I’m like Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, "torn, in a futile anguished fashion, between my disinterest in the landscape and my disinterest in the book which could conceivably distract me."
The opportunity cost of reading a given book is always too great. Some books, obviously, are a waste of one’s eyes. To feel this about airport blockbusters is perfectly normal, but I feel it is beneath me to read Jeanette Winterson, for example, or Hanif Kureishi.
This would be fine if I could transpose a reluctance to read James Hawes into a willingness to read Henry James, but I am unable to get beyond the first five paragraphs (i.e., four sentences) of The Golden Bowl.
But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty... now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.
Reflecting on the way he had gradually lost interest in fiction, Gerald Early asked if "this is how one, by stages, loses the ability to read or the interest in reading altogether." This in turn, he thought, might be part of a process whereby one loses "slowly but inexorably the ability to feel deeply about anything."
* Or ageing, if you prefer.
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