Against Rereading
September 10, 2024 at 02:15AMDo you reread the classics? Do you enjoy returning to books you’ve read—to dig into the details, to absorb “the particularities of the world that an author has rendered in words”? In this Paris Review essay, Oscar Schwartz writes in favor of the opposite: to read a book once and then close its pages forever.
As a student, I came to appreciate such granularity. Going over a text many times allowed me to fine-tune my initial intuitive judgments into something more comprehensive. There was an intellectual satisfaction in this, but I also felt, quietly, that rereading was not really reading. There was an immediacy, intensity, and complete surrender involved in the initial experience that could never be repeated and was sometimes even diminished on the second pass. Louise Glück wrote, “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” I felt the same about reading. I still feel like this. And, to this day, when I read something that functions as a hinge in my life—a book that rearranges me internally—I won’t reread it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/09/against-rereading/
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