Friday, October 5, 2012

How Books Are Like Kings

 Image on left is under a Creative Commons Share Alike license; source is here.
Take all my money,
Take all my dreams,
I'll swim across your ravaging seas.
"Bring Me My Queen," Abigail Washburn

I had a minor epiphany the other day that I wanted to share here: I realized that, for nearly twenty years of life, there has never been a time when I wasn't in the middle of reading a book. Often, I've been in the middle of several at once. This struck me as somehow significant.

I was trying to explain why I thought this was in any way remarkable to a friend of mine as we sat together in a CTA Blue Line car one evening. There was something moving and fascinating about the unbrokenness of the thing; I sensed that there was this invisible chain or line extending across so much of my life, accompanying it and watching over it, in a way. It's like a line of kings, I said, extending back in an unbroken succession to the day I picked up my first book not assigned by a teacher. It makes me feel protected and guided, like a subject living in the realm of a good king.

My friend was startled and amused by the metaphor, and so was I. I wondered if it would hold up as a good analogy for always having been in the middle of a book, or if it would break down quickly. More importantly, I wondered if the metaphor could make me understand myself better; this is, after all, the function of a good metaphor: creating understanding in a mind. And so I set out to see where the metaphor "Books = Kings" would take me.

Books are like kings for me in a number of other ways, I realized. Like a king whose sons and daughters are princes and princesses during his lifetime, awaiting the time when their parent will pass on and they can rule, the main book I am reading is often supplemented by other "side books" that do not have my full attention, and won't until I am done with the main book. And sometimes, like a usurper deposing a king before his time, a side book becomes so interesting that I abandon the main book in its favor. (I suppose a metaphor of a succession of presidents would be more appropriate to my national origins, but who ever heard of a VP assassinating the president? At least in this country. I'm open to examples from others.)

The metaphor holds up in some unpleasant ways, it turns out. Books often command my allegiance at inconvenient times, distracting me from the task at hand or wooing me into an anti-social state, just as feudal kings could call upon their subjects to fight in a foreign war when they ought better to be, say, harvesting the year's crops. I've talked before about Einstein worrying that reading too many books can tax one's creativity (or wallet: I buy quite a few books each year), and how I see that playing out in my own life. Kings tax people too, and it's not always popular.

Finally, like a royalist defending the divine right of a king to rule, and counting too much on his ability to do so, I remembered that I sometimes find myself leaning too heavily on the authority of books, believing and trusting what they have to say and not spending time trying to articulate their ideas for myself, or to look elsewhere for ideas. Alain de Botton puts it this way in an essay on the philosopher Montaigne:
It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves...But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books...may lead us to dismiss aspects of ourselves of which there is no printed testimony...Montaigne knew one man who seemed to have bought his bibliophilia too dearly:
Whenever I ask this acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and arse.
...[A]s Montaigne recognized, the great books are silent on too many themes, so that if we allow them to define the boundaries of our curiosity, they will hold back the development of our minds. (The Consolations of Philosophy, 161-162)
In summary, thinking about books this way helped me examine their dangers. I tend not to think of books as dangerous, but they certainly can be. Perhaps a break in the line of succession is in order, sometime soon.


  1. Fitting quote by Abigail Washburn. I had to read it again after reading your post, and the second time I was reading not about a sailor or a person singing to a person, but the lamentation of a book-lover: the one who cannot but consult a book to find the words to talk about a pimple on his or her own ass.

    A question for you: to find a break in the line of succession, must you finish every book you've ever started? Or must you simply finish every book you ever started that you intend to finish one day? It seems to me that either way this might be a difficult task. Or perhaps there is another way to look at it...

    1. Hmm, the way I picture the metaphor, a break in the line of succession would just mean stopping reading books for a while. There's no book being read = there's no king.

  2. Who's your king right now?