The Dangers of Literature is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Sunday, January 18, 2004. It is part of Journal.
Stop me before I read again.
I have always read a great deal, even as a young boy. In my early life I enjoyed science fiction and fantasy, followed by history — my father, in distress over my interest in fantasy, gifted me with a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when I was ten — but at fifteen I encountered Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which was the book that converted me from a genre fiction and nonfiction reader to an avid lover of Literature with a majuscule L. No other work of fiction I had ever read was as rich and deep and full of truth and beauty.
The following years saw me grow ever more ravenous for the feeling that can only be had from the sort of artistically wrought novel that leaves one reeling from a series of revelations about the nature of humanity.
Over the years I went on frequent binges, like a literary drunkard, spending weeks at a time reading the entire oeuvre of Nabokov, Borges, Calvino, and others. In some cases I have been so moved that I have tracked down multiple translations of the same foreign language classic. I have read Voltaire in French, Cervantes in Spanish, Catullus in Latin, and, now, Calvino in Italian.
My obsession has grown into a sickness. I carry a Dover Thrift Edition of, say, Luigi Pirandello or Virginia Woolf in my rucksack so that I am never stranded without something wonderful to read.
My patience with television, never particularly well developed, has vanished altogether, and, with it, the television itself. The space in my flat in which one would normally expect to find a television is occupied by a bookshelf.
Last year I volunteered at the Public Library, not out of a sense of community, but because I wanted to get closer to the books. The smell of them, the dust rising from their yellowed pages, made me tumescent.
“I’m sorry, I can’t come to work today because the pre-release hardcover of Eco’s new novel, Baudolino, arrived in the post today...”
“Your new lingerie is very sexy. Would you mind modeling it a little to the left? You’re blocking my light...”
Books are destroying my life. I have decided to embark on a twelve step program to cure me of this disease and heal me until I am whole and American and normal. My plan is thus:
- Buy a television.
- Stop listening to NPR, instead preferring Fox News.
- Order cable service, including HBO’s “must see” lineup of hot prison sex, mob violence and shallow, caustic, fashion obsessed, histrionic tarts.
- Purchase a 5 disc DVD changer.
- Acquire a collection of films by the Brothers Farrelly and Weitz.
- Learn to love the music on commercial radio stations.
- Become deeply interested in the lives of celebrities, particularly vacuous debutants who can’t keep their knickers up.
- Burn my collection of obscure novels and foreign language dictionaries.
- Learn the rules of American football.
- Subscribe to Maxim magazine.
- Request a frontal lobotomy at the nearest dispensary.
What was I saying? Have you any pudding?