I wish I could quote the entire essay by Adele Wiseman that I am reading, but I fear the publisher would frown upon that. It is also about 30 pages, and that is way too much typing for me! Much like when reading Nick Hornby's essays and I felt like he was inside my head....it is amazing how readers so often think alike! Only Adele Wiseman says it so much better than I ever could!
"It seems pretty clear to me now that just as important as the specific books which affected me at particular times were the experiential impurities of the reading process, the mutual contamination of the lived life and the lived reading. I have never been able to separate the act of reading from the acts of living. Reading is experience. I remember how it felt at different times, why I read what I read, what the reading meant to me, and what the books seemed to mean in relation to one another and to life. I remember the circumstances, how I used the very act of reading, in different ways, as part of the inner politics of the conduct of my existence. I avidly wanted to know, but I seldom read for intellectual information. I had to feel what I was reading, know what I was feeling, feel my knowing. I was never able to divorce myself from the emotional content of words and word combinations, the suggestions, the overtones, the balances, the ambiguities, the implications, the contradictions, as well as the direct, naked thrusts of meaning that drew blood of infinite varieties of comprehending protest, pain, and pleasure."
Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood, by Adele Wiseman
Edited: I intentionally posted something short and to the point tonight so I could work on my Slaves/Muriel Spark post for tomorrow. Being the procrastinator I am, I have been reading blogs instead. And now it is going on 10:00 p.m. and it is like homework all over again. There is so much to think of with Spark's work, I don't even know where to begin. Alas, in whatever form it takes, I will be posting on my two Muriel Spark reads tomorrow (at some point in the day anyway!).