Michael Harris is the author of All We Want: Building the Life We Cannot Buy.
When we are sick – as I am now – the world contracts and our days become abbreviated. Soon the tissue-strewn edges of the bed become the coastline of life itself. We are marooned. To be sick with COVID, though – as I am now – isolates us further. We’re forced to hide from family members and we become lepers in our own homes. Days are punctuated by little more than the sound of meals dropped fearfully outside the bedroom door. Millions of us have now known this dejection. And many of us, bleary-eyed from too much lonely Netflix, have turned at last to our dusty bedside books.
At first you pick one up out of sheer reckless boredom. You wrestle yourself into a semi-swooning attitude and, haltingly, begin to read. Then, hardly noticing, you enter a mesmeric state because the quiet, sure voice of the narrator offers the integrity you’re lacking. You carry on reading because the book is direly needed company, too, a whole world of people forced to hang out with you. A little confused, you read on for hours. Perhaps you thought of yourself as a lapsed reader who, these days, “never can find the time” – well, time has found you.
As the country descends into a third winter with COVID-19 – this one with few restrictions and fewer masks – many more will be in this position. With luck the symptoms will be bearable, though, and our wintry imprisonment may offer a rare opportunity to escape into that most luxurious of discomforts – a boring bed rest.
To read from within that lonely cocoon is to escape not just sickness but also the ego that dominates our ordinary lives. We leave behind the threadbare self and discover others.
Sir Thomas Browne believed that God gave us the world two ways: as nature and as a book. So, if we find ourselves barred from the so-called real world we do have a literary backup. Sometimes when we read we are so moved by this second world that we even mistake art for experience – we think the hero’s exquisite sorrow or morality or courage must be our own – for how could we feel those things so deeply if they were not triggering some matching material inside of us? That is the book’s real gift: an apprehension of our untapped potential.
But we can’t receive that gift without a little room, time and quiet. And these days its only sickness that gives us all three.
So, which author will join us in bed? Agatha Christie wants to be read in the lobby of a dim hotel; James Baldwin makes sense on a train. But some books do want to lie with invalids. A famous novelist once told me he was glad to contract mono because it was his only chance to read In Search of Lost Time (a novel Proust wrote from his own sick bed, stuck in a cork-lined room). Colette, who spent her sickly final years in her radeau-lit (“bed raft”) liked to read Les Miserables over and over. Perhaps I’d choose Elena Ferrante’s novels as the ultimate bedmates – with their inexorable sentences, that hypnotic cadence.
Of course, no book will actually make you better. Indeed, excessive reading has been blamed for all kinds of nasty side effects, including stooped posture, constipation, blindness, hypochondria, the derangement of females, exhaustion, daydreaming, low birth rates and, most compellingly, “befuddlement.” But every sick reader knows the act does not really touch our sickness. In fact, its remove from our physical state is precisely the point. We read to be transported, to fly above wretched reality.
Is reading, then, just a way to “distract our unhappy souls” as Virginia Woolf suggested? Or was Gustave Flaubert more on the mark when he said we must “read in order to live”? Is it a candy or a cure? A way to pass the day, or a way to make the day matter?
When we’re ill we pick up books wanting only the former, to be pulled away from ourselves. What happens next is more than we bargained for, though: We’re not just distracted, we’re reminded of the hundred struggling hearts inside of us, the parts that we’ve locked away like so many quarantined selves. Reading sets them all free, reacquaints us with a crowd of sensibilities. And so the irony (and magic) of reading while sick is that, trapped in our beds with the latest COVID variant, we may discover an expansiveness too often hidden by the unvarying story of a “healthy” life.