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Tuesday 2 December 2008

A time for resolutions

Allan Massie on how book-lovers can cope with waning concentration

Better (perhaps) to skip than be bored, even though, according to Nietzsche, only the higher animals have the ability to be bored. In his Diary of a Bad Year J. M. Coetzee’s narrator remarks, ‘I read the work of other writers, read the passages of dense description they have with care and labour composed with the purpose of evoking imaginary spectacles before the inner eye, and my heart sinks.’ Here, however, it may not be a question of flagging concentration, though in youth, one suspects, he might have read these passages more attentively, despite adding, ‘The truth is, I have never taken much pleasure in the visible world, and don’t feel with much conviction the urge to recreate it in words.’ Fair enough, each to each, but the absence of the ability to feel that pleasure cuts the speaker off from a deal of literature.

We all know of books we have always intended to read and of people who have reserved particular authors for their old age, only to find the desire to read them, or the ability to respond, has evaporated. In Maugham’s Cakes and Ale the narrator looks round the books in the elderly, distinguished author’s study and wryly suspects ‘that nowadays if Driffield read anything at all it was the Gardener’s Chronicle or the Shipping Gazette, of which I saw a bundle on a table.’

How to keep on going, how to continue to take an interest in things: these are questions that we are all faced with as the shadows lengthen. Easy to conclude that it doesn’t matter. Yet, for anyone who has spent much of his life, and many of its happiest hours, reading, the discovery that one can no longer be bothered with the classics must be painful. The answer is fortunately obvious. Just as the muscles of the body have to be kept active if they are not to atrophy, so too with the mind. So: set oneself a task: one classic novel a month, perhaps, or one Shakespeare play or long poem. If not positively rejuvenating, this may at least keep senility at bay. Reading, for instance, Anthony Powell’s late Journals, one finds him continuously and admirably returning to Shakespeare in a spirit of enquiry and with critical acumen well into his late eighties.

That said, journals and diaries offer happy and easy reading for those of us who fear our powers of concentration are weakening. You flit here and there, dip into this week or that one, unconcerned that you may have lost the thread of the argument, for there is neither thread nor argument, merely random jottings and wayward, if interesting, reflections. Which is of course why Simon Gray’s diaries are so addictive for readers; also, I would guess, for the author.

Allan Massie

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