Reading vs writing

No line on the horizon

I’ve always enjoyed reading and this is a shared interest in our family; my wife reads at every opportunity and both of our offspring are voracious readers. 

Reading lets us travel to foreign places without the physical effort or cost, it engages our imagination and connects us with others including our fellow readers. It can allow us to expand our understanding of the world, build empathy, understanding, and tolerance.

Reading has been described as a “gift to the writer”, because without readers, what is the point of writing? I get the idea that writing can be self-informing as well, but it’s clear to me that the whole thing is an exchange. 

I recently finished “We, The Drowned” by Carsten Jensen, a novel set on an island in Denmark, or covering the whole world’s oceans, extending from the 1840’s to the 1940’s, so several wars and lots of change, numerous interesting characters, and a great voice as a narrator.  I don’t want to give anything further away, but it’s a wonderful book.

What an imagination an author must have, to populate an entire world! He (the author) manages to tie the whole thing together so effortlessly seeming, I’m in awe of his skill. If I can rarely write as interesting a character or a glimpse of one, I’m beyond pleased.

One of my favourite authors is Jim Harrison, who writes in such a poetic style that I find myself rereading sentences because he manages to surprise me and bring about an insight, sideways, of the characters that populate his works. Another author I can’t get enough of is Cormac McCarthy, again because his way with words and phrasing leaves me amazed.  

One reason for learning German for me was to read in the original language the works of famous authors, from Kafka to Goethe, Mann to Rilke. Not to mention the philosophers! In this pursuit, I was successful. 

I was less successful in Russian studies although I did take two years of Russian at university. I had thought I’d be reading Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin but that did not happen. It would take me a lot of time and effort now to get back into language studies. 

Of French and Spanish I have only the most rudimentary capability: I can order a meal (usually, but not always successfully: as for one tiny example the time, which my children still laugh about, when, rather than asking for a spoon (cuillère) for them to get their ice creams out of tall glasses in a restaurant in Lyon, I ordered a (échelle) ladder!) or rent a car or book a room or buy a train ticket.  Or order two beers, please, and where is the bathroom?

So literature in its original language I can read only in English or German, sadly. I wonder what Carsten Jensen is like to read in the original Danish?

Writing gives me the chance to take my many teeming thoughts and set them briefly outside my head. And then to go back and revise the way of expressing them, for some imagined reader. 

In my last thirteen years of my professional career, I did a lot of writing: reports, mostly, on how a person came to their often tragic end.  Often I’d edit reports on behalf of the original investigator; and I probably took way too much time at this to the detriment of other elements of my work.

I would also need to issue legal rulings on applications or motions or objections at inquests where I was presiding, and I enjoyed the process of transforming my thoughts of the legal merits of one argument over another into legible prose. I had the benefit of counsel who could point out flaws in my legal reasoning and this insight would keep me out of hot water. 

In the first entries into this blog, up to my unfortunate crash and subsequent return home, I had the external circumstances of the voyage itself to drive the story. Similarly, when writing a legal ruling or a report on somebody’s death for their family, the facts are given, they are the facts at hand or are presented to me in the coroners report and police report and autopsy report and toxicology report and I merely need to string them together. 

Now that I’m delving more into memories and observations and thoughts and the need to use my imagination, this is a lot harder for me. 

But I’m seeing a value to the time I’m putting into this, and I thank you, dear (imaginary) reader, for giving me the opportunity!