I read old books.

                  If you’re not a professor, such a preference may seem odd. The book business promotes the latest, stoking avidity for novelty to make a buck. Recency excites; familiarity fatigues. Want to clear a room? Mention John Bunyan. Some old books sell – but that’s mostly because movies have made them “hot.”

                  Why this bias? I’m an amateur, no professor, I can read what I please. Is this snobbery? Vanity? Eccentricity paraded as superiority – the literary equivalent of dying one’s hair purple? Or am I fleeing today’s turbidity for yesteryear’s tranquility, where everybody’s dead?

                  We read for many reasons. For diversion, conversation, education, sensual satisfaction. Some devour whodunnits, as I do filmed detectives. The appeal of romance fiction or soft porn is obvious. Many read to be – or seem – in the know.

                  I read to relate. Lonely, I’m famished for friends. This loneliness is inbred, whether by nature or nurture who’s to say. One can read my career as trawling for intimacy. I can’t know another well enough, even Jane, whom I know pretty well. I feel for others’ disquieting depths – and for my own. I write to get to know myself better.

                  The souls who entice me are the more complex. Their complexity is conveyed by their art. No doubt there are complex souls who don’t make art but without a record how would I know? Art records a struggle for meaning in a meaningless world. Beauty is the imposition of a delusive, yet consoling order on the confusion of being.

                  Composers, for me, are the most confiding creators but their language is subliterate, making conversation uncongenial. I may sense Bach signaling to me soul to soul, but it’s untranslatable into words. You end up with word-mush.

                  Writers woo with words so in words we can respond. The greatest writers have the most passionate and perilous grapples with being. Their straining souls sweat. Their honesty hurts. We observe them with awe, as we might a matador facing a wounded bull. Their courage enthralls.

                  Time is short, so I want to spend my sliver with the mightiest. It feels wrong, shameful to squander my brain on piffle. The worth of makers is demonstrated by their duration. Time winnows ruthlessly. An ounce of Shakespeare outweighs a ton of bestsellers.

                  That I read for this reason is not to suggest you should. Each has different appetites and needs. My spiritual project is admittedly odd. Any reason to read is a good one in our blathering epoch. I raise the question to discover my answer. As E.M. Forster winked, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say? 

                  The intoxicating joy of reading is, for me, the encounter’s intimacy. If this description sounds sexual, it almost is. The authors I worship I wrestle. What are you telling me? What are you really telling me?

                  At present I am reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. I’ve read them before maybe half a dozen times but it feels I never have. I’m convinced I hear, as never before, the secret he’s straining to impart. This Shakespeare differs from our previous encounters and from others’ versions. Of course, he’s my projection, but that makes his disclosures more luminous, not less. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter,” observed Oscar Wilde.

                  If I didn’t write so much, I’d read more – there is no thrill like it. The books that surround me, like sentinels, protect me from desolation. They – and you – assure me I will never be alone, my deepest dread.