ricardo reading

I do believe a great library is both a prac­tical asset and a per­sonal achievement. It’s a way of saying, this is who I am; this is what I value. Saying it to yourself, most of all. I’m very proud of my shelves! Browsing them, you’d quickly iden­tify major preoccupations, glaring omissions: and those things are me. Makes you think about the power of choosing what, and what not, to read. The reader’s mind is molded by books, but, after a cer­tain age, that same mind also eval­u­ates what it reads: con­necting and integrating, accepting and rejecting, all in realtime. So it’s a dynamic process, rich with feedback; cybernetic. Note that this simple trick is beyond the AI models, as cur­rently constituted: in their training, every book, every sentence, every word, is equally true. As a writer, it doesn’t take much for a book to jus­tify its expense. I’m thinking of those dictionaries: if such a book sup­plies one character’s name, one deli­cious phrase, it has earned its place on my shelves forever. Books don’t con­tain such poten­tial in equal density. In my experience, the odder the volume — antique, academic, abstruse — the better the bet.

I distrust the modern way of speaking about books as content, as information, as things to be consumed and summarized and moved past. You do not consume a friend. You do not summarize a person you love and then discard the original as redundant. The dead in their books are not delivering information to you; they are keeping you company, which is a different and older service. The information in Montaigne could be summarized in an afternoon. The company of Montaigne takes years and is never finished and is the entire point. To read him for information is to invite a wise old friend to dinner and then demand he state his conclusions so you can leave early.

It begins by accident, as all the best societies do. A book is pressed on you, or found on a table, or bought because the blue of the cover looked correct in winter. You read it, and someone speaks to you from inside it who has been gone for a hundred years, or four hundred, or two thousand, and the strange thing, the thing that never stops being strange, is that they are talking about exactly your life. Not life in general. Your specific Tuesday. The dead writer who described, in 1580, the precise quality of his own procrastination, the way his mind wandered when he sat down to work, is describing the morning you have just wasted. He knew. He has been dead since before your country existed and he knew, and he wrote it down so that you, unimaginable to him, would one day recognize yourself in his sentence and feel, for a moment, less alone in time.

Watch how the culture absorbs every genuine act of refusal and sells it back as a technique. Walking, which was once simply walking, becomes a wellness practice with a step count and a heart-rate zone. Doing nothing, which was once simply doing nothing, becomes niksen, a Dutch lifestyle trend with books and a methodology. Even boredom, the most useless state imaginable, has been recuperated: boredom is good for you, the articles announce, boredom boosts creativity, boredom makes you more productive when you return to work. And there it is again, the inevitable return to work, the alibi reattached to the very thing that was supposed to escape it. The culture cannot leave a single hour genuinely unredeemed. Every patch of fallow ground must be shown, eventually, to be improving the yield of the fields around it. This is a harder position than it sounds, because the temptation to justify is enormous, and it comes from inside. You sit down to be idle and within minutes some voice begins constructing the alibi: this is good for me, this will make me more creative, this is restoring my focus for tomorrow. The voice is not malicious. It is the voice of a person raised to believe that time must answer for itself, and it cannot bear an hour that simply refuses to. To be truly idle you must disappoint that voice. You must sit in the chair and decline, actively, to collect any benefit from sitting in the chair. The moment you catch yourself thinking the idleness is doing you good, you have lost it. It has become rest. It has rejoined the economy. The discipline of idleness, and it is a discipline, is the discipline of refusing every offered justification, including the ones you offer yourself.

I’ve been a Fitbit user on and off for going on fifteen years, but Google, who bought Fitbit a few years back, have replaced the Fitbit app with something called Google Health. Which wants you to call it “Coach,” because it’s a AI chatbot now, which hides all the data you want your Fitbit to surface and hallucinates constantly. I went for a brief walk to the shops and stopped for a coffee. I finally got the app to sync four hours later and it asked me how my spinning class went. Trust me, I don’t walk that fucking fast. And there it is in the grey print between AI summaries: “AI responses may contain mistakes.” No kidding. It’s a particular kind of bullshit to wake up to a world where your heart and sleep tracker became a mad robot that hallucinates bicycles.

I go to bed around midnight, but before I have time for any blue glow, dwelling on fragments of memory, or lyrical musings, I put on a podcast, which keeps intrusive late-night thinking at bay. This podcast generally amounts to one person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to another person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, about something I know absolutely nothing about, and this triumvirate of stupidity generally lulls me into some approximation of sleep (the first sleep). I wake three hours later. I get up and go downstairs, where I read something soothing for half an hour or so – at the moment, The Owl – a Biography, The House at Pooh Corner or The Art of Bible Translation. Then I go back to bed, podcast-free, for another three hours (the second sleep). I wake around 6am from a mostly dreamless sleep, go back downstairs and eat a bowl of Grape Nuts (still). I meditate and pray – and then I read some Red Hand Files questions, which often amounts to the same thing. After a while, I go back to the bedroom, sit on the edge of the bed, and find out how all the ghosts are getting on as Susie wakes and tells me about her dreams. The dead frequently visit Susie at night, but her dreams are generally happy, trouble-free affairs. Last night she dreamed that her dog Otis, who died last year, was waving to her from across a wide stretch of water. As I rarely dream, Susie essentially does my dreaming for me.