Reading is, perhaps, a royal way to idle away your time, unlike surrendering to television, a mere colossal time-guzzler. Between the reign of no hurry when you yield to the quiet little pleasures delivered by an ingredient of a refined and experienced soul and the vulgar, ruminating surrender to the offer of the mass narcotic – the phrase has become known to the most naïve among us – the difference is immeasurable. Henry Miller wrote that people claim not to have time to read, adding that this excuse is as lousy as any other. Peter Solterdijk has concluded, in regard to Nietzsche’s work, that books are like long letters to friends from the future. Readers are then, above all, friends, and reading is an activity through which they display their good intentions, their good faith even. Potentially, reading means getting in touch with the thicker level of being; with the place where, in the compression of the creative contact with life, the depressing, shattered, annihilating, and highly corrosive elements that usually constitute everyday life have been overcome for a moment. Writing is almost not a secret: a writer writes because writing is the only possible way to get in touch with the dimension in which we may see gods treading the Earth. Bela Hamvas claimed so: I write, he said, because through writing, I get in contact with forces I would never experience. But reading? Looking at the one who observes the parade of higher beings? What faithfulness and precision are needed for that! What curiosity! Perhaps Borges was right: there must be fewer true readers than true writers.

Borges’s allusion is perfectly clear: people can spend a significant portion of their life reading and not become readers. For them, reading is a spectacular pastime, frequently a mere pose or a duty; reading certain books helps them become members of certain social circles. It might not matter that, in this so-called reading – regard the difference from the real Borges’s reading – snobbery and self-importance prevail; if a set of other traits accompanies them, these two flaws may become complementary to the whole, just like a scar on a thug’s face is complementary to their biography. They can be an awkward proof of the aristocratic spirit; some rightfully earned evidence that readers do not fall for artistry, the true enemy of ‘real literature’ – this term was undeservedly used to describe trivial literature for years. Nothing is more repellent for an experienced reader than the pretence and affectation of the typical artistic author of today, who has replaced thinking with phrasing and emotions with pathetic sentiment. There is a good deal of them, but this is not where their names will be said. They suffer from graphomania, as Kundera’s taxi driver would say, and their writing contains nothing of the unique experience that makes the individuals differ from one another in a way that graciously and inspiringly reminds them of how similar they are. For that, extreme modesty is needed; the modesty of a good reader, despite the number of scars that keep human brothers and sisters at a distance. Let us hear Borges again, exclaiming in the Montaignesque fashion: Let them others boast about the books they have written; I am proud of the ones I’ve read!

So, before we write an ode to reading, or a mass for reading, we must write a tiny ode or a cantate to celebrate solitude. Also, we must write a supporting little aria to the spaces well hidden from the sun; I don’t know whether you have noticed this – one may dig in the burning sun, but to read, one needs the shade.

Solitude first. Schopenhauer was at his best again: solitude, says this grumpy sage, has two advantages: first, that we are alone, and second, that we are not with the others. The second advantage, according to the philosopher, should be highly appreciated, for gatherings are mostly tense, surrounded by difficulties and all sorts of danger: most of the evil we have to endure is the result of our chronic incapability of coping with the salve compress of solitude. But unlike the untrained individuals, every real reader is entirely aware of the god-given benefits of solitude and is a great master of the seclusion operation. Being able to seclude yourself is sometimes everything. Ralph Waldo Emerson had a friend who had left the city and kept hiding in the meadows. If he bought a house, he would first plant some trees. The hedges here, oak trees there. He was particularly fond of the evergreen trees because “they hid the secret year round”. Emerson knew his friend was unique, a huge book lover who inspired him to write that nature protects its work. Subtle operations such as reading require a shelter, the Bachelard’s house, a refuge for the dreamer. Reading is the supreme opening procedure and does not stand other people’s views. Like sodium and potassium, which, to stay pure, need to be stored under oil.

Only then, after we have tucked ourselves away in the corner, we may begin with the wonderful passive activity, idling away our time, the only time Proust believed won’t be wasted unless, of course, we were Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer. That is the time we have benevolently and benignly rented to the imagination and erudition of another human being, often wholly unknown to us. A good question would be why reading, and not overreading for studies or career, is so unique, and perhaps a one-time opportunity for developing one’s abilities. John Cowper Powys said that he would give a warm recommendation to everyone, despite their social rank or profession, to read and reread a certain number of great writers of the past, the ones we like to call classics. Reading is like sailing in unknown waters, where the most important thing is, just like with actual sailing, to stay alive, to stay who you are. One of the most spread and destructive ideas is that reading makes people wiser. In the eyes of Powys, this nonsense is at the core of the repulsive pedagogical pedantry which pushes many tiring pieces down the inexperienced throats of the youth. Powys believed it did not matter if one read Alice in Wonderland or the Upanishads. One must only read books that profoundly and permanently encourage their imagination. With all our hearts must we read only powerful writings, the mighty ones that deal with love on the test, death, and all the adventurous entanglements that a person may fall into during their lifetime; we need to read about our layered psychic, history, the magic of dreams and phantasies, life of angels, the spirituality of animals and plants, about myths and everyday life. It is the way to harmonize with the life we are immersed in, to the congruous roundedness of the impeccably led lives of saints and the wise. The most motivating are the works that require from us the effort of comprehending and thus attaining the precious possibility of change.

Simone Weil used to almost apologize for not reading the mystics. She said she read the same as she ate, which made her feel as if reading filled her cells with energy. A part of the world’s Soul plunging toward the physicality of words, being caught with the antennas and tentacles and claws that mighty writers use when they write. Every reader was able to say this a couple of times in their life: I’ve been standing in front of the works of supreme realization, undoubtedly close to perfection. I cannot explain the force that emanated from them, the force that took away their materialistic features. They glittered in their own sphere, emanating, by pure benevolence, their tangible aspects into the half-darkness of the senses. Out of this sovereign harmony of all elements, a knot-untying Mass came down onto the admirer’s head. Every effort was complemented with a counter effort, and every sharp edge eventually turned into softness. The higher synthesis lies in the clash of the reader’s attention and the writer’s precision. All book lovers who have ultimately turned into bookworms know this, as good as they know, as Powys claimed, how acute their obsession may be.

An image has been haunting me for years. Béla Hamvas described it in the introduction to his text A hundred books. We’re on a mission to save books, said Hamvas. A hundred of them. From an occupied city or the occupied world whatsoever. Not the books by famous writers or works that can communicate at many levels. The books that should have been translated into all languages long ago. The books that resolve one’s relationship towards the whole. The books that have, among others, a scary characteristic of making you feel like a stranger in the world of human interests and fate, as a direct consequence of reading. Every bookworm then shivers and looks at people around them with a cold-eyed look of a stranger and a visiting demiurge, sharing nothing but the external form with the so-called ordinary world. We read perhaps to get a certificate for our unlikeness. To find our far-away siblings, the abovementioned friends, people who talk to us from the depths of time. Let us return to Powys and his advice to read classics, the writers that have been among us for a long time, to read them after all, despite the dullness of all schools. They have not succumbed to the waves of time; by immersing ourselves in their sentences, we immerse into the carefully created atmosphere of the refined taste of centuries and thus receive some of Shakespeare’s or Proust’s feelings of the world. We also rise above the ‘brutal facts of life’ and start treating them with a certain amount of irony and poetry. Reading such authors feeds a bit of their powerful sense of life into us. Powys never stopped emphasizing this fact, the remarkable development of a soul as the fertile result of reading. In self-cultivation – because without propagation, without grafting, everything is doomed to failure – is the essence of reading. You read, and you grow. In all directions. As simple as that.