Manguel's story reveals the enormity of reading. Many of his assertions I have never considered before, and yet I recognize their truth. I had never realized how much I read, until Manguel pointed out how many daily actions, in which the is no actual text, could be considered reading.
When it comes to Manguel's personal accounts of reading I am torn. I too enjoy reading, but Manguel seems to worship it on a whole new level. His claims that when he meets a new person, he is reminded of characters he has read, and that life takes on a deja-vu quality. To me, reading can expose truths about people I already know, but more often I find myself relating characters to people and not people to characters. I use reading as a tool to understand life, but I wonder if Manguel could even separate the two.
I like your assessment of how Manguel holds reading on a pedestal. When he says he compares people he meets to people in literature, he kind of puts real life people down. I don't think he necessarily means to, but his love for reading is such that it comes across that way. Your closing sentence is very thought provoking. I think there is simply a fundamental difference in the way you and I perceive reading compared to the way Manguel looks at it. If we were to talk to him about reading, I would imagine he would think we didn't like it very much at all.
ReplyDeleteI actually wrote about how I recognize Manguel's de ja vu feeling. Before I did, though, I was talking to a friend of mine about how I planned to write about my own experiences of de ja vu because of books. He made pretty much the same point that you did, telling me I'm weird and that it's normal to read about people who remind you of the people in your own life, but not the other way around. This being the second time I've been told that it's not normal, I realize that maybe I'm just crazy.
ReplyDeleteI see that you brought up that Manguel could have a hard time separating the two. Would you agree that Manguel has an almost unhealthy obsession with the concept of reading?
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