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Over lunch about a month ago, a friend asked me if I had read any good books recently. After some vacillation, I settled into an eager endorsement of Ben Lerner’s novel “Leaving the Atocha Station.” My friend accepted the recommendation and told me that he would seek out a copy. “I’d loan you mine,” I said, “but I haven’t finished it yet. I actually sort of stopped reading it a few weeks ago, about two-thirds of the way through. I should probably get back to it.” My friend narrowed his eyes, sighting me skeptically down the barrel of his burrito. He didn’t get it. If it was such a good book, and such a short one (a hundred and eighty-six pages), why had I abandoned it? An excellent question, maybe even a necessary one, but I didn’t have much of an answer. Abandoning books was just something I did, I told him, and something I was increasingly unable to stop myself from doing. I’ll start a book, get about halfway through it, and then, even if I’m enjoying it, put it down in favor of something else. My friend just shook his head sadly, perhaps a little dismissively, and resettled his attention on his burrito.
This reading habit is something I’d self-diagnosed over the past few years, but this was the first time I had admitted it to anyone. I worry that perhaps it’s a symptom of some larger weakness of character or fatal atrophy of the intellect. On my bedside table, there’s a precarious column of half-read paperbacks that taunts me with the evidence of my own readerly promiscuity. The reason I don’t finish books is not that I don’t like reading enough; it’s that I like reading too much. I can’t say no. I’ll be reading a novel and thoroughly enjoying it. Then I’ll be in a bookshop and I’ll see something I’ve been anticipating, and I’ll buy it. I’ll start reading the new book on the bus home that evening, and that will be the end of the original affair. I’m certainly invested in the relationship with the book that I’m currently reading, but I can’t help myself from pursuing whatever new interest happens to turn my head. Perhaps that’s just a tortuous way of admitting to being a pathetic serial book-adulterer who’ll chase after anything in a dust jacket.
I wasn’t always this way. I used to finish what I started. Not out of any greater sense of obligation or commitment; I just wasn’t as prone to restlessness. If I liked a book, I stuck with it; if I didn’t, I put it down. That dichotomy is no longer nearly so clear. This is partly due to that most contemporary of conditions, the degenerative disorder of the attention span that now affects pretty much anyone with an Internet connection. Many of us have been training ourselves, over the last decade or so, to look at texts (or to not look at them) in a different way. You click on a link to an article that someone has put up on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes the article will interest you and you’ll read it to the end; sometimes it won’t and you’ll take your business elsewhere. I’ve found that even when the article interests me I’ll click away anyway, distracted by an embedded link or video, or by the fool’s gold of some glittering sidebar. I’m not saying that the Internet has entirely robbed me of my ability to concentrate when I need to, but rather that spending hours online every day has had the effect of normalizing a certain kind of fleeting, casual encounter with texts. I still finish books all the time; it’s just that the books I do finish are likely to be those that I’ve agreed to review or am teaching a class on or that are in some way necessary for something I’m writing.
So it worries me, this promiscuity; I often feel as though I’m a bad reader, an unfaithful reader, a reckless literary philanderer. But I can usually assuage this guilt by reminding myself that if I were to impose some sort of embargo on starting a new book before finishing a current one, I would end up reading fewer books. I would be a more methodical and orderly reader, certainly, but a less varied and prolific one. There’s a bit in Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson”—a book that I started but never finished—where Johnson gives amusingly short shrift to the notion that you should finish reading any book you start. “This,” he says, “is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?” Well, when you put it like that, then no. It’s always reassuring to have Dr. Johnson on your side, and he makes an excellent point—that we don’t necessarily have to think of books we are reading as relationships, that they can just as well be casual acquaintanceships—but I’m still only ever half convinced of the virtue of my ways.
One book I recently read all the way through, however, led me to think about the paradoxical way in which certain literary works can countervail this tendency by seeming to accommodate it. The book was “Minima Moralia,” by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno wrote this captivatingly strange and mordant text while exiled in the United States during the last two years of the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath. It is, essentially, a thematically wayward aggregation of a hundred and fifty-three short essays and aphorisms that darts restlessly from one subject matter to the next, its fleeting yet intense engagements rarely spanning more than a page and a half.
“Minima Moralia” is as much a work of late modernist literature as of Marxist cultural criticism, and, in an obvious sense, its fragmented form reflects the devastated world that Adorno had been forced to flee. (Its subtitle, “Reflections from Damaged Life,” is faintly suggestive of Proust’s definition of literature as a “mirror held up to life,” but it’s as though the mirror were now reduced to a jagged assemblage of glittering shards, the better to reflect a traumatized culture.) The book covers extensive cultural, political, and philosophical territory in its two hundred and forty-seven pages: psychoanalysis, slippers, fascism, love, restaurants and hotels, clichés, the thoughtless greed with which society consumes culture, the subtle subversiveness of toys and children’s games. It’s not always easy to read—many of the essays only begin to yield their full significance on second or third encounters—but it is filled with astonishing insights rendered in beautiful prose (and not just by the standards of twentieth-century philosophical writing). There are passages in “Minima Moralia” that I loved so much I read them again and again with the hope of committing them to memory. Like this one, for instance, which materializes in the middle of a hypnotic montage of haphazard aphorisms:
Adorno does, in some of these essays, return to certain questions in order to address them from new angles, but more often than not he declines to linger once he has written his way, however briefly, into a subject. For a promiscuous reader like me, the beauty of a book like this is the way in which it seems to move in time with the irregular rhythms of my attention.
Almost as much as I love the unexpected illuminations of Adorno’s thought and the elegant detachment of his prose, I love the sensation of elevated vigilance that comes from not having any notion of what he might do next. One moment he’s insisting that “In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations,” and before you’ve even had time to appreciate the dextrous eloquence of that assessment, he’s telling you, on the very next line, something apparently unrelated but equally arresting: “We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.”
In one sense, it’s an appealing mystery to me how a book like “Minima Moralia” might sustain my attention where a linearly plotted novel or finely wrought non-fiction narrative might not. But in another sense, it seems perfectly logical: Adorno is continually discarding one line of inquiry to pursue another, and so the fickleness of the book’s form meshes, for better or worse, with that of my acquired reading habits. I’ve had similar experiences with other fragmentary books—Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”, E. M. Cioran’s “A Short History of Decay”, Walter Benjamin’s “The Arcades Project” (the vast disjointed labyrinth in which I’ve intermittently wandered around over the past couple of years)—but it’s “Minima Moralia” that I’ve found to be the most paradoxically compelling. And I’m not sure I would have fallen quite so in love with it if weren’t for my promiscuity. It’s still a problem that I plan to address, this promiscuity—perhaps by reading a third of some book on how to recoup your powers of attention in an age of distraction—but there are fleeting moments when it seems as though it might not be such a terrible thing.
Illustration by Ralph Steadman.
