Some people don't reread books. They find it wasteful. Redundant. An example of poor time management. Maybe they have a point. The human lifespan has increased, but it remains unavoidably limited. There's only so many books we can read while we're here. That number dwindles every time we read a book we've read before. And yet, I make it a point to reread certain books frequently.
Sometimes the world is so unrecognizable that we start to feel unrecognizable too. It helps to find something familiar when the way forward seems strange and untenable. Reading, especially re-reading, offers us a way out, a way back, a way through. A way to the part of ourselves that is true. We "Reach up to the shelf," Dona Ann McAdams says, "and pull it out"; a thinker, a poet, a prophet, a teacher, a friend. We "Open it again". We look again. We read again. We return again. We begin again. Each line running across the double helix strands that trace the history of who and what we've ever been. Every word coiling around the chain of code that carries the instructions of how we came to live. This book. This once living tree, brought to life again. This piece of you. This molecular promise at the beginning of beginning again.
I started rereading Cheryl Strayed's book, Tiny Beautiful Things, recently, and I have been reminded again as if it were the first reading that "The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love." I have been reminded that despite our urges to turn inward, to be cold and closed and cornered, "We are obligated to the people we care about... to be forthright", to be radically honest, to be boldly and dangerously vulnerable. "[T]o elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be [both needed and] meaningful". To speak the truth of our deepest and our most muster-able truths no matter what happens or how someone might receive it.
But I’m also reminded how complicated it all is. Of all the ways it can play out different and vary.
Sometimes it means letting something in. Letting yourself be overwhelmed and overcome by its happening.
Sometimes it means letting something go despite how good and selfish it feels to keep it where it is.
Sometimes it will entail closing a door that wish you could take off its hinges.
Sometimes it’s allowing yourself to be surprised by it opening again.
How will you know what the right or wrong move is? How will you know what to do? How will you know the difference? The hard truth is you won’t, dear ones. You won’t ever. You will get it wrong. You will fuck it up much and often. Again and again and again.
Love is a book you read by braille. You discover through touch and feeling. And you will have to be fearless and brave enough to keep on rereading it.
In case no one has told you today, I love you with all my everything.
One thing I love about re-reading is just diving in anywhere in the book. Not necessarily reading cover to cover, though that's fun too in certain instances. But rediscovering the surprise of certain phrases, ideas, characters, and plot turns. I don't reread Moby Dick cover to cover, but I love a random idiom or chapter, a quick drink with Stubb or a pipe with Queequeg, a detailed description of the oil cask in a whale's skull.
Certain books have to be read more than once. Think about children and books. How many times did I read Goodnight Moon to my daughters? How many Christmas Days heard me read A Child's Christmas in Wales to all assembled?
I also like re-seeing certain films. Is that a waste of time?
I think in terms of excellence not quantity. I fear stinting on excellence.
FOMO has made us shallow. Let's go back to stillness and depth.