It is nothing short of a comfort, the first time one is able to do some pleasure reading. By this, I mean that time when you go to your bookshelf, pile of bargain hauls from the nearby Booksale or other hole-in-the-wall, or stuff scattered around your floor, picking a book whose title, cover or blurb appears interesting enough (let us all whisper a little word of thanks to Sir Dennis to showing us how important these parts are), and sitting or lying down and taking the world of the word in, with no framework to keep at the back of your mind, no theory-ascribed patterns to watch for when a particular narrative device appears pregnant with meaning.
Reading up on nationalism, magic realism, postmodernism, criticism of Filipino novels in English and magic realist novels themselves can get stale after a while, especially when that while almost stretched to its second year.
Anyway, the whole rhetoric about reading for pleasure was to make way for my latest piece of pleasure reading: Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Not bad, if not overy laden with speeches about history and the human condition at times (I say this only loosely, as this is the first Coetzee I've read).
It presents several interesting things, though I only have space and brainpower to present to the few people who still read these far and very few in between blog entries one of them, in my opinion the most important piece of intellectual masturbation in the book. It goes like this: according to the book (and possibly some historians out there), the original root of the Humanities and of textual analysis was in order to understand the Bible, God's Divine Word. Because it was presumed that in order to gain true understanding of its messages, one would have to know the language/s the original/s was/were written in (Greek, Hebrew, etc.). Also, one would have to be able to understand the way the Word was written (literary study), the culture (anthropology) as well as the historical conditions (history) under which it was produced, in addition to the above note about language (linguistics).
And it didn't stop there. As it would be theorized that the Bible was written to elevate people, to guide them away from some wretched state of things, people then felt the need to understand the conditions that the Bible was supposed to address. Hence, the turn to whatever literature we could scavenge from the ancient Greeks, which in time, became an end unto itself as well, as the study of the Classics.
Thus we are castaways, adrift in a pedantic sea, with nothing more to cling to, as the true motivation behind our efforts has vanished into the horizon long ago. We cling to the pieces of literary driftwood that pass by us, creating little causes to justify our existence.
Why, then, do we continue?
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