Hospital Reading

Alberto Manguel

Two weeks before Christmas last year, I was told that I needed an urgent oper­a­tion, so urgent in fact that I had no time to pack. I found myself lying in a pris­tine emer­gency room, uncom­fort­able and anx­ious, with no books except for the one I had been read­ing that morn­ing, Cees Nooteboom’s delight­ful In the Dutch Mountains, which I fin­ished in a few hours. To spend the next four­teen days con­va­lesc­ing in hos­pi­tal with­out any read­ing seemed to me a tor­ture too great to bear, so when my part­ner offered to bring me a few books from my library, I seized the oppor­tu­nity grate­fully. But which did I want?

Pete Seeger and the author of Ecclesiastes have taught us that for every thing there is a sea­son; like­wise, I might add, for every sea­son there is a book. But read­ers know that not just any book is suited to any occa­sion. Pity the soul who finds itself with the wrong book in the wrong place, like poor Roald Amundsen, dis­cov­erer of the South Pole, whose book­bag sank under the ice, so that he was con­strained to read, night after freez­ing night, Dr. John Gauden’s indi­gestible Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. There are books for read­ing after love­mak­ing and books to read while wait­ing in the air­port lounge, books for the break­fast table and for the bath­room, books for insom­niac nights at home and for insom­niac days in the hos­pi­tal. The list of books Oscar Wilde requested in “The Balad of Reading Gaol” included Treasure Island and a French-Italian con­ver­sa­tion man­ual. Alexander the Great went on his cam­paigns with a copy of Homer’s Iliad. Do astro­nauts take Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles on their jour­neys? If Bernard Madoff spends any time in prison, will he demand Dickens’s Little Dorrit, to read how the embez­zler Mr. Merdle, unable to bear the shame of being found out, cuts his throat with a bor­rowed razor? The list of books we seek out for a par­tic­u­lar occa­sion is always per­sonal, and few are those who can accu­rately guess what another reader needs or wishes for. What books would best keep me com­pany in my hos­pi­tal cell?

I’m not a user of e-books; I require the more solid flesh of paper and ink. So I made a men­tal inven­tory of the books piled by my bed at home. I dis­carded recent fic­tion (too risky because un-proven), sci­en­tific essays (too cere­bral: much as I’d been enjoy­ing the Darwinian renais­sance, I felt that a detailed account of the sea cucumber’s life would not be the right med­i­cine), biogra­phies (too crowded: hooked to a tan­gle of drips, I found other people’s pres­ence annoy­ing). At first I thought a good detec­tive novel would be ideal, either an old favourite — a clas­sic by John Dickson Carr — or a new title by Reginald Hill. But the anaes­thetic had soft­ened my brain and I knew that I’d find it dif­fi­cult to fol­low even the sim­plest of Sherlockian rati­o­ci­na­tions. What I wanted was the equiv­a­lent of com­fort food, some­thing I’d once enjoyed and could end­lessly and effort­lessly revisit. I asked my friend to bring me my two vol­umes of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote was, I dis­cov­ered with relief, the per­fect choice. Because I’ve kept going back to it ever since my ado­les­cence, I knew I wasn’t going to be tripped by the sur­prises of its plot; and since it’s a book that I could read just for the plea­sure of its inven­tion, with­out hav­ing to delve into its eru­dite conun­drums, I could allow myself to drift peace­fully away in the story’s flow, in the wake of the noble knight and his faith­ful side­kick. To my first high school read­ing of Don Quixote, guided by Professor Isaias Lerner, I have added many other read­ings over the years, under­taken in all sorts of places and moods. To those I can now add a med­i­c­i­nal Don Quixote, both a balm and a consolation.

Don Quixote eased me through those dreary days and inter­mit­tent nights; when I was told that I had to return to the hos­pi­tal for a sec­ond oper­a­tion, I was pre­pared. This time I care­fully decided to pack four or five titles that would allow me a com­pan­ion­able vari­ety. After much con­sid­er­a­tion, I set­tled on four categories:

A MISCELLANY, one of those vol­umes that allows us to wan­der in and out, aim­lessly. The Trivia of Logan Pearson Smith, Samuel Butler’s Note-Books, the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—all belong to this gen­er­ous breed. I chose Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: to the delights of a vagrant mind are added those of an intri­cate, exu­ber­ant style, rem­i­nis­cent of baroque music.

A MEDITATIVE WORK, some­thing sooth­ingly philo­soph­i­cal, such as Jean Cocteau’s col­lec­tion of essays The Difficulty of Being, or one of Plato’s early dia­logues, or Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams. I toyed with the idea of star­tling the nurses with two of Kierkegaard’s essays coa­lesced into one ter­ri­fy­ing title, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. I took with me King Lear, the sad­dest of all plays.

A BOOK TO MAKE ME SMILE. Alice in Wonderland, Thomas Love Peacock’s Crotchet Castle, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, Nabokov’s Pnin. I selected Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy, which seems writ­ten with a chuckle.

A COLLECTION OF POETRY. Richard Wilbur, Philip Larkin, Blas de Otero, Quevedo, John Donne, W.S. Merwin … I decided that an anthol­ogy would ease the choice, even if it could not con­tain every­thing I loved. I packed the Albatross Book of Verse, which I’ve read since my ado­les­cence and know prac­ti­cally by heart.

These four books did the trick and I’m deeply grate­ful to them. Over the hos­pi­tal weeks they kept vigil with me: they talked to me when I wanted enter­tain­ment, or waited qui­etly, atten­tively, by my bed. They never became impa­tient with me, or sen­ten­tious or con­de­scend­ing. They con­tin­ued a con­ver­sa­tion begun ages ago, as if indif­fer­ent to time, as if tak­ing for granted that this moment too would pass, along with the dis­com­fort and the anx­i­ety, and that only their remem­bered pages would remain, describ­ing some­thing of my own, inti­mate and dark, for which as yet I myself had no words.