Books & more books: too much of a good thing. (Of Several Minds).

Frank O'Malley was one of my teachers at Notre Dame, and he was a blessing, as anyone to whom he taught literature can tell you. O'Malley was the last of Notre Dame's "bachelor dons"; he lived in an apartment in Lyons, a residence hall at the end of the campus. Once he told us of a time when the hall was opened to a group of inner-city kids for a summer program. O'Malley--a man who was terminally shy by nature--thought he should open his doors to them.

"One little boy," he mumbled (he mumbled all the time), "came into my room and looked at all the books. `Are all these books yours?' he asked. I said they were. `Have you read them all?' `Yes,' I said, `and I've read some of them more than once.' He shook his head. `Man,' he said, `you must be sick.' I thought a little and realized he was right. I am sick."

I remembered this recently, looking around my book-lined apartment. Books overflow the shelves; they're stacked in piles on the floor. I think they mate and give birth while I'm out. I try giving them away, and more seem to wash in. It's like the broomstick scene in the Sorcerer's Apprentice part of Fantasia.

I read a lot. Some people think this is a good thing, but I'm beginning to think of it as an addiction. I once knew a woman who was truly addicted to television. We worked for a state legislature, and the staff was not allowed to leave as long as the house was in session, which was often quite late. There was no television set in our office, and this woman was hurting. She had to pace, or put her head down on her desk while she waited for release. Nothing would assuage the pain of her deprivation.

I know how she felt. I never go anywhere without something to read. When I'm between books (a rare and brief condition; I usually have two or three going at once), I get antsy. When you are a writer and read as much as I do, writing comparatively much less, it's like inhaling most of the time, and seldom exhaling.

Like Frank O'Malley, I read some books more than once. I go back often to Raymond Chandler, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, and W. H. Auden. This sort of reading I can defend: the second reading of The Brothers Karamazov is a richer experience than the first. But I spend far more time with the New York Times than I should. Our grade school library was thin on science fiction, which I loved, so between fourth and eighth grade I read Robert Heinlein's Red Planet thirteen times. I'm not sure this can be defended. Much reading is killing time, avoiding the silence, just like having TV on all the time. It looks better than that and feels more like serious work or serious pleasure, but there is a problem buried there as well.

It is probably better to read less, meditate more, and make sure that what you read is worth it. I recently read Eudora Welty's wonderful book One Writer's Beginnings. (It's included in the Library of America selection of her work.) No one better conveys the joy of reading and language: "In my sensory education I include my physical awareness of the word. Of a certain word, that is; the connection it has with what it stands for. At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word `moon' came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio."

Reading which refreshes this part of us is not simple distraction, as I am afraid too much of my reading is. It comes close to being a sacrament.