I Keep Going Back To The Same One

The spine is cracked in the same three places.

You could open it at any of them without looking. And you know roughly what is on the page before you turn it, and you know how it ends, and you have known how it ends for about nine years.

And you started it again last month.

This is the last article on this site, and it is about the thing you have been slightly embarrassed about the whole way through the other six.

Because when the subject comes up, and somebody asks what you are reading, you do not say the true answer. You mention something else, or you say you are between things, or you name the one you started in the spring and did not finish. You do not say: the same one I read last year and the year before.

You have a private view about this and it is roughly: that rereading does not count. That it is comfort rather than reading. That a person who has got through eleven new books this year has done something you have not, and that going back to a familiar one is the reading equivalent of putting the same program on because you cannot face choosing.

I want to take that apart, and then I want to leave you with something better than permission.

Here is the first thing. The eleven books are not the achievement you think they are.

Reading eleven books once is not more than reading one book eleven times. They are different activities with different products, and only one of them is currently being counted by anybody.

He shall read therein all the days of his life

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy about a king and a book, and the timescale in it is the point.

And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: (Deuteronomy 17:19, King James Version)

He shall read therein all the days of his life.

One book. For a whole life.

Not read it and move on to the next. Not get through it and demonstrate that he has. It shall be with him, which is a description of a physical object staying near a person for decades, and he is to read in it all the days of his life.

And notice the reason given, because it is not information.

That he may learn to fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words, to do them. The purpose is formation rather than acquisition. He is not reading it to find out what is in it, which he would know after the second pass. He is reading it because the reading does something to the reader, repeatedly, over a lifetime.

That distinction is the whole of this article.

There are two things a person can do with a text, and we have almost entirely lost the second one.

The first is acquisition: find out what is in it, and having found out, you are done, and going back would be redundant. That is how we read now, and it is why a finished book gets shelved and counted.

The second is formation: return to the same thing repeatedly, not to learn what it says, but because what it does to you is different each time, because you are different each time.

Under the first model, rereading is failure. Under the second, it is the entire practice, and scripture assumes the second one about the most important book a person could own.

Returning to the same thing is a whole practice rather than a failure of the other one, and the reading has never once been about finding out what is in it. Deuteronomy 17:19 keeps one book with a man for the whole of his life, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody opening something for the ninth time.

You are not the same reader

Here is the practical part, and it is the reason your rereading is not what you think.

The book has not changed. You have.

Every time you have gone back to that one, you have brought a different person to it. The first time you were somebody who had not yet had the year you had in between. The version of you that read it at twenty five did not know what the version at thirty two knows, and the book met a different person on each occasion and gave them a different thing.

That is why particular parts have come forward and others have receded. There is almost certainly a passage in it that meant nothing to you the first three times and now stops you every single reading, and it did not change.

So you have not read that book nine times. You have read nine different books, because the reader is half of the transaction and the reader has been under constant revision.

And there is something else worth knowing, which is that this is why the returning happens at particular moments. People do not reread at random. They go back to a familiar book in a hard stretch, or a tired one, or when something has shifted, and it is not because they want the comfort of a known plot.

It is that a known book is the only kind that can be read by somebody with nothing left. A new one requires you to build a world; a familiar one is already built, and you can walk into it in the state you are actually in.

Which means the returning is a competence rather than a retreat. You have worked out, without being taught, what to read when you have nothing, and most people have not.

You have never once read the same book twice, and the reader has been under revision the entire time. The written word keeps one book with a man for a lifetime for the sake of what it does to him, and the Spirit of God is the one present when a passage stops somebody on the ninth pass.

Read ten pages of the one you know

So here is the last assignment on this site.

Read ten pages of the book you have read before.

The one you go back to. Not a new one, not the improving one from the stack, and not one you feel you ought to reread. The actual one.

Ten pages, tonight, deliberately, as a choice rather than as a thing you fell back into.

That word deliberately is what this assignment is for. You have been rereading for years, but always slightly sideways, as a lapse from what you meant to be doing, with a small apology running underneath it.

Choose it. Sit down and open it on purpose, knowing exactly what is in it, and read ten pages.

And here is the second half. When somebody asks what you are reading, say the true answer.

Say: I am rereading such a thing, I do that. Plainly, without the small laugh, and without explaining that you know it is silly.

Watch what happens, which is that a surprising number of people say they do the same, and you will find you have been carrying a private embarrassment about a thing that turns out to be common and largely undiscussed.

And that is the last word from this site, so let it be this one: nine years with a book is not a failure to move on. It is a relationship, and you have been apologizing for one of the longest ones you have.

You are able to choose it deliberately and say so plainly, and rereading has never once been a lapse from what you meant to be doing. Deuteronomy 17:19 sets one book beside a man for all the days of his life, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody opening a familiar book on purpose.