W
hen I studied literature at Barnard and Columbia
in the late 1970s, we were assigned so many books to
read in short order that the experience was almost that
of speed-reading. In my teens and twenties I imbibed
books quickly and with devotion; I possessed a patience
for large tomes I lack today. Perhaps deep reading is
the preserve of the very young or the very old who have
time on their hands, for those who have not quite begun
to live, or for those who are almost done with it, having
discovered that no thrill equals the vicarious one. I am
still lodged in a late middle period, all talk and action, the
latter in the form of writing.
The quintessential episode of an unlikely fast read was
the late seigneurial Professor Edward Said's twelve week
seminar on "Proust and His English Forebears,"—as if
reading the four thousand or so pages of A La Recherche
du temps perdu in eight weeks were not enough, we
had then to trace the influence of an English author—I
chose George Eliot, herself no slouch when it comes
to length—upon this masterwork in the remaining four,
writing a twenty page essay on that relationship. (The
good professor lost my paper, but gave me an A-.) Thank
goodness we read it in English translation; C.K. Scott
Moncrieff's was the only one at the time, and so we knew
the novel by the poetic English title, Remembrance of
HYLAND
