Reading Life

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“Arthur has taken the essay and filled it, over and over, with his singular insights and perceptions. The form is especially suited to his temperament. Beginning in 1999 with Irish Nocturnes, he has shown, through many collections, how wide-ranging, compelling and illuminating this particular, and often undervalued, brand of literature can be... What he is aiming for, and achieves [in Reading Life] is ‘a closer, deeper reading of a few fragments of experience’... his essays branch out into a web of allusions, without sacrificing their hold on the particular. Always erudite and entertaining, Chris Arthur goes his own way, keeping his mind independent and all his senses alert... It’s all exhilarating.”

Patricia Craig, The Irish Times, January 6th 2018 (the full review can be read here)

How do you read a girl's bare feet, a fallen fuchsia blossom, or the act of throwing a gun into a reservoir's deep water? In Reading Life Chris Arthur continues his essayistic explorations, using this fascinating and flexible literary form to fashion fourteen exquisitely crafted readings whose lyricism often suggests poetry as much as prose. Sometimes reading is meant literally and books are the point of focus; sometimes it's meant metaphorically with the objects and events around us being read. But whether he's considering child prostitution in Paris, Flann O'Brien's great comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds, a whale's tooth, a bayonet, or the poems of Seamus Heaney, common to all of these readings is a search for the meanings that lie behind the superficialities of ordinary discourse.

The book's epigraph — taken from Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading — emphasizes its main theme:

We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

This is how Reading Life begins:

The Shimna — whose name in Irish means "river of the bulrushes" — rises in the Mourne mountains near Lough Shannagh and meets the sea at Newcastle, County Down, a town whose setting must be one of the most beautiful in Europe. It's where, in the words of Percy French's famous song, "the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea." They really do, and Newcastle, with its main street and esplanade built only a stone's throw from the waves, enjoys the majestic backdrop of the mountains rising steeply and spectacularly behind it. For part of its way, the Shimna flows through Tollymore (from Tulaigh mhór, "the big hillock"), a forest park whose densely wooded acres on the lower slopes of the Mournes offer a delightful choice of walks. My favorite involves crossing the river by a set of stepping stones. If the river is in spate, the stones can become impassable. In a dry midsummer, when the water level is sufficiently low, the stepping stones and their foundations protrude like a recumbent section of battlements affixed to the river bed. You can walk up and down their steps quite dryly almost all the way across. With only a trickle of flow, the river reduced to a few puddled threads of shallow, sluggish movement, it's more like walking on some ruined castle's crenellated wall than crossing a stretch of water. The most challenging conditions are when the spaces between the steps are entirely submerged, just managing to contain the snaking currents coursing through them, and the steps themselves — a dozen diamond-shaped granite blocks greened with moss — seem like a little linear archipelago, the islands separated by the Shimna's powerful flow. They offer a line of steps — at once enticing and intimidating — only millimeters above the river's level. Going across under these conditions is as close to walking on water as any of us is likely to experience. It requires concentration. The river's great moving sweep right at your feet is mesmerizing. It can undermine even a strong sense of balance. I've seen some walkers take a few unsteady steps across, falter, almost topple and then retreat, preferring to continue on the bank-side path and cross at the bridge further upstream, rather than risk falling in or being stranded halfway over by a sense of water-induced vertigo.

At one point on the walk by the Shimna, not long after crossing the stepping stones, you come to a high bank that affords a good view of some of the river's largest pools. These must be seven or eight feet deep at least, but the water is so clear you can make out the precise shape of every stone at the bottom. The water has a definite greenish tinge to it. I'm not sure if this is caused by some kind of mineral dissolved in it, or if it's the color of the stones on the river bed that gives the water this particular tint. Or maybe it's a property of the overhanging trees, their verdant shade making the water take on the appearance of a weak, leafy brew. Whatever the cause of this coloration, I've often watched salmon swimming in these green-deep pools, their sleek forms moving effortlessly in their element — ghostly torpedoes hinting at the presence of a another world close to, yet different from, our own.

Watching the salmon always reminds me of the traditional tale of Finn MacCool and the Salmon of Knowledge. Finn (to use the common Anglicization of Fuin Mac Cumhal or Fionn Mac Cumhaill) is one of the great heroes of Irish mythology. Tradition has it that he was destined to become leader of the band of warriors known as the Fianna. To join this elite group — let alone become its leader — demanded more than merely military prowess. Finn knew he would have to be well-versed in traditional poetry and learning too (would that such literary accomplishments were always a prerequisite for those who take up arms). Accordingly, so the legend goes, the young Finn apprenticed himself to Finnegas the Bard, a renowned poet who had been living on the banks of the river Boyne for seven years, perfecting his art and trying to catch the Salmon of Knowledge. An ancient prophecy foretold that whoever ate this fabled fish would gain all the wisdom of the world. The salmon lived in a deep pool in the river overhung by oak trees. I imagined it having the same green translucence as the Shimna's pools at Tollymore.

One day, after all his years of effort, Finnegas finally catches the elusive salmon of knowledge. He instructs his acolyte to prepare it, warning Finn that under no circumstances must he eat any of it himself. The story tells how Finn faithfully obeys his master, but that some hot fat from the cooking fish spits onto his thumb. Without thinking, he puts his thumb in his mouth and sucks it to relieve the pain — and in that moment becomes enlightened. Bringing the fish to Finnegas, the poet immediately notices the change in his young disciple. Questioning him, he discovers what has happened and instructs Finn to eat the rest of the salmon, whose knowledge, so we are told, came from having eaten the nuts of nine hazel trees that grew beside a magic undersea well.

In Theories of Everything, astronomer John Barrow suggests that myths "do not arise from data or as solutions to practical problems." Instead, "they emerge as antidotes" for humankind's feelings of "smallness and insignificance." Given our position in the world, and the fact that so much is beyond our understanding or control, it's not surprising that we feel the need for consoling antidotes that hint at fathomable meanings. Stories offer some kind of psychological compensation for not being in control, for feeling overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of things and their often baffling lack of sense. The story of Finn and the Salmon of Knowledge offers a kind of narrative balm for the fact that our understanding can only ever be partial. What I particularly like about it is the way the story celebrates the rich fecundity of fragments. A single fish that is the embodiment of all knowledge, hazelnuts that contain the secret of everything — these are wonderful symbols for the depths of meaning contained in the ordinary, seemingly simple things around us. From a tiny splinter of being — a splash of hot fat — Finn gains insight into totality.

One summer afternoon after I'd crossed the stepping stones and was watching the salmon swimming with their mysterious heavy gracefulness in the Shimna's green-deep pools, a dog appeared on the opposite bank. He too spotted the salmon and proceeded to try to catch them, jumping in with ungainly splashes — pounces of tremendous energy, but complete ineptitude. They posed no danger to the fish; depth and refraction kept them safe. The transparency of the water and the dark, alluring shapes moving below, seemingly so close, kept the dog entranced. He jumped in repeatedly, pausing on the bank only for long enough to let the ripples settle so that the swimming shapes could be seen clearly again. Their tantalizing presence caused him to bark and growl excitedly, to wag his tail uncontrollably, as the puzzlingly elusive forms beckoned to instincts that could not be resisted.

I'd not thought of Tollymore, the stepping stones, or the salmon-chasing dog for years. But faced with trying to explain the nature of this book, they came back to me again. I don't know how I knew to summon them from whatever stratum of the mind holds the ore of metaphor, nor did I do so consciously, but I'm glad they returned.

At first, the stepping stones were what I welcomed most. They seemed to offer a fitting symbol for what Reading Life attempts. I liked the idea of seeing it as building a series of crossing points across life's rivers, laying down footholds close to — right in — the water of experience so that we can feel its surge and flow, savor the rich flavors that it carries. The way each stepping stone is self-contained, yet contributes to the line of steps of which it's a part, seemed to fit my style of writing more than, say, a bridge would, with its one continuous structure, more elaborate building materials, less simple construction technique, and the promise of more distanced — albeit safer — crossings.

But it wasn't long before the comparisons I smelted out of this piece of metaphorical ore buckled and failed. There are too many dissimilarities between actual stepping stones and those in Reading Life to allow the parallel to stand unchallenged. With the Shimna stones, you can see across to where you want to go; both banks of the river are in plain sight. The steps offer a direct way across, a straight line that runs from one side to the other. The stones themselves are regularly spaced and on a uniformly solid foundation. None of them tip or wobble. You can see all of them at once in a single glance, imagine your passage across before setting out. Their flat tops are made with the size and shape of a foot in mind. They're fixed, immovable, designed to take a weight. The stepping stones I've assembled here, by contrast, offer no such reassuring certainties. They're rarely linear and walking on them often feels like attempting to cross the Shimna when the river is in massive spate, the current tugging powerfully at your ankles. Not only are the stones submerged by the surging flow of whatever river they're attempting to offer a way across, but they've also been dislodged from any pattern of secure alignment, making it necessary to feel forward precariously, testing for steady footing. There are no guarantees that there will be another stone, or that what's laid out will bring you to dry land.

I've not given up on the stepping stone comparison completely, thus its presence here. But, in the end, out of all the metaphorical ore my memories of Tollymore offered, it was the dog and the salmon that seemed to mirror most closely the way Reading Life proceeds. I've come to think of my writing as attempting to catch some of the unexpected salmon I see moving in life's pools. They're not the Shimna's sleek, torpedo-bodied fish, but instead have all manner of unlikely guises — a child's feet, a whale's tooth, a wartime pistol, three old walking sticks, books by Flann O'Brien, Michel de Montaigne, Seamus Heaney and other writers. Such things may not have been fed by magic hazelnuts growing by an undersea well, but each of the fragments that have caught my eye seems laden with a cargo that's worth teasing out, however commonplace they may at first appear. Like the Shimna salmon, they hint at the presence of another realm of meaning close to, yet different from, our workaday preoccupations.

The fact that I was born in Belfast and grew up in Northern Ireland, at a particularly turbulent time in that small country's history, means that many of my salmon bear distinctive Ulster markings — sometimes scars. The fact that I left Ireland in my twenties and that, in any case, my reading had already taken me to distant destinations, means that my salmon also swim far beyond any Irish waters. And unlike the dog that simply hurled itself into the Shimna's green-deep pools, I can fish with all the sophisticated tackle words afford. If, like the dog, depth and refraction mean I miss my targets, I can only keep on trying. If, to a reader's eye, some of my salmon of knowledge seem more like sprats of inconsequence, I can only say that as we gaze into the waters around us we each must pursue whatever shapes strike us as worth catching.

The title of the book emphasizes its major concern — reading. This is sometimes meant in the literal sense of reading books, sometimes in the broader, metaphorical sense of reading the objects and events around us. I've arranged the essays so as to alternate between these two senses. Common to all them is a search for the meanings that lie behind or beyond the superficial readings of ordinary discourse. "Reading Life" — the book's title essay — brings together the two fundamental threads of reading books and reading the world around us.

I know, of course, that I'm fishing for things I'll never catch. But the hope remains that a splash of water from the pools in which I cast my line will contain a few droplets that once brushed a salmon's side, and that these may find their way into my mouth and the mouths of my readers. Tasting them won't bring about some sudden, Finn-like moment of epiphany, a tsunami of realization in which everything falls into place. All they offer is a closer, deeper reading of a few fragments of experience. But such reading will, I hope, serve the function Alberto Manguel points to in the epigraph I've chosen for the book — namely that it will help us to catch some glimpses of what and where we are.

Reviews

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"Chris Arthur has persisted, with wide critical success, in a deeply old-fashioned form of words: the essay. Arthur was once warden of a nature reserve on the shores of Lough Neagh, and his early life in Co Antrim still animates him... Few of his essays have ever been simple 'nature writing': the landscape and wildlife in Ulster serve as grist to a formidable intellectual mill. Reading Life, his sixth book, extends a seductive flow of speculation and connection."

Michael Viney, The Irish Times, 4 Nov 2017

“Every essay is engaging, and contains myriad twists, turns and treasures. Arthur’s prose is mesmeric and musical, his authorial voice quiet yet compelling, assured yet inquisitive ... the language is constantly inventive in imagery and vocabulary.”

Ellen Wiles, Times Literary Supplement, 6 Feb 2018

“Beneath the fizz and dance of memory and imagination that play so beautifully across his pages, is the single idea which is at heart, a devotional one. Pay attention, the essays say. Be still. This life all around us is larger, more mysterious than we are. Let us take our place within it. ... Why don’t more of us know more about this particular, extraordinary writer? ... Reading Life is a showcase of an essayist at the top of his game. Though each of his pieces is highly crafted and finished, they have a tentative, contingent quality to them that leaves them hanging in the air long after our reading.”

Kirsty Gunn, “Endangered Species”, Scottish Review of Books, 10 Feb 2018

“Sitting somewhere on the borderline of meditation and poem, Arthur’s gracefully composed essays are often profoundly moving. And this set, Reading Life, offers up much for deep contemplation... This is an exquisite collection.”

Frances Devlin-Glass, “Particularities of Time and Space”, Tinteán March 6 2018

“Like the French phenomenologists Gaston Bachelard and Francis Ponge, Chris Arthur explores the significance of everyday objects that we may otherwise take for granted. His lyrical essays probe the essence of objects as diverse as his daughter’s feet or a whale’s tooth and enable the reader to share in the consciousness of these intimate experiences….each fragment of each essay is a stepping stone to another level of meaning ... When Arthur quotes Kobayashi Issa’s haiku, ‘What a strange thing, / To be thus alive / Beneath the cherry blossoms,’ he makes us aware of the simplicity and complexity of man’s relation to art and nature. He doesn’t take for granted the most common objects, but instead teases out their variations, reading from them and into them ... Arthur’s essays breathe life into his chosen genre.”

Michael Greenstein, The Dalhousie Review, 97.3 (Autumn 2017): 434-436

Reading Life, keeps an eye on the particular while exploring perennial questions... Though essay collections rarely outshine crime novels, biographies, or histories on the best-seller lists, readers who come across a collection such as Chris Arthur’s Reading Life know its value.”

Greg Brown, World Literature Today, May 2018

“Chris Arthur has made an art out of the close scrutiny of seemingly insignificant experiences of life and of things, teasing out from them a wider meaning, and setting up reverberations far beyond what he begins with.”

David Burleigh, review of Reading Life, Journal of Irish Studies, Vol.XXXIII (2018), pp.136-139

“Arthur’s Ireland is a personal homeland, an imagined homeland: his imagination has created it from memories and other sources. He works out his own sense of Ireland and his own sense of self through a personal field of reference developed over a long period, using a variety of sources: pre-Christian and non-Christian religions, youthful memories, adventures in nature, family history, images, books, and everyday objects which he endows with symbolic significance…Instead of accepting a given identity from a religion or a society, Arthur shows how imagination and inquiry can create one’s own unique place in the world.”

Graham Good, “Talismans”, in the Dublin Review of Books, November 1st 2018

“The nuanced thoughtful nature of Chris Arthur’s prose belies the violence that the eye behind the text has witnessed. The ‘gentle brooding of who we are’ keeps brutality in check, grants perspective, always offers more, yet is aware too of the possibility that we can be catapulted back into a damaged broken sphere... Reading Life is [also] a treasure chest of quotes and thought-hatchings from many authors: classical and contemporary, European and American, but also Eastern. Flann O’Brien I’m sure would be delighted to swim alongside Montaigne, George Steiner, Basho, Heaney, Sven Birkerts, Annie Dillard — just to mention some of my own favourites. The lens of other eyes and observations constantly float in and out.”

Carol O’Connor, The Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol.18 (2018), pp.156-158

“In ‘reading’ the objects of the world around us, Arthur offers a kind of enactment and commentary regarding the essayist’s purpose. ‘Essays deal in the shrapnel of being,’ he writes, ‘turning over now one piece, now another, carefully running the fingers of their prose along the edges, testing for sharpness, looking for hints of connection, feeling for the cut-off remnants of joins, trying to reconstruct a sense of setting, context, contiguity, extrapolating from the minuscule moments and objects that create a life reminders of the massive milieu in which they and it are embedded.’ The extended metaphor — stunning in its disruptive mashup of violence and contemplation — exemplifies Arthur’s method. He favors complex and suspended syntax; he crafts intricate details that subtly interconnect. Arthur’s essays have always worked by way of fragments, assembling mosaics or braiding multiple narratives. His style lies in the scope of these assemblages and the patient, measured pacing with which he brings the pieces together.”

Elizabeth Dodd, “The Shrapnel of Being,” The Florida Review, 42.2 (Fall 2018)

“There are fourteen essays here, many of which deal with themes of recollection, place, and language, and though all of them command attention some are particularly notable (the ones on fuchsia memories and ‘elderly’ walking sticks this reader found especially so). Because there is no overarching narrative but rather a playful, almost ludic engagement with the discarded and the everyday, the reader can dip in and out; indeed random, non-linearity not only works well but perhaps is the approach best suited for this kind of collection, especially when it comes to wider cultural matters.”

Glenn Hooper, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol.42 (2019), pp.264-266

“Few writers today can rival Chris Arthur in his mastery of the traditional essay, that endangered and slow-moving literary species which manages to survive despite the competing pressures of 24/7 journalism and the incessant clamor of everybody's infallible opinions. More interested in the glance than the gaze, the spark than the fire, Arthur — like so many great essayists — takes creative advantage of our strangest faculty: the wandering mind. I found Reading Life enchanting and invigorating, chock-full of those wonderful and surprising insights that come only from an inspired divided attention.”

Pre-publication quote from Robert Atwan, Series Editor, The Best American Essays

“Here is an essay to be read and read, to be pondered for its dazzling originality, and studied for its graceful style. Arthur considers George Steiner, Alberto Manguel, Walter Ong, Sven Birkerts, and other well-known scholars and critics, and he cites such writers as Chesterton, Borges, and Les Murray; but his principal example is J.A. Baker's Peregrine. This brilliantly original and prize-worthy essay reveals the joys of reading as we 'navigate a way through the mysterious transience of our existence' — 'the very life of life' and 'the secret world' of that life. Arthur not only introduces us to Baker but to the author himself — Chris Arthur — the maker and shaper of five books of essays. Read him.”

George Core, Editor of the Sewanee Review, in Sewanee Review, 120.4 (2012), p.87, commenting on an early version of Reading Life's title essay, as it appeared in the Southwest Review in 2011

Reading Life can be bought from:

"Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought — but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read."

Paul Graham

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Reading Life front cover

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Footnotes Reading my daughter's feet
  • Breath Reading an entry from the Goncourt brothers' Journal
  • Fuchsia Reading a patch of fallen blossom
  • When a Dog Barks Late at Night and Then Retires Again to Bed Reading Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds
  • Priests Reading fishing and desecration
  • When the Time Comes to Leave Them Reading Montaigne
  • Tracks Reading footprints in the snow
  • Sonatina for Oboe and Bayonet Reading All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Describing a Thought-Path Reading a path along which I cycle nearly every day
  • Containing Agostino Reading a copy of Alberto Moravia's Novella
  • Scrimshaw Reading a whale's tooth
  • "Coincidences, Graces, Gifts" Reading Seamus Heaney
  • Memory Sticks Reading three old walking sticks
  • Reading Life Reading J.A. Baker's The Peregrine
  • Afterword Reading Essays
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

"When a Dog Barks Late at Night and then Retires Again to Bed" explores the experience of reading Flann O'Brien's great novel At Swim-Two-Birds in 1974, and rereading it several decades later. The essay includes this paragraph: "It's hard to measure the influence reading has on a life, let alone calculate the effect of any single book. Some titles carry so little in the waters of their text that the words just wash over us and vanish, leaving no discernible trace. Others are more like boulder-loaded waves, a turmoil of water and sediment pounding on our shores. They feel as if they leave us marked by the storm of their passage. But do we really understand what happens when a book touches us (or when it fails to)? Can reading rewire the psyche, leave an impression that's indelible, or is it no more than something of the moment, its impact evaporating as soon as we disengage the reading eye?"

Fuschia

Beside one of Leonardo da Vinci's famous anatomical drawings there's a comment written in the artist's hand: "How could you describe this heart in words without filling a whole book?" "Fuchsia" hints at how a description of fuchsia blossom can take on similar dimensions when it's closely attended to and the memories, connections and associations implicit in it are teased out.

A whale's tooth

This whale's tooth provides the pivot around which "Scrimshaw" weaves a meditation. "Looked at in one way, the tooth is just a remnant from childhood, an eccentric curio of little value to anyone but me. Looked at in another way, it feels almost like a relic, something made near numinous by the wonders it's festooned with. Like the Buddhists of Sri Lanka and their famous Temple of the Tooth, built to house what's said to be one of the Buddha's incisors, perhaps this essay is my way of enshrining the whale's tooth, placing it in the verbal equivalent of a jewel-studded reliquary."

The Peregrine by J A Baker

The title essay in Reading Life makes substantial reference to J.A. Baker's account of watching Peregrine Falcons over a ten year period. Arthur describes Baker's prose as "writing that binds us to life's jugular; its proximity to the pulse of being is sometimes startling, laced with a sense of naked immediacy."