I'd always intuited from a very early age that the reading of a book and the garnering of its fruits relied on some part on the where of its reading. Indeed, some books positively cry out to be read outwith the domesticated apparatus of civilization. Or 'read' in such a way that it does not send you to sleep, or propogate you back into the slumber that you sought to emerge from.
Books, much like anything, can be of two sorts - the sort that cleaves your head open and draws air into that brain, or the sort that sends you back to sleep within the soporific cliched existence of the pusillanimous and posthumous. Kafka said as much when he remarked that if your book is not of the latter species then it is not a book, but something to wipe your bum with. Sadly, in today's all too soporific society, where single-linear-mindedness triumphs, there is much toilet paper to go around.
Recently, whilst reading Belden Lane's Backpacking with the Saints, I was over the moon to read the following:
Reading a potentially dangerous book in a landscape perceived to be dangerous can be doubly hazardous. The place heightens the vulnerability occasioned by the text. Challenging books lose their bite when they're read comfortably at home in a favorite armchair. Their riskiness increases, however, when read by firelight in a forest glade, ten miles from the nearest road.
Here, it's not so much reading in the gloaming, as meditations on the peaks and the sides of hills, an endeavor I began in earnest a few years ago having felt what Lane just iterated, that a book can elevate more than usual if read within the 'correct' context.
Most of my thinking deals with Nature and how we can return once more to a harmonious way of being in the world, so it stands to reason that most of the books I go through (and study, not so much read), are books of that ilk.
I am tremendously fortunate in having retained a special readership at my alma mater Glasgow University's Library which, though not an especially exciting building from the outside (12 floors straight up), has views over the valley like no other (situated as it is on the top of Gimorehill). I had recognized many moons ago that reading on Level 11 (Philosophy & Fine Art), with the gulls outside, and the horizons beckoning, was better than reading in the bath, 'better' in that something more came through the text than the actual text itself.
I then realized that if I went into the hills (which I could see from the upper floors of the library), I could jump the train with the bicycle in tow, and have ten-twenty minutes of reading on the train before getting off. This would invariably instil a notion in my mind which would then take shape on my way into the hills. Invariably, by the time I got halfway to the top (we're only talking wee hills here, 200-500m, more attitude than altitude), that notion, ventilated by the cool quiet of the hillside would have manifested itself into something quite insightful.
This is the mountain study.... collecting the white-gathered element.
The benefits I found with a taking a book into the hills didn't stop there however. I found that the author's mind was actually somehow present, as a sort of companion, but a companion that didn't talk, that didn't stop every five metres to examine the bog asphodel and sphagnum (my botanist pal is guilty of such staccato movement), that didn't need watering or feeding, that didn't get tired and start complaining, in short, a companion that was there without being there. To be sure, there are benefits to having a botanically-minded stravaiging companion, and all the rest, but sometimes, to understand anything you have to arrive through your own power of solitude.
David Levin's The Listening Self....
Karlfried Graf Durckheim's Absolute Living...
William Corlett & John Moore's The Islamic Space...
Hakuin's The Four Ways of Knowing...
Absolute Living!
I'll tell you what it's not for........ (to use the words of Ellen Ripley).......it's not for screwing each other over (and every other animal for that matter) for a goddamn percentage.
Julius Evola's Meditations on the Peaks
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
Franz Kafka
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