Read Not, Want Not

Jamin Warren

“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers.”

One of The Twilight Zone’s earliest episodes entitled “Time Enough at Last” portrays a man named Henry Bemis who can never find time to read. His philistine wife torments him and his boss thinks reading is trash. After taking a lunch break in the vault of the bank where he works, a nuclear blast decimates the human population, finally removing the tongue-cluckers who stood between Henry and his beloved pages (truly one of this century’s greatest segues).

Yet a life without people is sobering as poor Henry is forced to walk a wasteland without human contact. He sullenly prepares for suicide. Then he finds (wait for it) a library and his hope is restored as Henry catalogues his reading material. But in a move that my father would call “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” he breaks his glasses, dooming Henry to a lifetime of ennui and astigmatism.

Surely, viewers of that episode viewed the deliciously brutal irony with sympathy, retelling the story at their water coolers and bemoaning Henry’s fate, perhaps comparing the tragedy to Charlie Sheen’s 1996 purchase of 2,615 seats at the Anaheim Angels’ stadium to catch a home-run that yielded him nothing except another broken marriage. But anyone who really loves books should see Henry Bemis is a truly enviable character.

Look into Barnes & Noble and you look into death. The shelves are lined with thousands of tomes and the website delivers thousands more. And then there’s the original texts in their original tongues and their accompanying reissues. It’s hypnotizing—and demoralizing.

The cashiers woefully underestimate their seduction when they ask you to come back again, because I would come back again. Forever and ever, world without end, until every book has been consumed—or at least perused until I could feign a conversation with friends who also haven’t read said work but saw a really “gripping” review in the Times Literary Supplement. When I left TFA, I made a list of books I wanted to read from a supposed “canon” in the front of an edition of the mildly unread Jude the Obscure. I have not read a single one, although I occasionally move Politics from one windowsill to the other.

The cold reality—and for me, it is chilling—is that I cannot read everything before I die.

Perhaps if my grade school had me working chronologically from Aristotle to Zadie rather than convincing Phillip Babb that he needed to finish Beverly Cleary’s Henry and Beezus—and stopped building wooden ninja-stars so we could get personal pan pizzas from Book-It (it never happened)—then I could have happily moved from reading a juvenile hundredth of the Western Canon to a sophomoric tenth. Book critic John Sutherland estimates that a reading career of fifty years with a 40-hour reading week, a 46-week working year, and three hours per novel would move him through Amazon.com’s full collection—in 163 lifetimes.

That goes for Henry Bemis too, and that’s why he’s the luckiest man in the world. The glorious weight of expectation bestowed upon him from those dreaded polymaths Goethe, Jefferson, and Thomas Young had been lifted. He could resume other conquerable pursuits like wondering why a 1950s black-and-white nuclear fallout wouldn’t have produced at least one zombie.  

Likewise, I have agreed to abandon false hope and work my way through the Harry Potter series before I start on my twenty pounds of Joyce Carol Oates and Langston Hughes, knowing in fullness that while we read we die. But if God is gracious, paradise will have a library.

Jamin Warren (TFA class of 2006) spent less time reading in college at Harvard then he should have, but you can blame his lovely wife for stealing him away from the library. He's currently a reporter for the Pursuits section of the Wall Street Journal, where he covers videogame-related injuries and the glories of YouTube.

6 Responses • Alumni, Wed 13 Dec 2006