How Reading Changed My Life

Anna Quindlen

I had a lovely childhood in a lovely place. The neighborhood where I grew up was the sort of place in which people dream of raising children—a small but satisfying spread of center—hall colonials, old roses, and quiet roads. We walked to school, wandered wild in the summer. We knew everyone and all their brothers and sisters, too. Some of the people I went to school with still live there.

Yet, there was always in me the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with Anna Karenina. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, and Jane Eyre.

When I was in eighth grade I took a scholarship test for a convent school, and the essay question began with a quotation: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known." Later, over a stiff and awkward lunch of tuna-fish salad, some of the other girls at my table were perplexed by the source of the quotation and what it meant, and I was certain, at that moment, that the scholarship was mine.

How many times had I gone up the steps to the guillotine with Sydney Carton as he went to that far, far better rest at the end of A Tale of Two Cities.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one-Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennett, Dill and Scout—were more real than the real people I knew. My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life. One poem committed to memory in grade school survives in my mind. It is by Emily Dickinson: "There is no Frigate like a book / To take us Lands away / Nor any coursers like a Page / Of prancing Poetry."

Perhaps only a truly discontented child can become as seduced by books as I was. Perhaps restlessness is a necessary corollary of devoted literacy. There was a club chair in our house, with curled arms and a square ottoman; it sat in one corner of the living room, with a barrel table next to it. In my mind I am always sprawled on it, reading with my skinny legs slung over one of its arms. "It's a beautiful day," my mother is saying; she said that always, often, autumn, spring, even when there was a fresh snowfall.

"All your friends are outside." It was true; they always were. Sometimes I went out with them, coaxed into the street, out into the fields, down by the creek, by the lure of what I knew instinctively was normal childhood.

I have clear memories of that sort of life, of lifting the rocks in the creek that trickled through Naylor's Run to search for crayfish, of laying pennies on the tracks of the trolley and running to fetch them, flattened, when the trolley had passed. But the best part of me was always at home, within some book that had been laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people waiting for me to return and bring them to life.

In the years since those days in that club chair I have learned that I was not alone in this, although at the time I surely was, the only child I knew, or my parents knew, or my friends knew, who preferred reading to playing. In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.

Years later I would come to discover, as Robinson Crusoe did when he found Man Friday, that I was not alone in that world or on that island. I would discover (through reading, naturally) that while I was sprawled, legs akimbo, in that chair with a book, Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in the glare of the Caribbean sun in Antigua reading in that same way that I did, as though she was starving and the book was bread.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

By the time I became an adult, I realized that while my satisfaction in the sheer act of reading had not abated in the least, the world was often as hostile, or as blind, to that joy as had been my girlfriends banging on our screen door, begging me to put down the book—"that stupid book," they usually called it, no matter what book it happened to be.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

There is something in the American character that is even secretly hostile to the act of aimless reading, a certain hale and heartiness that is suspicious of reading as anything more than a tool for advancement. America is also a nation that prizes sociability and community, that accepts a kind of psychological domino effect: alone leads to loner, loner to loser. Any sort of turning away from human contact is suspect, especially one that interferes with the go-out-and-get-going ethos that seems to be at the heart of our national character. The images of American presidents that stick are those that portray them as men of action: Theodore Roosevelt on safari, John Kennedy throwing a football around with his brothers. There is only Lincoln as solace to the inveterate reader, a solitary figure sitting by the fire, saying, "My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read."

There also arose, as I was growing up, a kind of careerism in the United States that sanctioned reading only if there was some point to it.

Students at the nation's best liberal arts colleges who majored in philosophy or English were constantly asked what they were "going to do with it," as though intellectual pursuits for their own sake had had their day, and lost it in the press of business. Reading for pleasure was replaced by reading for purpose, and a kind of dogged self-improvement: whereas an executive might learn far more from Moby-Dick, the book he was expected to have read might be The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Reading for pleasure, spurred on by some interior compulsion, became as suspect as getting on the subway to ride aimlessly from place to place.

For many years I worked in the newspaper business. For many journalists, reading in the latter half of the twentieth century was most often couched as a series of problems to be addressed: Were children in public schools reading poorly? Were all Americans reading less? Was the printed word giving way to the spoken one? Had television and the movies supplanted books? The journalistic answer, most often, was yes, yes, yes, yes. And in circles devoted to literary criticism, among the professors of literature, the editors and authors of fiction, there was sometimes a kind of horrible exclusivity surrounding discussions of reading. There was good reading, and there was bad reading. There was the worthy, and the trivial. This was always couched in terms of taste, but it tasted, smelled unmistakably like snobbery.

None of this was new. Reading has always been used as a way to divide a country and a culture into the literati and everyone else, the intellectually worthy and the hoi polloi. But in the fifteenth century Gutenberg invented the printing press, and so began the process of turning the book from a work of art for the few into a source of information for the many. After that, it became more difficult for one small group of people to lay an exclusive claim to books, to seize and hold reading as their own. But it continued to be done by critics and scholars. When I began to read their work, I was disheartened to discover that many of them felt that the quality of poetry and prose, novels and history and biography, was plummeting into some intellectual bargain basement. But reading saved me from despair, as it always had, for the more I read the more I realized it had always been thus, and that apparently an essential part of studying literature, whether in 1840, 1930, or 1975, was to conclude that there had once been a golden age, that it was gone. "The movies consumed so large a part of the leisure of the country that little time is left for other things," the trade magazine of the industry, Publisher Weekly, lamented in 1923. "The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor," the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine said in 1960.

There was certainly no talk of comfort and joy, of the lively subculture of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens' latest novel. We are the people who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print.

Nothing had changed since I was a solitary child being given leather bookmarks by relatives for Christmas. It was still in the equivalent of the club chairs that we found one another: at the counters in bookstores with our arms full, at the front desks in libraries, at school, where teachers introduced us to one another—and, of course, in books, where book-lovers make up a lively subculture of characters. "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing," says Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Reading is like so much else in our culture: the truth of it is found in its people and not in its pundits and its professionals. If I believed what I read about reading I would despair. But instead there are letters from readers to attend to, like the one from a girl who had been given one of my books by her mother and began her letter, "I guess I am what some people would call a bookworm."

"So am I," I wrote back.

读书如何改变我的一生

安娜·昆德伦

我在一个美好的地方度过了我美好的童年。我成长的社区是人们梦想中养育孩子的地方——它不大，但是有不少殖民地时期建造的舒适的老房子，屋里有大厅，周围有长了多年的玫瑰，以及宁静的道路。我们走路去上学，夏天的时候就四处疯玩。在那里我们都相互认识，包括大家的兄弟姐妹。当年和我一起上学的人中，有一些现在还住在那里。

但那时候我总觉得我应该到别的地方去转转。尽管平时我也确实到处闲逛了，但我并没什么地方可去，也想不出任何要离开家乡的理由。我是通过读书来游历世界的。阅读《米德尔马契》和《小公主》我见到了维多利亚时代的英国；阅读《安娜·卡列尼娜》我见到了俄国沙皇倒台以前的圣彼得堡；阅读《飘》《蝴蝶梦》和《简·爱》，我就到了塔拉庄园、曼陀丽庄园以及桑菲尔德庄园，看到了那些有着高高天花板的大房子以及在那里发生的激动人心的故事。

到八年级的时候，我为了得到一个修女学校提供的奖学金，参加了一次考试。有一道论述题的开头是一段引文：“我要做的将是我有生以来所做过的最好、最有意义的事情；我将得到的休息也将是我一生中从未有过的最好的休息。”后来，大家在紧张尴尬的气氛中吃金枪鱼沙拉午饭的时候，我听到几个与我同桌的女孩说不知道那段话的出处，也不知道那段话是什么意思。那时我就确定，这个奖学金肯定是我的了。

我都记不清我曾多少次陪着西德尼·卡顿，像在《双城记》结尾处描写的那样，一步一步走上断头台，走向他所说的最好的休息。

就像我读过的很多其他书一样，它对我而言从不像是本书，而是一个我居住过、访问过，而且以后还要重访的地方。书中描写的所有的人，所有那些幸福的人——绿山墙的安妮、海蒂、杰伊·盖茨比、伊丽莎白·贝内特、迪尔和斯考特——都比我实际生活中认识的人更真实。我家在费城城外一个令人惬意的地方，但我总觉得我其实生活在别的地方。我生活在书本里，而那些书对我来说，比我生活中所有其他的东西都要真实。我至今还记得上小学时学的一首艾米莉·狄金森的诗：世上没有任何舰船能像一本书/带我们一瞬间就穿越国境到达地球的远方/也没有任何骏马能像一页小诗/昂首阔步、跳跃前行。”

也许只有一个对现实十分不满的孩子才会像我那样沉迷于书。也许要真正学会读写本领，就必须如此不安分。我家里有一把带弯曲扶手的椅子，配了一个方形的脚凳。椅子放在客厅的一个角落里，旁边是一张用桶做的桌子。在我的记忆里，我好像总是躺卧在那把椅子里看书，把细瘦的两条腿耷拉在一边的扶手上。我妈妈则会说，“今天的天气多好！”我妈妈总是这么说，不管是春天还是秋天，甚至是刚下完雪。

“你的朋友都在外面呢。”我知道，的确如此。他们的确总在外面。我有时受他们的诱惑和他们一起上街，到田野里、小河边去。我知道这种诱惑对一孩子而言是正常的。

我清楚地记得那样的日子，在内勒河那条潺潺的小溪里搬起石头，寻找躲在下面的小龙虾；在电车轨道上放上小硬帀，等电车开过，再跑去把压成片的硬币取回来。但我的心总还是在家里，在某本书里，书摊在桌上，那是我留下的标记。书里那些想象中的人物都在等我回去将他们唤醒。

躺在那张椅子里看书的日子已经过去多年了，这些年来我发现，这么做的不只我一个人。尽管在那个时候，就我所知，就我父母和我的朋友所知，我是唯一一个对读书比对玩更着迷的孩子。在书本中，我不仅游历其他世界，也探索自己的世界。我了解了自己，明白了自己想成为什么样的人，发现了自己心中的愿望，敢于对自己以及所处的世界进行种种幻想。我学会分辨善恶是非。每天睡觉、起床，除此之外，就是读书。这些书，就像一个平行存在的宇宙，在这里，我也许是个新人，但绝不是个陌生人。这些书对我来说，是真正的、真实的世界，是完美的小岛。

多年以后我才发现自己在这个世界或小岛上并不孤单，就像鲁宾逊·克鲁索发现星期五时那样。我发现（当然，是通过读书），当我叉开两腿躺在椅子上看书的时候，牙买加·金凯德就坐在安提瓜岛上刺眼的加勒比海阳光下，和我一样读着书，仿佛饥不可耐，而书就是面包。

阅读一直是我的家、我的食物、我那不可缺少的伴侣。特罗洛普把这称为“书恋”。他说它能使你一生中每个小时都非常愉快。”然而，在所有我们普遍认为能给人安慰的事物中——上帝、性爱、食品、家庭、朋友——读书似乎是最少被人提起的，起码在公开的场合是如此。但对我来说，读书就是我能想到、能感受到的一切：不论是在我贪婪地一本接着一本看书的时候；还是在我明明坐在椅子上，可是心却早跑出了家门的时候；或是在我满世界到处漫游，而实际上根本从来没有离开房间的时候，我这么做不是出于一种优越感，也不是为了升职，甚至和做学问都无关。我读书就是因为我喜欢，喜欢它胜过喜欢世界上任何别的活动。

在我成年之时，我认识到，尽管我对读书本身的兴趣丝毫未减，可是这世界却经常对这份快乐抱着一种敌对或视而不见的态度，就和当年我那些小女伴们一样——她们老是砰砰地敲我家的纱门，叫我把书放下，总说那是“无聊的书”，也不管那是什么书。

我们虽然口头上也说读书的好处，但实际上，我们的文化却始终怀疑那些读书太多的人——无论读书太多意味着什么），认为他们懒惰、胸无大志，需要成长并接触现实生活；认为他们不屑与他人为伍。

我们美国人的性格里，甚至有一种偏见，暗中敌视无目的的阅读，总认为读书不过是升职的一种手段。美国是一个强调社交和群体的国家，因此她有一种心理上的多米诺骨牌效应：独处会导致不合群，而不合群的人会变成失败者。任何拒绝交际活动的行为都是可疑的，尤其是和“走出去、干起来”这一精神相矛盾的行为就更可疑了，因为这一精神似乎是我们民族性格的核心所在。人们印象中的美国总统总是在行动：在野外狩猎的西奥多·罗斯福，和兄弟们传橄榄球的约翰·肯尼迪。对于那些顽固不化的书虫，唯一的安慰是林肯：他独自坐在火炉旁边，说道谁给我一本我没有读过的书，谁就是我最好的朋友。”

我长大成人的那些年里，在美国还兴起了一种追求名利的风气。人们只认可那些有用的阅读。

美国最好的文理学院哲学或英语专业的学生们总是被问道你们学了这些，打算将来干什么？”好像在商业社会的压力下，纯粹的学习与研究已经过时了。过去读书是因为乐在其中，现在变了，读书变成了某种目的，变成一种顽固的自我发展。虽然一位高级管理人员很可能从《白鲸》这本小说中学到更多的东西，但人们却认为他应该看《超级成功人士应该具有的七种习惯》。因内心某种追求乐趣的欲望而阅读，已经变得让人无法理解了，这种阅读就好像一个人进了地铁，毫无目的地从一个地方坐到另一个地方。

我在报界工作过多年。很多新闻记者认为，在20世纪后半叶，大家总把阅读作为一系列需要解决的问题来谈论：现在公立学校的孩子们是不是很少读书了？是不是美国人都比以前读书少了？书面文字是不是被口头文字取代了？电视、电影是不是把书本都取代了？新闻工作者在大多数情况下都回答：是，是，是，是。而在文学评论界，文学教授、小说编辑、小说家在讨论阅读时，有时会带有一种令人望而生畏的排外性。他们会评论说哪些是好书，哪些是坏书，哪些值得读，哪些毫无价值。他们总是在谈品位，但这听上去很势利。

这些当然并不是新鲜事。人们历来用读书将一个国家或文化分成两部分：文人和其余的黎民百姓，有才智的上等人和其他普通民众。但是当古登堡在15世纪发明了印刷机之后，书本从原来只是少数人享有的艺术品逐渐变成大众的信息来源。从那以后，一小部分人想要独占书本并将读书的乐趣当作自己的特权就变得难多了。不过，批评家和学者们仍然在这么做。读他们的作品时，我失望地发现他们中间有很多人都认为如今诗歌、散文、小说、历史和传记的质量已经严重下降，已经变成知识产品当中的廉价处理品了。但是读书总能将我从绝望中解救出来，因为我看的书越多，就越是认识到事情历来如此。很明显，文学研究，不论其对象是1840年、1930年还是1975年的文学作品，其主要结论就是：曾经有个黄金时代，但是已经一去不返了。1923年，出版界的专业杂志《出版人周刊》曾感慨电影占去了国家那么大一部分休闲时间，几乎没有给别的活动留下时间。”1960年，法国作家路易斯·费迪南德·塞利娜也说：“小说无法与汽车、电影、电视以及烈酒相竞争。”

显然没有人谈论我们这些真正的读书人的舒适与乐趣，谈论我们活跃的亚文化。我们读书不是为了评判他人的阅读，而是为了估量我们自己。我们这些人爱读书超过一切，看见书店的感觉就像有些人看见珠宝商一样，但人们不会谈论我们。这种沉默实在令人奇怪，因为我们人数众多，而且我们才是真正的读书界。我们就是当年翘首以望，等着狄更斯小说最新一期连载的那些人，我们就是那些永远不会让《傲慢与偏见》绝版的那些人。

从当年亲戚们在圣诞节送我这个爱独处的孩子皮制书签一直到现在，一切都没有改变。在书店柜台边抱着满怀书籍的人，在图书馆借书台前等待的人，在学校里老师为我们介绍认识的那些人，当然，还有在书本里构筑亚文化的众多读书爱好者，都是和坐在椅子里读书的人志同道合的人。在《杀死一只知更鸟》这本小说里，斯考特说过直到我害怕会失去一本书的时候才开始爱上读书。这就像人不懂得热爱呼吸一样。”

读书与我们文化中很多东西都相似。它真正的意义在普通人心中，而不是在学术权威和专家学者身上。如果我相信我读过的关于阅读问题的文章，那我就要绝望了。好在我还有读者给我的来信要我回复。比如有个小姑娘，她妈妈送给她一本我写的书，她给我写了一封信，开头提到我想我就是人们所说的书呆子。”

我回信说我也是。”

Key Words:

awkward ['ɔ:kwəd]

adj. 笨拙的，尴尬的，（设计）别扭的

perplexed      [pə'plekst]     

adj. 困惑的，不知所措的 动词perplex的过去式

certain    ['sə:tn]    

adj. 确定的，必然的，特定的

imaginable     [i'mædʒinəbl]

adj. 可想像的，可能的

wander   ['wɔndə] 

vi. 徘徊，漫步，闲逛，迷路，蜿蜒

spread    [spred]   

v. 伸展，展开，传播，散布，铺开，涂撒

source    [sɔ:s]      

n. 发源地，来源，原始资料

saint              [seint]    

n. 圣人，圣徒

vt. 把 ... 封为圣人

stiff  [stif]

adj. 硬的，僵直的，生硬的，拘谨的，不灵活的

quotation       [kwəu'teiʃən] 

n. 引语，语录，引用，报价，行情

guillotine        [.gilə'ti:n]

n. 断头台

literacy    ['litərəsi] 

n. 识字，读写能力

committed     [kə'mitid]

adj. 献身于某种事业的，委托的

devoted  [di'vəutid]      

adj. 投入的，深爱的 v. 投入 vbl. 投入

discontented  [diskən'tentid]

adj. 不满意的 动词discontent的过去式和过

restlessness   ['restlisnis]     

n. 坐立不安；不安定

universe ['ju:nivə:s]      

n. 宇宙，万物，世界

tracks           

n. 轨道（track的复数）；磁道；轮胎

imaginary      [i'mædʒinəri] 

adj. 想象的，虚构的

creek      [kri:k]     

n. 小湾，小溪 Creek n. 克里克族，克里克人，

parallel   ['pærəlel]

adj. 平行的，相同的，类似的，并联的

sustenance    ['sʌstinəns]    

n. 维持生计，食物

glare       [glɛə]     

n. 闪耀光，刺眼

v. 发眩光，瞪视

hostile    ['hɔstail] 

adj. 怀敌意的，敌对的

sheer      [ʃiə] 

adj. 纯粹的，全然的，陡峭的

adv. 完

comfort  ['kʌmfət]

n. 舒适，安逸，安慰，慰藉

vt. 安慰，使

universal        [.ju:ni'və:səl]   

adj. 普遍的，通用的，宇宙的，全体的，全世界的

superiority     [sju.piəri'ɔriti] 

n. 优越性，优势

companion    [kəm'pænjən]

n. 同伴，同事，成对物品之一，(船的)甲板间扶梯(或扶

recognize       ['rekəgnaiz]   

vt. 认出，认可，承认，意识到，表示感激

invincible       [in'vinsibl]     

adj. 不可征服的，难以制服的

figure     ['figə]     

n. 图形，数字，形状; 人物，外形，体型

portray   [pɔ:'trei] 

vt. 描写，描绘，饰演

ethos      ['i:θɔs]    

n. 民族精神，道德风貌，思潮信仰

superior  [su:'piəriə]     

n. 上级，高手，上标

adj. 上层的，上好

certain    ['sə:tn]    

adj. 确定的，必然的，特定的

hale [heil]      

adj. 强壮的，健壮的 vt. 猛拉，拖揭发拽

suspect   [səs'pekt]

n. 嫌疑犯

adj. 令人怀疑的，不可信的