condemned by nineteenth-century advice manuals—a reading characterized by acceleration (“the hours were seconds”) and insatiety rendered in physiological terms (“I was thirsty with an unquenchable thirst”). Thomas, then, is that female reader whose frantic engagement with books betokens the triumph of modern consumer society. That she willingly describes her reading this way is perhaps evidence that readers could reproduce the dire discourse of advice manuals in their own accounts of reading. And yet, her words also complicate or, at the very least, flesh out this apocalyptic narrative. The pleasure she registers in reading (“It is the purest happiness”) suggests that her insatiety is deeply satisfying, a lack that rests content with never being filled. In this way it is not reducible to the tormented addiction of James Freeman Clarke’s newspaper reader whose motto is “What next?” Something similar is conveyed in Thomas’s phrase, “It was like treading on air,” a description of reading significant because it straddles the borders of materiality and spirituality, the corpus and cognition. To walk or step in a medium that is pure ethereality is to partake of a movement without progress, a corollary, perhaps, to being “thirsty with an unquenchable thirst.” These descriptions limn the reading subject as removed from sequential activity (forward movement) or causal predictability (ingestion followed by satiation). They suggest a type of reading that is neither commensurate with accelerated modernity nor capable of being rerouted into efficiency. Indeed, Thomas’s final characterization of her time in the mercantile library as “the purest happiness—the one thing wh[ich] no man taketh from you” suggests that reading has a holy dimension, remote from the acquisitive and competitive orientation of daily life.
Warner and Thomas are examples of what I am calling “wayward readers,” readers whose engagement with books leads them away from rather than toward measurable ends. Their reading is not easily aligned with directives for productivity. Rather, it remains stubbornly figured as consumption (as evidenced by Thomas’s ingestion metaphor) and thereby tied to the body, albeit a body reconfigured by a new experience of temporality. As yet, however, I have not commented on the consequences of wayward reading, its ability not simply to skirt instrumentalism but to remake the world and one’s relations within it. To do so, I turn first to Mary Austin’s autobiography Earth Horizon and then, finally, to the writing of Henry David Thoreau.
“The Feel of the Author Behind the Book”
Although published in 1932, Earth Horizon is in many ways an account of nineteenth-century reading practices. Austin’s favorite books from adolescence—including Queechy, The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter, Beluah, St. Elmo, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin—read like a hit list of mid-century domestic fiction. Her memories of these novels are often accompanied by exact recordings of when and where her reading took place. Yet despite this attention to detail, she often characterizes reading as a felt phenomenon that resists the claims of cognition, as in this description of encountering Tennyson in her fourth year at school, in 1876: “You hadn’t supposed up to that time that poetry had been expected to mean anything in particular. “The Lady of Shalott’ you had chosen for its glittering figures, its smoothly swinging movement of rhyme and meter.”98 Of reading Paradise Lost in the winter of her twelfth year, she offers a similar account, this time writing in her preferred third person voice: “Through Milton, the magic of words carried Mary swimmingly much of the way.… But she kept forgetting the sequences of the story, mazed by the magic of the verse” (105). Still again, in reference to her reading during the 1880s: “She could recite whole pages of‘Laus Veneris,’ not really knowing what it was about, but captivated by the swinging rhythm” (165). In each of these descriptions, Austin emphasizes the failure of comprehension and the neglect of plot in favor of a reading process that is marked by convolution, iteration, and belatedness. Her preferred spatial model is not the “sequence of the story” (since it is that which she consistently forgets) but the repetitive and meandering figure of the “maze.” Indeed, Austin’s own use of alliteration in these descriptions (“smoothly swinging,” “mazed by the magic”) works to emphasize the emotive over the perceptive and to create a sense of elongated or deferred temporality. Thus what arises is a curious contrast between Austin’s own placement of her reading in linear time (the fourth year at school, the winter of her twelfth year, the 1880s) and the ability of that reading to create an alternative chronometry—a “swinging movement” not reducible to “sequence.”
This sense of altered temporality is at its most profound in Austin’s account of reading a geology textbook, Old Red Sandstone (1841), introduced to her in the eighth grade through the auspices of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle:
the title had a calling sound; there was, for the child, a promise in it of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors, for lack of which she was for years, after her father’s death, a little sick at heart. I remember the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts, the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth—I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my favorite seat in the cherry tree which stood to the left of the door of the yellow house as you came out. I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape of Rinaker’s Hill, the Branch, the old rock quarry, unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map—the earth itself became transparent, molten, glowing. (104)
The intensity of the experience is signaled in part through Austin’s reversion to the first person voice, as if the memory is too powerful to accommodate the distanced objectivity of third person narration. What the “I” of her account remembers is a series of vivid details, both empirical–“the very look of the pages, the easy, illustrative charts”—and numinous—“the feel of the author behind the book, the feel of the purposeful earth.” This fusing of the actual and the mystical continues in the sentences that follow, where Austin locates the coordinates of her physical bearings (“I must have been reading it out-of-doors, in my favorite seat in the cherry tree”) and undoes these through her descriptions of spatial transformation (“I remember how, as I read, the familiar landscape … unfolded to the dimensions of a geological map”). Here, as in her descriptions of poetry above, reading is accompanied by a curious pairing of precise temporal-spatial measurement and the utter destruction of these, so that the reading subject feels herself both familiarly located and lost in space, uncannily situated between “Rinaker’s Hill” and a newly made earth, “transparent, molten, glowing.” This is a decisively more radical articulation of what Hamilton W. Mabie describes as “mental traveling.” His was a transport without disorientation, in which the reader remained in control of his new environs. Austin, by contrast, conjures up a world in which the book remakes the reader, thoroughly reconfiguring her sense of self and place.
Austin intensifies this feeling of dislocation by fusing the materiality of the geology textbook with that of her immediate vicinity, as if Old Red Sandstone and the “rock quarry” that surrounds her are somehow coextensive. The book, in other words, appears not just about the earth, but of it, deeply entwined with her physical environs. She describes the title as issuing “a calling sound,” thereby suggesting the book’s complicity with primordial nature. And she speaks of the book’s “promise … of reinstatement in that warm reciprocal world of outdoors,” a promise made good by the fact that Austin reads it in the open air. Most striking, however, is the way the text’s unfolding is metonymically linked to the transformations she experiences in physical space, in which her “familiar landscape” is “unfolded.” Austin’s reading, in other words, establishes a connection between narrative disclosure and spatial dis-closure, a theme reiterated in her final account of the book:
”Old Red Sandstone” disappeared from the family bookshelves about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school, but the sense of the unfolding earth never left her. There are moments still, when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico, when the first geological pages of the past begin to open and turn, when they are illuminated by such self-generated light as first shone from the chapters of “Old Red Sandstone.” (104–5)
Despite the fact that
