The Value of Rereading, Repetition

Ruminations riding madly off in all directions as I read Borges. In Utopia of a Tired Man, Jorge Luis Borges wrote,

The man laughed. “No one can read two thousand books. In the four centuries I have lived, I have’t read more than half a dozen. Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. Printing – which is now abolished, since it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to the point of dizziness – was one of man’s worst evils.”

What story is necessary? What is extraneous in existence that we could skip it as redundant or unimportant?
What does this silence and stifle? Nonsense? Sidelined superior truths that don’t fit the girdle?
Do many voices prevent one dominant story from excluding most data and people? Or sum to more people being isolated and excluded? It de-concrentrates power to disperse story and allow less polished voices of less standard shapes, but isolates people from overlapping knowledge. Overlapping knowledge is part of peace. Monolithic story aids peace, until it meets another blindered story. Then is the collision summing to a bigger injury than all the death by thousands of cuts?
Gleaning for what abides. What is core? What is worth absorbing?
If all story is love/conflict or birth/death and the rest is details…what details figure in?
I could take any number of leaping points out of the quote.
The value of rereading is one I’m pondering generally. It’s a defensive ponder, partly due to the years of sporadic pokes of threat that I should get rid of books if I only read them once. I’m done with them and they should go back into the world. Use or lose. To justify keeping them, I feel my back against the wall to reread and prove their worth. The model seems wrong. B&W, prove use or proven hoarder. Many readers have thousands of books. I grew up around people who had rooms of books. Not sure how to resolve that difference in expectations. To next point on value of rereading.
A book is made with the writer and reader in concert. There has to be overlap and extension on each part. If they mapped up perfectly, one would be redundant. Who the book is likely is constant, second edition with changes, or new prefaces not included, what the reader knows and can grasp after intervals will be different. It may seem in part like a new work, same but different as if printed in color with the registration marks perhaps not lining up. It measures change of movement in the reader. This thought is nothing new, my usual whirligig, the relativity like what I was considering in 2005.
What’s the use of a second read? Can you get pleasure again? With a memory like mine I joke I can experience the same thing for the first time, over and over.
I load the brain and empty it for more like a dump truck. Repeating is to lodge and keep. There’s little I want to keep, much I want to keep access/option to.
Am I restricting myself to more of a superficial read if I don’t loop back? Is not paying attention the first time as good as looping back? I tend to get more of connections and implication in first glance than most seem to in a few passes. I tend to be less interested in repetition than most, which is why songs tend to drive me to distraction with repeated beat and choruses. It’s been said, move on! Next song. No depth, no complexity, no point.
What holds the depth of memory if not text. Placeholder objects. The shirt that is a copy of the one I wore one afternoon in Giant Tiger when I was 15. I can remember the sun, sounds, shape of space I was in. Seeing a vine-candydish is a rereading the face of grandma one Christmas and a much older memory of a summer afternoon at an elderly cousin where there was horehound candy. Associated readings of time first seeing a lathe, the smell of wood shavings and tung oil. These memories I can reread thru tactile. Would a more compelling portal to memory text be one routed thru braille I could read? Visual, rather than text, I also can re-read on a more frequent rate. I can look into a few paintings, a few visual poems often and the repeat is pleasure. Is it a obstacle at audio repetition and words are sound?
What does it come out of, this habit to not pore over the same books dozens of times, to make them a personal canon I can recite? The urge forward for opportunity cost, knowing that when one thing is repeated, something new is being displaced? But for each thing new, something old is also losing traction. From a belief that repetition is a sign of a lie rather than truth? Stories are a matter of ‘protesteth too much’ thus more a red herring than good to feast on.
My preoccupation with novel paints me not into the corner, but out door after door after. I want to push myself outward. Perhaps some is my fear of returning to the hostile narrow minded “Christian love of hating the sin but not the sinner” that I find contemptible in myself, how I caused myself and others pain. Challenging myself to read in different directions exercises me to stay flexible, prevents some hardening into narrow subset. I do not want to reinforce my own views, but trying to widen data set, counter directions, keep the range and to the middle so I can see farthest works against this. That restricts my seeing the range in walkabout, close up, to stay in the middle. Perhaps this not wanting to harden to a view is why people who agree with me and disagree with me both make me nervous. I’d rather get information without deciding it is this way or that or be told these imaginary sure right or wrongs. Things are. Foundational is the zen story of the farmer who gains 3 runaway horses. There’s no luck, good or bad, only changing context and attitude.
Not having the habit to loop back often perhaps is a product of what I’ve read in part, off-the-cuff, half-considered trinkets of words that don’t reflect on themselves. There’s nothing to unpack structurally in syntax or sound or ideas that the writer intended. It’s ill-trained me.
Some things reveal a considered work. Most are half-assed disposable thoughts. There’s no more benefit to studying them than spacing out in marvel at how two crumbs incidentally fell on the floor and cast long evening shadows.
At the breakfast talk at Book Expo America, Barbara Kingsolver pointed out in the livestreamed talk that in times of papyrus perhaps 1% of men could read now we have literacy of billions. She said the job of a writer is an unbroken lineage of finding universal truths with the same technique for an unchanged human brain, from the practice of ancient Iceland, Greece or Ireland. The argument suggests we can’t bore of stories if told well.
Something in there sits wrong somehow.
There’s nothing, surely, that reading does, that an oral society doesn’t preserve in different shapes. Literacy is not superiority. It is difference in routes. A proverb related in In the Orchard, the Swallows, more knowledge makes a wise man wiser and more knowledge makes the fool more foolish.
Education isn’t enough for wisdom. Literacy and education overlap but aren’t the same. Ample numbers of those with PhDs in my life with not a whit of compassion or sense past self show demonstrate against the education system. Having taught people who were text-illiterate but well-rounded thinking, critical citizens shows the little seriffed fonts are not magic pills. We have universal literacy and a national vision skewing towards war machine that came out of a culture that reads tens of thousands of magazines, books, newspapers. As she pointed out rural farmers are likely to be heavily hit by climate change but are those least likely to believe it is happening. How do two people see the same world and a different pattern and outcome?
She talked prettily, glossed over fears of the future of the book with the resistance that meets every change. It’s nothing new to e-books. She says as we left vellum, detractors must have scoffed, “this paper doesn’t do it for me. I have to feel the skin of a dead sheep for this [text] to work for me”. She was amusing even if dismissive. At the same time she raised by coincidence the same point of Borges, the value of timeless lessons in stories.
Do we want lessons? The non-linear, non-narrative, non-didactic aspects of poetry need lessons as a foil. It makes their humour, their defining edges to work against the insistence on producing meaningful. If I consume sound without sense for long enough, it becomes a salt diet that has me thirsting for the fig of meaning again.
The back and forth is a sort of repetition that can be pleasing.
You may disagree with some of what I said, but then, so do I.