Open Writing

One of those delightful convergences that make a reading life worthwhile led me to a 2008 Atlantic Monthly article by Nicholas Carr titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” just as I was reading “The Hundred Days,” one of Patrick O’Brian’s celebrated series of historical novels. Carr is a thirty-something technophile who considers himself a reader, and constantly monitoring his smartphone, FaceBook account, and other online links in his hyper-connected life has him reading more than ever. However, when he attempts serious, continuous reading, “my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages,” he writes. “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or turns of the argument … that’s rarely the case anymore.”

“The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” is Carr’s recent book. It is about research into how increased Internet activity is changing how people’s brains are neurologically wired. Coincidentally, perhaps, I hear with increasing frequency of young adults consciously choosing in-depth reading of literature to keep their brains supple. Reading’s amazingly pleasurable if your mind’s in shape.

It’s often rewarding to consult the higher thoughts of wiser people, and a case in point is Vladimir Nabokov, the late author and engaging professor of literature at Cornell University. Highlights from one of Nabokov’s best lectures, “How to Read, How to Write,” was captured in print in Esquire Magazine in 1980. Nabokov believed that truly “great novels are great fairy tales” wherein gifted authors create entirely new worlds and do it so well it transports and broadens their readers’ imaginations., whereas lesser writers engage in “the ornamentation of the commonplace” and don’t “bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things.”

Nabokov was definitely a literary snob, but he allowed that “the various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way.” P.G. Wodehouse, Elmore Leonard, and many other good writers bring great pleasure, but I agree with Nabokov that it’s good for young readers to be looking for a wholly original work that speaks to them and is worth re-reading throughout their lives, gaining new insights with each encounter.

That’s where “Hundred Days” comes in. I read O’Brian’s twenty-one volume series of books about the English navy in the Napoleonic wars the first time for the rollicking, information-packed story line. Part way through I began jotting down page numbers containing unusual words, beautifully-crafted passages, and intriguing allusions. There were over thirty in “Hundred Days,” and a good dictionary advised that “surd” is an “irrational number,” a “bistoury” is “long, narrow surgical knife,” and a “shawm” is “a forerunner of the modern oboe.”

Whenever O’Brian drops name or allusions, they’re worth some research. For example, a passing mention of Dismas Zelenka led to learning why he was the leading Czech composer in the 18th century and Back admired him. I now also know that a “gleet” is connected to chronic gonorrhea in very disgusting ways, “palmer aponeuroses,” the shriveled hand of hanged men that clench tightly in death, were also known as good luck “hands of glory,” and Apicius, the ultimate gourmet in ancient Rome popularized hummingbird tongues and served his guests moray eels fed on human slaves.

O’Brian also mentioned the “surprising varieties of leeches,” and a gander at the www.Leeches.biz revealed that there are 650 species of leeches, a type of worm ranging between a half-inch to eighteen inches. They have suckers at either end, sometimes with “millions of teeth,” and their bite can penetrate a hippo’s hide. They’re hermaphrodites with nine pairs of testes. Scientists “milk” them for their saliva, in a process best left to the imagination. Happily, leech spit possesses amazing anticoagulant properties that’s extremely useful for dissolving pooled blood, especially during transplant recoveries.

Hooray for sustained reading, for I know there are countless other delights awaiting my repeated re-readings of O’Brian’s wonder-filled 7,000-page novel. As Italo Calvino once noted, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”