What am I to think when a piece of writing that was once easy to read now becomes difficult? Either my well-honed mind is picking up nuances that I missed in earlier readings or my worn out brain is showing signs of age. I have very little doubt as to which of these two possibilities is more likely. Last week I had trouble reading Civil Disobedience. Thoreau has never been easy for me, but I have always thought of him as the most accessible of the Transcendentalists. Now I can’t even say that.
Civil Disobedience is not the first book in recent years to give me trouble. In the past twelve months, I can think of three excellent novels that were put aside because the prose overwhelmed me. The real question is not whether my brain is slower than it once was; the question is how best to read now that my brain has slowed. One option is to stick to light fiction and avoid the tough stuff. I’ve probably been doing that subconsciously already, but I don’t want to entirely give up on challenging prose. I especially want to keep reading personal essays, in part because they help me with my own writing.
I decided to try something new with this recent reading of Civil Disobedience. When I was in my twenties, my first wife, Lisa, was somewhat critical of the way I read books. If she picked up a book after I’d read it, she’d complain about the many comments that I’d written in the margins. She didn’t care whether I defaced the pages, nor did my comments have an affect on her own enjoyment of the book. She just thought I was reading the book incorrectly, too focused on the details and missing the big picture.
Without admitting to myself that Lisa might have had a point, I decided to try reading Civil Disobedience without getting hung up on any one sentence or any one paragraph. I still highlighted a few exceptional sentences (e.g. “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad”), but I also skated over confusing passages that, in the past, would have brought me to a stop.
I am not sure that I learned anything new by reading Civil Disobedience in this new way, but I did read it in its entirety. Now I am thinking about using the same method to take on Emerson and Marcus Aurelius. It seems better to read these guys and glean something from their writings than to not read them at all.
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