Bibliophobia

by Sarah Chihaya

I am disturbed and irritated whenever I encounter the moralizing claim that the main point of reading fiction is relentlessly positive self-improvement: Reading is good because it makes you good. To think of reading in this reductive way is insulting, both to books and to their readers. Being good, or becoming better—how can anyone think this is the limit of the literary imagination?

I want to think with writers who, as Italo Calvino writes marvelously in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, produce books as a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins; fruit for fruit’s sake, not for the sake of whatever moral preserve or pedagogical jelly might be made of it. And I want to read as though eating whatever grows on those vines—an operation that is at once thoughtful and sensory, absorbing thought with one’s whole body. Sometimes it is nutritious. Sometimes it is poisonous. Sometimes—surprisingly often—it is both.

Since I was a child, I have secretly believed that if I read enough, one day the right book would come along and save me. It is perhaps the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious faith.

The moments when I’d felt the life-taking, life-giving power of books only made me ask more of them than I should have; books, like people, should not be asked to save us. It’s not a fair demand. But perhaps some part of me also believed that I might need some darkness to fight darkness.[*2]

had not yet learned that there are ways to read such that books stay with you—in you—forever. I was years away from the understanding that there are certain books that modify your chemical composition so palpably you fear you might no longer breathe air or drink water. And it becomes clear that something ever so slight but important in the way you read the world is altered forever. These are the books that make us

It wasn’t the books themselves that did anything; it was the feeling of immersion. I wanted to stay inside that feeling, but I already knew it was frustratingly

But The Bluest Eye did more than change the way I read literature—it also made it impossible for me to read my own circumstances as I had before. The novel forced me to look deep down into those thoughts and feelings I tried so hard never to examine, as well as into the history of the specific place I lived in and the country my family and I still thought of as foreign.

How important it is to read a book that so undoes you that it becomes a precious token of your own destruction to carry to the end of your days.

We did not fall in love immediately, unlike my relationship with Possession. Instead, we developed that kind of friendship that builds up out of the tiny grains of shared time that are the by-product of school or a certain kind of workplace—the kind of situation where you are often together, underoccupied, and mercifully unhurried.

And so, I became accustomed to, even dependent upon, a kind of disciplined liberty, one in which more and more, I sought out books that I could account for conscientiously in my writing, even if—or especially when—they were difficult or challenging. I became a professional reader. I accepted that, while objectivity was impossible, subjectivity was perhaps avoidable.

Possession reminds us constantly that what we love must be allowed to retain its little secrets. It enacts this, most notably, in its epilogue, that last page that my teacher found so sad (and which does, in fact, grow sadder to me the older I get). But there’s also a flirtatious assertion of dominance that the narrator occasionally exercises the further we get into the book. The closer we get to narrative resolution, the more playfully convoluted it becomes. You may think you’re in control, the book says, but I’ll tell you what you want and what you can have, and when you can have it. It doesn’t let its reader forget that any text, and any person, too, has its right to tell or not to tell, to surprise us when it can, to always be open to changeable meanings and interpretations even as its words remain—wonderfully—immutably the same.

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.

After you walk away from a last goodbye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.

This should be the best feeling, encountering the books that say just what you want to say. This is the dream of the searching reader: to find that impossible text that fully understands you, seems to know your mind better than you do, reads your soul and recites it back to you, challenging you to examine its flaws.

The Last Samurai is not a book that tries to make sense of life. It is a book that seeks answers but knows that explanations are impossible—and to attempt to give them, as Sibylla does to many a nonplussed stranger, only leads to frustration. And in that moment, not knowing how to move on and no longer even knowing how to start to find out, I needed a text that met me where I was: at a point where it was painfully clear that books and stories are not enough. And yet, it was equally clear that their very insufficiencies—the moments at which they strain to meet our depths of confusion and despair and perhaps acknowledge their own failures—are sometimes exactly what we need.

Since my narrative failed to end how I thought it would, I have thought a lot about what it means to have the stories that you tell yourself, about yourself, suddenly revised.

After the hospital, he says, “friends joked that I was crazy, and I laughed along. Some suggested that a psychiatric history might enhance my literary reputation.” I have to wonder, horribly: Is this simply what I’m doing here, in this book, trying to burnish my writerly credentials with this proof that I’ve been through something real? Am I a fool to think that I’m far away enough from it to write about it—am I still not past it, but in it?

“Fate comes when it will, and thus we are ready.”