“Sladavicko’s [1] just called,” my mother said. “They’re short, and they need you to come in a work a shift.” Sladavicko’s was a miserable regional supermarket chain with a clip-on-tie dress code and subterranean wages. I hated it. The only thing it taught me was that work is worse than school.
My mother, father, and I argued about this bullshit for 20 minutes before I sulked to the store, only a sad half mile away [2].
Sladavicko’s was managed by this guy named Bill, a rumpled sourpuss who looked like he slept in his work clothes and shaved at night so he would always sport a drunk’s five o’clock shadow when he hit the store. Bill was a dick, and I never had a tolerable encounter with him. Once I steered a customer to Bill because I didn’t know where the marshmallows were, and he yelled at me afterward, saying I had to learn the store’s layout and product arrangement, which I would never do. I wish I knew Bill’s last name now, so I could Google him and see if he’s dead.
Naturally, it bothered me that I had to go in and work this odious job when I wasn’t on the schedule, but it bothered me even more that I didn’t get to use my free time and socially worthless Friday night to read.
Now, there’s a lot of inspirational garbage you can find on BrainyQuote and other likeminded sites popular with grade-school teachers and religious aunts that will offer you an anthology of wan takes on the mysterious power of reading: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing,” the infamously promiscuous Ben Franklin once quipped. Or “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body,” per Joseph Addison, which calls to mind this quote, attributed to many people, including Mark Twain, Edna Mae Oliver, and Paul Terry, whose version I like the best: “When I feel like exercising, I just lie down until the feeling goes away [3].” Interestingly, the comedians have better takes than the authors and intellectuals. Here’s Steven Wright: “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.” And Henny Youngman, of “Take my wife, please” fame: “When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading [4].”
Now, for the most part, I didn’t read because I thought it was this adventure or the mind or whatever. I read because I needed a Plan B. Plan A was play sports (which I quit when practices got too hard) and smoke weed with my friends. Plan B was address mild depression, surplus free time, and age-appropriate identity crisis with books.
Now I’m not saying that bookworm-me was totally unrelated to previous-me, just that previous-me was history and someone else (with the same memories and a very similar appearance) had to take his place. I neurotically sought the company of books because I thought, as single-minded, ambitious, lonely people sometimes do, that reading would add things to me that were missing, like ideas, insights, and a sense of identity. Eventually, that was sort of true, but at first, I really didn’t know how to use a book, and it honestly took a long time to learn. In the meantime, I read books of fiction looking for pat prescriptions for personal development and social reform. I read non-fiction with credulous faith in the authors’ wisdom and good will. I read too quickly and superficially, thinking that knowledge and insight would just cling to me the way toilet paper clings to the dullard’s shoe as he flops away from the public restroom stall.
In Jean Luc Goddard’s film Band of Outsiders, a group of droll, alienated French youths, who devote most of their time to fashionable loitering and ill-conceived crime, decide to see how fast they can run through the Louvre, since one of them heard that an American had done it in 09:45 [5]. They beat the record. As disaffected Parisiennes, bored with even world-famous local landmarks, they don’t care about taking it all in. I, on the other hand, acted like a tourist who thought he was supposed to run through the museum of literature in order to experience everything as quickly and efficiently as possible, to cross everything off the list. This left me with a pile of books I had finished but didn’t really appreciate or understand [6].
Nonetheless, some valuable lessons slipped through my thickheaded defenses. For example, I sometimes accidentally enjoyed a book, which I thought was far less important than LEARNING SOMETHING. I loved Salinger’s Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters because its narrator was funny and, like me, socially deficient, and because the most important character, the narrator’s brother, was missing (he didn’t show up for his wedding). What an interesting choice! Now, I take my time with books, try to enjoy being with and in them, and forget about everything else. I treat them more as experiences than manuals.
I used to think knowledge was the better part of love when it came to reading. That you couldn’t really love something until you figured it out. There are books I read a long time ago that I can barely remember, but I don’t fret at what I’ve lost. I treat my remaining blurry impressions as something like the collapsing memories of a grade school friend who moved away or of a pet from early childhood; that is, as a rich if fuzzy mental complex that doesn’t need a great deal of information to clarify or justify its significance. I regard the lingering affection as an end in itself and move on.
I don’t remember what I did when I got back from my closing shift at Sladavicko’s, but I probably just microwaved some slop and ate it in front of the TV. I liked TV too since it was a frivolous and pleasant way to waste time, between more important things. And because, tired and relieved as I was, for once, to be on my own, what time I had was all mine to waste.
[1] Not its real name.
[2] Or was given a ride. I’m not sure.
[3] See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/06/09/urge-to-exercise/.
[4] All this nonsense is taking from https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/reading-quotes.
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9i771qYngY
[6] For a thoroughly humorless take on this phenomenon, which is in some ways my ironic inspiration, see Richard Rodriguez’s morose essay “The Achievement of Desire.”