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Reading Deeply

Reading Deeply

Author: Jo Rushby
Date: 2023-09-02

It is the age of the instantaneous. Instant gratification, instant communication,Instagram, instant coffee and even sacrilege upon sacrilege, instant cricket. But there is a growing counter movement that asks us to slow down, to allow the coffee to brew and to let things naturally grow.

And, if reading patterns of book lovers at Ike's are to be discerned, there is a turn to the longer epics and classic heavyweights. People are demanding copies of the Odyssey, War and Peace, Ulysses.

And,when I discreetly ask people why, I have a sense that, for many, there is a need at once to look at the whole in huge historical sweeps while straining inwardly into their soul. Roosevelt MontÃ!s in "Inside Paradise Lost" puts it brilliantly:

"To understand Macbeth deeply, you have look into yourself deeply. What is it like to be gripped by the lust for power? What is the taste of glory? What is the shock of betrayal? What is the psychic havoc of unassuageable guilt? Literature can be humanising precisely for this capacity to shine a light on aspects of one's inner life that might otherwise go unexplored or be seen only superficially. It demands the most difficult and most decisive of psychic tasks: to look unflinchingly at yourself."

This is not the Kardashianesque looking inside yourself to only find another mirror in which to gaze adoringly. It means reading as a way to challenge who you are,the prejudices you carry, the burdens even. Often, we read the same thing only to find new truths in the words. One young customer told me recently that she wept after reading Tolstoy's short story, 'How much Land does a Man Need?' written in 1886 about a man's greed for land, which results in him losing everything.

Across the world, wars rage, and those who cry for peace, cannot find their voice. How to fathom all this? And then just this morning, I chanced upon W.B. Yeats', Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and read aloud 'The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.' One gets a sense we are at that time when 'mere anarchy is loosed upon the world' and we need to take stock of ourselves, one by one, to look deeply into ourselves. As Socrates put it, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' And what better way to examine oneself than to read, to make notes on the side, to come back and reflect on those words.

Ina world where so many live Lear-like, books are a companion, a lover, a page that will never leave.

Come to Ike's Book Store - 48a Florida Road

Greyville

Durban

4001