Seven Pages

Being as obsessively careful as I am to keep my books in perfect condition, I’ve read half of this one without as much as a gentle curve lifting the cover, or even a hint of that thumbed yellowing that can run down the edge of the pages. These are problems I’ve often mustered the strength to overlook, but if by some unthinkable circumstance a crease were to appear in the spine, I would have to buy a new copy and start reading it again. Nothing like that has ever happened. If I thought that it was going to happen, I would choose never to read another book, rather than face the palpitations and scoldings of my inner critic. 

I open it on page two hundred and four, with no memory of what was happening or being described at the point where I stopped. It’s in the middle of a chapter. My bookmark is there, nestled into the crease, too replete with purpose to withstand my pinch. I examine it before looking at the page. A picture of a sleeping dog and a quote by a famous poet. It had been such an easy object to understand before I uncovered it and exposed its meaning to the ambiguity of those symbols. It simply was, then I injured it by looking; now it has to heal by trying to be something more than itself. This is the only kind of wound that I plan to inflict on my book, as I now turn to look at its enclosed universe of symbols.

I must have stopped reading in the middle of a paragraph. I remember subvocally riding the peaks and troughs of the words at the top of the page, but those in the middle are only superficially familiar. I start from the beginning of the second paragraph and follow their sounds along a short runway into unfamiliar territory. Before long, I’m stumbling across the fibres and phonemes of page two hundred and five. More often than not, I need to repeat at least part of a sentence before I’m sufficiently satisfied that I’ve internalised it to continue reading. Almost as often, that satisfaction can be quite complete long before I feel at ease to call it sufficient. Sometimes, I will pause on a single word and no matter how many times I repeat it, I cannot be induced to feel like I’ve imparted meaning to its tangle of lines and curves.

A singing electrical appliance battles for my attention, but it’s not the only contender. There’s a texture in the air whose material basis distractingly eludes me. If it contains the spaces where words would go, it’s not a voice, but if it has the mathematical luminosity of notes, it’s not music. The walls are too thin. I could be at the bottom of a cliff, pitting these words against the sea, and the walls would still be too thin. Someone I can’t see is making movements that spill into a space where they don’t belong. It’s almost as if they were scribbling on my pages; except, of course, that if they did that I would be utterly devastated. As it currently stands, I’m permissibly irritated and a pigeon’s distant cooing is pulling harder on the threads of my attention. 

Turning onto page two hundred and six is a rewarding experience. Of all my personal achievements, the few that came with greater satisfaction than turning a page still lacked the empowering promise of its consistency. I can’t remember if I’ve ever won a competition, but I think I know the feeling of it. It contains that elated appetite to become more of yourself that comes with turning a page, amplified proportionately to a broader perspective on the self whose becoming it entails. It must have been wonderful, if it ever happened to me, but could only have been so in order for my fingers to feel this dry scratch between them. The boundary between the texture and sound of paper is uncertain. They leak into each other in the same way as the meanings of words in a sentence.

Although the prospect of new ground is always exciting, the block of unread text that appears across two new pages overwhelms me at first. It’s the same effect as turning a corner or coming over the cusp of a hill. You look up from the path and a whole new section of the landscape appears before you. If the previous page has ended in the middle of a sentence, I usually need to turn back and retrace my steps because of the distraction. This only serves to prolong the satisfaction on my fingers and in my ears. I could happily endure the disorientation of navigating even the least rewarding book for longer than that of standing among an unreadable crowd.

I can also enjoy the movement of numbers across the corners of the page, which all have distinct personalities. It can take excessive handling of the paper to satisfy myself that I haven’t skipped a page, but once I’ve overruled my mind’s insistence that there’s a hidden one that I can’t access, I settle into the new combination of digits and it becomes a backdrop to what follows. Such a trivial detail is nonetheless a fundamental aspect of how we experience the written word. It’s a weather pattern that repeats its ritual between the covers of every object that we would call a book.

Continuing onto the unique terrain of page two hundred and seven, I find that the world has been irreversibly changed. An event, a concept, or an object has been described to me since I allotted my attention to the book. As the pigeon outside has continued to speak and sunlight has sharpened and blurred a line of shadow across the page with the passage of clouds, I’ve formed an understanding of it that shifts my perspective on the story where those things are happening. However imperceptible that shift may be, I can never return to a place where it hasn’t happened, no matter how successfully I forget the actual words that I’ve read. That’s why this little thing that I’m holding is so precious to me. That’s why they’re arranged on my shelves like the vital organs in a living body.

Two, zero, eight: in the digits of the next page, a pair sees itself cubed on the far side of a void. From this digressive observation, my mind loses its grip on my eyes and allows them to wander across the room’s clutter and colour. By the time I become conscious of this, I’ve been planning meals and replaying conversations for several minutes. I can still remember the last words from the previous page, but the sense of discontinuity is too uncomfortable, so I feel compelled as usual to retrace my steps. That texture in the air is becoming more viscous. Whatever the person on the other side of the wall is doing, they’re doing it more now. Where it resembles speech, it’s more distinctly musical. Where it resembles music, it’s more imposingly eloquent. It rolls through the air without a pause, punctuated by muffled thuds and mechanical shrieks. Against the current of these puzzling faces that the world keeps turning to me, I find my way back into the text. Inevitably, I sink into its cushion of prose and find that it’s by far the most comfortable place to be.

As I make my way smoothly down the lines of page two hundred and nine, consciously trying not to repeat any of them unnecessarily, I notice a tension in my throat and on my tongue. It’s as if I’m forcing my progress by reading aloud in every sense except physically enunciating the words. I’m standing at the very edge of speech to block it from interjecting any of its own concerns from outside. I’m still aware of the noise, and the air temperature is becoming abrasive despite not having changed, but I battle my way through happily until I turn to page two hundred and ten. It takes only one satisfyingly simple gesture, which my fingertips had instinctively prepared themselves to make. In an unlikely occurrence, I maintain my footing in the sentence and continue reading without having to turn back.

My hands are starting to cramp slightly from the excessively cautious way they’re cradling the book. I know that I could relax my grip without incurring any greater risk of dropping or bending it, but its appeal to my senses and its place among the external objects I’ve appropriated as bodily organs renders the pain more rewarding than its release. I keep a finger flat against the spine at all times to make sure it doesn’t crease; so that no injury the book might incur would escape my perception, as if it weren’t physically integrated with my nervous system, which its ideas and images are sculpting. Like a limb, I’m conscious of its position whether or not I’m looking at it. 

It can’t be overstated, of course, that a lot of things in life are more important. On summer evenings, the setting sun commands my attention by staging an opera in vast washes of fire across the edges of carefully drifting clouds; I watch it, absorbed in an awestruck sense of abstraction that never diminishes with time. Sometimes I might hold a guitar and mindlessly release a few slow progressions of chords into that space just to watch them get lost there, but not a word crosses my mind unless it’s spoken by one of the birds chattering outside. I’m not thinking about the book, because I’m too engaged with the world in which it’s set; but it can only be from the book that I’ve derived such value for that world, and by absolutely no means have I forgotten where it is.

My steady flow of comprehension doesn’t last long. On page two hundred and eleven, I struggle to lift meaning from each word and carry it across into the next. While I’m replaying the sound of a sentence for the third time without catching enough of its momentum to cross its full stop, the sound from next door comes to a rattling crescendo and then stops. Its absence initially feels like an addition to the crowded room. All of its dissipated pressure against my ears is still fresh enough in my mind that its features hang in the air like smoke, but the squeals, hums and rumblings that rose from beneath it are audible now too. I look up to let them flood into their new sensory niche. A shy trickle of water joins them from somewhere beneath a sweetly pontificating robin, whose voice seems to have pushed aside the less articulate pigeon’s. As I settle into this new field of sound, I start to notice other things, too. My stomach, or something around it, feels tense. I’m probably hungry. My legs hurt, so I shift my position, which sends a wave of something distinctly identifiable as hunger through me. I lower my eyes passively to the text. Any effort required to direct them doesn’t extend to focusing them. For the following minute, I’m staring at a grey smudge, but if anyone were to ask me what I was doing, I would say that I’m reading. It wouldn’t be dishonest, because during that minute, nothing other than the simple enjoyment of having that book in my hands could make me feel so safely tethered to the uncertain ground where spines crack and pages tear.

Reluctant to remove myself from that space having extracted a chain of words only seven pages long, I gather all of my strength into pulling something comprehensible from those dark stains on the paper. One more sentence rewards my efforts with its own tiny support under the weight of the churning world, but it’s not enough to carry me further. After feeling its syllables on my tongue and tying them into an approximate understanding, I pick up my bookmark and look at it again. The dog looks peaceful and familiar. It’s the kind of scene that makes me feel like I’m remembering it from a dream, or from some unremarkable day long ago. I must be tired, too. I tuck it far too carefully back into the crease and close my book. Despite all the noises that are swarming in the air, it’s as serene as I could reasonably hope for. My breath is slow, deep and automatic. It’s predictable, but to some ineffable discontent that settles in the space now void of written words, it’s the only thing that is. As I listen to something start to rattle again on the other side of the wall, I try to remember what happened on the pages I’ve just read. I can’t.