Language thrills

I am back now from a lovely Fall Break Retreat in Lake Geneva, WI with friends from church. I didn't bring homework with me, which was blissful, so today I will be reading all day long. There are worse fates. I am enjoying a book for my Senior Seminary class on reading called Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Here are a few quotes that resonated with me within the first hour of reading. More to come, I hope.

Despite all this mental pirouetting, or maybe because of it, I don't remember much of what I've read. My lifelong capacity for forgetting distresses me. I glance at a book on the shelf that I once read with avid interest - Dorothy Gallagher's All the Right Enemies, about the 1943 murder of the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca - and while I struggle for the details, all I recall is the excitement of the reading. I couldn't give a cogent account of its dense intrigue or social history, yet I have some inchoate sense of the texture and dynamics of the subject. (p. 4)

In truth I have made some tentative steps toward freedom. Over the last ten years or so, I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills. (p. 5)