Other people’s words about … books
After Bunty died, days slid into one another like the colours in a sunset. Whole afternoons passed as Christabel drank tea in the kitchen … If there was a book in front of her, she would look away frequently and forget to turn its pages — she no longer read in the old, urgent way. The taste for reading had started to withdraw from her; she felt it pulling gently away, like a tide. Books contained hard truths, waiting like splinters in their pages. Over the years, many had lodged in her unnoticed. Little anticipations of life’s awfulness, they might have served as a defence against it but pierced instead with knowledge of damage, error, waste.
From ‘The Life to Come’
by Michelle de Kretser
CS Lewis once wrote that we read fiction and literature to seek an enlargement of our being; we read because [w]e want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. I don’t subscribe to Lewis’s Christian practices and beliefs, but I do — oh, I do — subscribe to his views on reading.
And so Michelle de Kretser’s words in the passage above affected me deeply. I cannot imagine a life in which [t]he taste for reading had started to withdraw from me; the thought that the truths I treasure finding within a book’s pages might begin to feel like splinters horrifies me.
Reading for me is an activity that provides solace. The solace comes most strongly from finding kinship within the pages of the books I read: kinship with the book’s characters, and, vicariously, with the book’s writer, who created the characters. That’s not quite what Lewis is saying, but it’s part of it, I think: it’s hidden in his words. When de Kretser’s character Christabel finds herself losing the taste for reading, losing the urgency that was inherent for her in the act, what she is really experiencing is loss. Loneliness. Desolation.
If I was a praying person, as Lewis certainly was, I would offer up a prayer here, in response to de Kretser’s words. I would pray: Please don’t let me ever experience this particular form of loss.
I would pray: Please don’t let me lose the companionship of books.
I would pray: Please don’t let the tide go out.
Please.
twenty-one words 
Interesting quote. I’ve thought along similar lines, but with regard to my eyesight. At the end of her life, my grandmother’s sight failed, and I have a sister-in-law who has a degenerative eye disease. I wonder how it would be to longer read or see beauty that surrounds me. It would be a sad loss indeed.
I’ve been taught to pray in the positive, asking for what I want as opposed to what I fear, so I’d pray, ‘Please let my eyes always see clearly!’
Yes, I would dread losing my sight, too. Interesting to consider only praying in positive terms rather than negative. I can see the logic. I guess I’d have to change my prayer to: ‘Please let me continue to enjoy reading for the rest of my life’.
Yes!