The joy of taking a short book on a long walk
Prospective holidays are refuges in our imaginations. When we imagine ourselves holidaying we imagine ourselves stress-free, well-rested, and energetic without relying on caffeine. We imagine that we will have time to do all those things which we had hoped to do, but couldn’t because of the demands of quotidian existence. Imaginary holidays are repositories for things one would do “if only I had more time.”
Typically I take too many books with me on holiday. (This is such a universally shared experience, there must be a German word for packing too many books into too small a suitcase). Throughout the rest of the year I read steadily enough, but the growing tower of unread books leaning over my bed stares at me menacingly like a sleep paralysis demon scratching at my bedpost to mark the seconds counting down towards my death. To keep my mortal despair at bay, I’ll assure myself that while holidaying I can read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one week and still have time to rearrange a living room and eat a Fruju.
I kept this dysfunctional behaviour up until I walked the Routeburn track. I was packing light, so I chose between two small books: either Schopenhauer's Essays & Aphorisms or Shakespeare’s sonnets. I packed the sonnets—a small, slim, almost-square orange book that could be mistaken for a coaster.
One of the joys of taking short books filled with small things, like poems or aphorisms, on a long walk is that they are well suited to the logistical demands of traveling. In his essay, On Reading, Montaigne expounds his love for Plutarch and Seneca:
'They both are strikingly suited to my humour in that the knowledge that I seek from them is treated in pieces not sewn together (and so do not require me to bind myself to some lengthy labour, of which I am quite incapable) . . . I do not need a great deal of preparation to get down to them and I can drop them whenever I like, for one part of them does not really lead to another.'
When you’ve reached the hut and you’ve unrolled your sleeping bag, hung your clothes out to dry, and changed into something cozier, you can read a little—just a little. You can slip into the bath without getting your hair wet.
The second joy of taking a short book on a long walk is the connection it creates between a book and a place. Like a summer romance, the charm of the book is inseparable from the place where we read it. And like re-reading a love letter, when we return to the book we are transported through time to a precious version of the place that exists only in our memory, unblemished.
The third great joy of taking a short book on a long walk is that you can take the time to worry at it, sink your teeth into it, and chew it slowly. YouTube is filled with videos with names like “How reading one book every week changed my life,” “How to Read Faster,” “Why I read a book a day (and so should you!)”. The cult of reading books faster isn’t really about learning or, at least, it’s inspired by a theory of learning that says that the more information you can pour into your head the more you’re going to learn. But learning isn’t that simple. Schopenhauer says that...
'Thoughts put down on paper are nothing more than footprints in the sand: one sees the road the man has taken, but in order to know what he saw on the way, one requires his eyes.'
We must labour to understand a book. By taking a short book on a long walk you have time to read and re-read it, looking closer and closer still at each time of passing.
'Only through ordering what you know by comparing truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.'
—Schopenhauer, On Thinking For Yourself
Against my love shall be as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand
crushed and o'erworn;
When hours have drained his blood and
filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful
morn
Hath travelled on to age's steepy night;
And all those
beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing, or vanished out of
sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a
time do I now fortify
Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That
he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my
lover's life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.
—Shakespeare, Sonnet 63