Lasha Kharazi


Relationship with reading changes in time. In the pace of this change reader’s disposition to life is partly defined. The usual habit of any attentive reader to possess that is to subjectify a book is bit by bit dissolved in an incredible faculty of letting the book to become the reader, the bad taste of complacency gives way to the critical hopes of continuation, the jargon of finalized personality is overcome by the routes of worldly impersonalizations. In fact, there is no other way for a true reader than that of becoming the world; the experience of reading by its innermost consistency is destined to be accompanied by an atmosphere of worldliness. Is not the temporality of reading, stretched from the concrete to abstract sufficient argument to this?

With the passage of time, the abstract touch with the book inevitably wins over the young reader’s perseverance to command its concreteness (but to note necessarily, only the one with the experience of concreteness can achieve this point). Zones of factual gravitation are transformed into the ethereal spaces of sensation; lust for categorization or for the classification of whatever kind is diluted into the intuitive whisperings of intellection, thus affecting things around with the sense for the imperceptible lines of becoming the world.

Probably, this was the very line Paul Klee wrote about in his diary:

“I am now able to express with a certain precision,
and this by line alone, line as absolute spirituality,
without analytic accessories, simply taken for granted.” [1]

In the thoughtfulness of things duration of reading extends itself towards this line, which as a lighthouse from far distances of abiographical time is heralding reader’s becoming the world, paradoxically implying one’s successive liberation from the process of reading itself. In essence, every true experience of reading is an attempt to descend to the nadir point of impossibility of reading, in any other way reader never grasps that abstract line of the world, that incredible faculty for precise expressions. And there are those who prematurely, with a portion of obtuse easiness speak up about their impossibilities to live even a day without reading; the ones who rarely become aware that such a statement is more of a sign of one’s weakness than of virtue. Blanchot’s remark that reading is the easiest thing, effortless liberty found in the immediacy of yes, should be understood as a kind of warning against becoming passively dependent on it.[2]

Obviously reading is the noblest out of all dependencies, but as soon as a reader is devoid of the profound necessity of being successively liberated from it (which is never realized de jure), instead of becoming the world, one becomes the objectified instrument of habit, a marionette in the hands of naively modeled self-compensation.

Writing is meant to be the best remedy against the certain poisons of reading.


Notes:

  1. The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918, trans. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 278
  2. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 196.

The picture is “Blue Monochrome” by Yves Klein (1961; source).