"Some hours after reading he still felt numb and unsteady"
Sometimes I think that I would be better off if I had never read a book in my life.
Most books, in theory, serve both an inner and outer purpose. The outer purpose is to make the reader seem more intelligent, both because they've been seen reading the book, and because they have reasonably intelligent things to bring up in conversation. The inner purpose is to cultivate a complex and rewarding emotional and intellectual state for the reader, to help them understand the world around them.
In practice, discussing books or philosophy or anything other than daily events is usually boring and unproductive and results in two people talking past each other. One person waits patiently for the other person to finish speaking, so that he or she can talk, usually about something only tangentially related to the previous person's point.
In practice, the complex and rewarding emotional and intellectual state usually consists of a lot of contradictory and confusing ideas picked up from this or that book that shed light on nothing and simply make life harder. Taken to the extreme, it can be positively paralyzing.
Books have had at least three obvious negative effects on my life:
1. Books, and novels in particular, lead me to believe that my life is a series of related events that will one day become interesting and poignant and meaningful if thought about or written down or verbalized in the right way. This is usually an unconscious process, and the direct result is that I see connections between things that aren't actually related in any meaningful way. I then overanalyze things, misdirect blame or praise, refuse to take responsibility for my actions (because everything I do, good or bad, is the result of something that happened in the early chapters of the book that is my life), and give up hope of choosing my own direction in life.
2. I now tend to mentally narrate my own life. This is somewhat related to #1 above, but is much more conscious. I lose track of the present because I'm still narrating my past. I forget details because I am busy trying to fit memories into the overall story arc. Additionally, if I get ahead of myself and begin narrating my immediate future, the failure of things to go exactly as planned can be incredibly disheartening. A change in a television schedule or the store being out of hot dog buns can put me in a bad mood. Basically, I've lost the ability to adapt to my surroundings.
(Movies can have a similar effect. How many of you have trouble walking down a street without thinking of what song should be playing in the background? Self-narration is a nasty addiction.)
3. On a deeper psychological level, the themes and ideas of books get stuck in my mind and build up and everything I look at is forced to work its way through filter after filter, and what eventually lands in my brain is nothing like what I'm actually looking at. Someone's facial expression or intonation, completely innocent, is run through my mental database, and I end up either getting confused or misperceiving his or her intentions. Even I am not free from this process, and my own thoughts and words are subjected to this analysis. This can make it hard to communicate with someone. Additionally, if I identify with one trait of a character in a book, I often find myself bestowing other, less applicable aspects of that character to myself. This can result in one of two things. Perhaps I read about a character that is similar to me in some ways, but is also brave or noble or a genius or artistic or selfless, and I begin to think that I, too, possess these qualities, only to be embarrassed and disappointed when I come back down to earth. Or, if I read about a character that is similar to me in some ways, but is also weak or deranged or emotionally crippled, I start to worry that I, too, have these problems. Eventually, of course, as I think about them and think about them, I do begin to have these problems, as most of them are caused by the self-doubt that reading the book initially created in me.
It's not that I believe in the concept of the noble savage, or that I think books are entirely bad. I just think that other people should read them, not me.
Most books, in theory, serve both an inner and outer purpose. The outer purpose is to make the reader seem more intelligent, both because they've been seen reading the book, and because they have reasonably intelligent things to bring up in conversation. The inner purpose is to cultivate a complex and rewarding emotional and intellectual state for the reader, to help them understand the world around them.
In practice, discussing books or philosophy or anything other than daily events is usually boring and unproductive and results in two people talking past each other. One person waits patiently for the other person to finish speaking, so that he or she can talk, usually about something only tangentially related to the previous person's point.
In practice, the complex and rewarding emotional and intellectual state usually consists of a lot of contradictory and confusing ideas picked up from this or that book that shed light on nothing and simply make life harder. Taken to the extreme, it can be positively paralyzing.
Books have had at least three obvious negative effects on my life:
1. Books, and novels in particular, lead me to believe that my life is a series of related events that will one day become interesting and poignant and meaningful if thought about or written down or verbalized in the right way. This is usually an unconscious process, and the direct result is that I see connections between things that aren't actually related in any meaningful way. I then overanalyze things, misdirect blame or praise, refuse to take responsibility for my actions (because everything I do, good or bad, is the result of something that happened in the early chapters of the book that is my life), and give up hope of choosing my own direction in life.
2. I now tend to mentally narrate my own life. This is somewhat related to #1 above, but is much more conscious. I lose track of the present because I'm still narrating my past. I forget details because I am busy trying to fit memories into the overall story arc. Additionally, if I get ahead of myself and begin narrating my immediate future, the failure of things to go exactly as planned can be incredibly disheartening. A change in a television schedule or the store being out of hot dog buns can put me in a bad mood. Basically, I've lost the ability to adapt to my surroundings.
(Movies can have a similar effect. How many of you have trouble walking down a street without thinking of what song should be playing in the background? Self-narration is a nasty addiction.)
3. On a deeper psychological level, the themes and ideas of books get stuck in my mind and build up and everything I look at is forced to work its way through filter after filter, and what eventually lands in my brain is nothing like what I'm actually looking at. Someone's facial expression or intonation, completely innocent, is run through my mental database, and I end up either getting confused or misperceiving his or her intentions. Even I am not free from this process, and my own thoughts and words are subjected to this analysis. This can make it hard to communicate with someone. Additionally, if I identify with one trait of a character in a book, I often find myself bestowing other, less applicable aspects of that character to myself. This can result in one of two things. Perhaps I read about a character that is similar to me in some ways, but is also brave or noble or a genius or artistic or selfless, and I begin to think that I, too, possess these qualities, only to be embarrassed and disappointed when I come back down to earth. Or, if I read about a character that is similar to me in some ways, but is also weak or deranged or emotionally crippled, I start to worry that I, too, have these problems. Eventually, of course, as I think about them and think about them, I do begin to have these problems, as most of them are caused by the self-doubt that reading the book initially created in me.
It's not that I believe in the concept of the noble savage, or that I think books are entirely bad. I just think that other people should read them, not me.