Reading, Interrupted

by Justina Dobush

How long has it been? How many months have passed? Maybe not even months, but lives, centuries, deaths, and resurrections? How many things have irrevocably changed? How many things have disappeared for good? Is it logical to count this year's quarantine in any usual way? Is it possible to measure it at all? Somehow it became not only a health, economic, political, social, or cultural issue, but it also raised deep metaphysical, existential, and psychological questions. So first of all, 2020, I bow my head; you fucked us like nobody has done for a long time, good job, just what Freud would have prescribed.

At the start of quarantine, many people were trying to make sense of it all, proclaiming that “It’s the pause we needed” or “Finally, we’ll have time to try and figure out what’s wrong not only in our own lives but how a situation like this could even be possible in today’s world”. And now, after some time has passed, or at least enough of it, it’s fair to ask ourselves: How was it?  Was it worthwhile? What did we learn and come to understand about ourselves and humanity overall? What do we understand about the world and our place in it?  What do we want to change in the future? Which of our past mistakes were unforgivable? And most importantly, if we’re being honest with ourselves, did we even take that pause seriously? From where I’m standing, most of us have outright rejected it.  Don’t you feel that since the beginning of the pandemic, we have started to attend more online meetings, events, and concerts than we had before?  Žižek even wrote and published a new book with unprecedented speed (otherwise, I liked it). We started to post more and more and watch more movies and TV shows. We started to live as if we had all the time in the world, and in the end, during that forced isolation, we had everything except a simple, tiny pause. And I know the American presidential election and countless other breaking news stories are more than necessary, but where is that pause? Where is our introspective period of muteness, dare I say numbness? Why are we incapable of enjoying silence? 

I try to watch public discussions and don’t understand how so-called intellectuals can help us move forward healthily. Which real-life problems are they able to fix? After all, it looks like our greatest thinkers can’t even clean their own homes. Why are we moving in the same circles? Aren't you offended by the topics of conversation offered by cultural managers and journalists? Do you think it's worth it? Do all those individuals belonging to academic circles want to deconstruct their postmodern problems, which seem like a self-made metaphysical crisis from the onset? And don’t say that it’s not so bad and I’m overreacting, because for the last couple of years, I have heard many complaints from people behind closed doors about how unsatisfied they are. Many of us talk just because we need to, sometimes our career depends on it, sometimes we don’t have any other choice. That’s why it’s worth asking about the glorious pause 2020 has offered us. Why do people, who are by their definition the smartest and wisest people alive, seem to not care about their mental health?

Looking at the subjects of our talks, social media posts, podcasts, and discussions, do you know what is happening? What are we even talking about? I don’t know anymore, I don’t understand anything, I don’t relate to any of it, and I can’t handle it any longer. And it’s not because everything is fake... it just doesn’t feel like the right stuff to discuss. Our world nowadays looks like a later season of a TV show that has gone on for way too long, and it scares me not because this show was supposed to have finished already but because it got too complicated in the stupidest way possible. Who told you that the world can’t be simple? Books? Politics? Bloggers? Shrinks? God himself? Who told you we must keep working and be active for more hours than the day can give? Who forbade you to take that pause? Why didn't you take it? Why did you need to stay online? What did you gain from arguing with strangers on Twitter? Can you honestly tell yourself that you have a better insight into our waking nightmare, to which most people can only respond, “It’s 2020”? It’s not necessary for everyone, I know. It can be hard for most people, so I took that pause instead of you, and I’ll tell you what happened.

Something happened to me this year, even before the reality of the pandemic had sunk in. I lost myself, and that feeling of loss was so profound I thought I would never be able to feel like myself again. It seemed I had lost everything that made me who I was, including reading and writing. I was full of suicidal thoughts, didn’t understand what I was doing in this world, who the people around me were, why I bothered waking up every morning, why my home was full of unread books, how I turned out to be in an environment full of weird personalities who make me angry, exhausted, desperate, and wanting to call my drug dealer every week. I didn’t believe in reality anymore and didn’t believe in myself – and not in myself as in my will to handle everything 2020 has been throwing at us, but in myself as a living entity. It sounds like the onset of madness or some other serious mental health issue, doesn’t it? That’s why, at some moment, I started to have serious doubts about reality and its adequacy. So one day, when I found myself drowning in yet another toxic relationship, some unknown self-preservation mechanism awakened and compelled me to take every Freud and psychology-related book I had from my bookshelves. I started to read in the most old-school way possible, thinking more about the texts than actually reading it. But I didn’t think about whether or not I had read those books before or whether they would be helpful in future texts, columns, public speeches, moralizing sermons, or fights. I just needed to build some foundation from which it would be possible to start living again, to clear my mind, something that would be able to support me like a friend and listen, understand, make comments and references without judging or trying to impose a radically different point of view. In short, I was reading as it was meant to be, by definition, just collecting the information, suggestions, theories, inferences, experiences, and examples and reflecting on them, connecting them with my thoughts and doubts, arguing, disagreeing, and most importantly – making my conclusions, not contradictory to what I already knew, perfectly inscribing them into my system of values, pre-existing knowledge and outlook on life, reinforcing iron confidence that my thoughts are not just some copy paste product, fragile and easily replaced, to be questioned or rejected as soon as I read another book. And mother of God, I swear, it was better than sex, LSD, a mushroom trip, falling in love, better than reading Nabokov for the first time or visiting Norway, Paris, and London, and feeling that 2020 will end someday. During that inner journey to reclaim yourself, you begin to understand how unique your brain is, the beauty of its complexity, how great it is to be human, and how proud we should be of our civilization, which has birthed so many geniuses. How thankful we should be for technological advancements, going back to Gutenberg’s printing press, which allows us to read the thoughts of those who died long before us. How unbelievably amazing it is to spend days on end with a book, to travel to the deepest parts of your consciousness without speaking a word, leaving your bed, asking anyone else their opinion, or treating the author like a God. And to know that you are free to do whatever you want with the words you’re reading, that there are no limits and no one can interrupt you, that it's your choice whether to listen to the author or ignore him once you understand that you'll become the ubermensch Nietzsche always wanted you to be. The most important thing while reading is to go further, not to let words keep you hostage or blindly believe in everything the author says. Reading, first of all, is fuel for your thoughts, and most importantly – it enables your brain to work like the super-complicated machine that it is, which not only absorbs but simultaneously filters, sorts, sifts, recycles, and rethinks every word it comes into contact with. Reading one book is comparatively simple, but not letting it overpower you is hard work. Because books can harm us, weaken us, and lose our confidence. If you don’t keep that in mind, they can quickly become a detriment to your health - not because some of them are written by bad people or fools, but because we can lose ourselves in them without even noticing it, transform into a walking collection of quotes and random information, become another character altogether, a Neo-Nazi, libertarian, Eco activist, transgender, the most depressive human on the planet, a Buddhist or Communist - not because we were born that way, but because someone told us to be and we accepted it. Where do books end and our personality begin? Who are you without them? What is your true self? What will be left of you if someone removes books from your life?

During the middle of the summer - the last week of July, to be precise, a warm Wednesday evening - I neared the end of my journey in psychoanalysis. I finally experienced it: genuine, original, and unique catharsis – painful, sweet, unpleasant, burning, sticky, intoxicating, delicious in all its glory. Suddenly, I understood everything about myself, even though I’ve been visiting various psychologists since I was 18. Finally, everything was illuminated for the first time in a very long time, and more importantly – I discovered the main problem, which was hidden like the Holy Grail, and understood how to fix it. The next day I developed a fever and an unreal pain throughout my body. A few days later, doctors diagnosed me with severe inflammation of the kidneys. A few months later, I still had health problems, and this need to fix my body and mind caused me to stop reading altogether. 

When you possess neither the physical nor the mental strength to read, and you generally think of yourself as a literary person, it can feel strange not to do it, at least initially. And then it surprises you, but most of all it hurts like hell. And then, when you finally take that pause, just lie in bed and try to survive, something happens. Suppose you do not indulge yourself with watching movies, talking to people, scrolling the news feed, or even if you do some of that, but you feel so terrible that you wouldn’t even care if aliens finally came to visit us, at some point, if you possess some minimal observation skills. In that case, you’ll start to notice some weird shit inside of you – and you'll stop caring about the world’s problems. Suddenly, you don’t feel numb when you stop reading books for two months. You don’t feel out of touch if you stop reacting to the latest social media scandal, and sooner or later, you realize that you are not sorry about other countries and their cruel problems; you don’t even groan at human stupidity because, as a human being you’re not filled with boundless empathy and sincerity for people that you’ll never meet. That’s the ugly truth, and if you think that it doesn’t apply to you, then you might not know yourself as well as you think. When no one is trying to persuade you that something is important, you don’t give a shit because if no one is whispering in your ear about who is bad and who is a saint, you understand that we are all guilty in some way, and more often than not decide who is the worst (certainly not ourselves) when indebted to another person’s influence. Don't we look like hypocrites when we try to make it seem that we possess boundless empathy? Are we capable of feeling all that pain?  That’s why, despite the difficult past few months, I’m thankful for my health problems because I found the time to realize that what I thought were pressing ideological problems were actually not that important. More importantly, I was dying inside, and my worries were an excuse to hide the truth I was ashamed of. And after you realize that all your thoughts and prayers after hurricanes, fires or wars weren’t always that honest, you won't even want to talk about it publicly. Sometimes, it’s okay not to worry, not to understand. Our conversations have become so dull, pretentious, and postmodern (in the worst way) that I sometimes feel it’s better not to address them. So now I’ll go back to reading, which has returned to my life, and now, after a pause, is more enjoyable  than before. I wish you the same - take the pause, even with reading. It's worth it, trust me.