The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023

 

 The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening: the 2023 Edition

 

 

Our annual Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening series will begin tomorrow. This year I feel unprepared to make any generalizations at all about 2023, much less imagine what might lie in store for us in 2024. Over the last few years I’ve begun to feel in my bones a reality of history which, from the time I studied history as a graduate student, I’ve understood intellectually, though not as something important to me personally, that the random and the unpredictable rule human history—and, of course, the universe. If there were such a thing as the Laws of History, this would be the First Law. I remember thinking, during my first exposure to the theory of evolution, that the one thing most people I knew didn’t get about it—as evidenced by their misunderstanding of selection via “survival of the fittest”—was how great a role chance played in evolution.

 

In theory, of course, probabilities can be computed to great effect, and quantum computing gives one the sense that extraordinary feats of prediction might be achievable in the near future (as many science fiction novels have, of course, depicted). But reading the first two books in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series this fall actually saddened me a little for reminding me of how fervently we humans long for predictability (which isn’t, of course, the same as stability) even as we struggle to believe that humans hold the fate of their species in their own hands. (Sometimes, when I think about the rising sense of fatalism in the US, I want to scream. It reminds me of the deceased family member who years before his death refused to do anything for his rapidly deteriorating health, saying “What will be, will be.”) A few years back, my reading of the Foundation series would instead have been focused on the gap between theoretical models, which are needed for generating projections, and the vast complexity of reality, never mind the complications of chaos theory.

 

Reading is always serendipitous. When a few days ago I read an essay by Joseph Conrad titled, simply, “Books,” dated 1905, I knew I would be offering lots of book talk on this blog in the weeks to come. The context for which Conrad wrote the essay wasn’t mentioned, so I have no idea why he began the piece by talking about books that people (including himself) hadn’t read. “But they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as such, in their ever increasing, jostling multitude, they are worthy of regard, admiration, and compassion,” he writes, startling me.

 

“Especially of compassion,” he continues. “It has been said a long time ago that books have their fate. They have, and it is very much like the destiny of man. They share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory—of severe justice and senseless persecution—of calumny and misunderstanding—the shame of undeserved success. Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life.”

 

I confess I’d never thought of books—the precarity of their existence—in this way before, though I had thought (almost obsessively, some people probably think) about how books mean differently over time. Conrad continues:

 

“A bridge constructed according to the rule of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long, honourable and useful career. But a book as good in its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth. The art of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life. Of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity of human minds, those that the Muses would love best lie more than all others under the menace of an early death. Sometimes their defects will save them. Sometimes a book fair to see may—to use a lofty expression—have no individual soul. Obviously a book of that sort cannot die. It can only crumble into dust. But the best books drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the brink of destruction, for men’s memories are short, and their sympathy is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion. No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs. This is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life, but because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, of beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change their form—often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation.”

Conrad also talks in this essay about novels and what novelists do. For those interested, the essay can be found in his collections, Notes on Life and Letters (1920)

 

The Pleasures series includes more, of course, than the pleasures offered by books. In past years the series has shown that reading, viewing, and listening pleasures vary widely. And that is what has made me keep this series going. I love the variety of tastes and practices it repeatedly reveals. This year's edition will include posts by Eleanor Arnason, Andrea Hairston, Lisa Tuttle, Christopher Brown, Nisi Shawl, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Cheryl Morgan, and others.

I hope you'll enjoy reading these as much as I do and that they'll swell the presumably always growing list of titles you want to read. Sometimes it seems that the volume of books published is so tremendous that it's no surprise that really wonderful work often slips below one's personal radar.