There Are No Old Books to Read

On The Temporality of Reading

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

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What are you reading when you hold a book by Homer, Confucius, Jules Verne, or James Joyce in your hands?

Reading a book is an interesting phenomenon. Most people have experienced the act of reading a book. A book, at least today, is a printed object that endures through time, that can be reproduced or reprinted, thus making it possible for the same book to be read, possibly by different people, at different times, and, depending on the conditions of preservation, in quite different periods of human history.

This is, despite its ancientness, a wonder of technology.

But what is reading a book? What are we reading when we read a book? Such a question seems obvious at first, and an answer might be: “When I read a book, I read a book.”

Such an answer is tautological and it says nothing about what the little event of “reading a book” means in terms of the relationship between the reader and the book itself, between me and the book. In this post, I want to think about what it means to read a book.

To Read a Book Is to Read Something That Has Already Been Made

A book is a tool, and like any tool, it has to be made before it can be used. Therefore, what is read when someone reads a book is a tool that performs a specific task.

The purpose of a book is to convey information in the form of (printed) characters. These characters have been reproduced according to a specific set of rules that reproduce as identically as possible what one or more authors have written.

Books are reproductions of an original set of specifications.

The information conveyed by a book carries a specific message, be it a story, an analysis, a thought, and so forth.

This message has always been conceived in the past, in a timeline that can be seen by the reader as present-past or, for example in other cases, as a memory of the antic past.

Whether it has been recently conceived or not, what the reader reads is always something that has been elaborated in the past.

Reading something, and especially reading a book, means reading something that has been designed beforehand.

But Every Experience I Have as a Reader Is New

For the reader, however, things are very different. As Heraclitus famously said, no one ever steps into the same river twice. Each reading experience is unique because the context of reading at any given time is never exactly the same as the previous one.

Let’s take an example: if I decide to read a book I first read as a child, I will have a different experience. I have certainly grown up. It is also true that the context in which my reading experience is inscribed cannot be the same as when I was a child.

When I begin to read a book written in ancient times, my experience consists of reading something in the present. My reading is necessarily something that appears in a new form in my consciousness.

It is not new in the sense that the book itself was written recently, but new in the sense that any experience I can have is always in the present and cannot be exactly the same as a previous experience.

Consequently, when the book that I am reading is a classic from ages, what I am experiencing is never the reading of something old per se. Reading means reading here and now, whatever what the reading is. 

There is old books to hold, but no old books to read, their is just new experiences.

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Thank you for your time and reading.

Romaric