Austin confesses, that even now, “when she is alone with the mountains of New Mexico,” the memory of reading transforms her surroundings, so that the “geological pages of the past begin to open and turn.” The ability of the earth to become book-like (the “geological pages of the past”) and the book to become earth-like (the “self-generated light” that “shone from the chapters”) attests to the deep imbrication of text and context, the capacity of reading to alter the grounds of understanding. Austin’s account, in other words, speaks to the transformative power of reading, not as a source of individual self-improvement, but rather as a catalyst for a regenerated relationship to one’s surroundings. Old Red Sandstone leaves the bookshelf in normative chronology—“about the time Mother gave away Mary’s collection to a neighbor’s child, after Mary went away to normal school”—but the memory of its reading allows Austin to play with the coordinates of time and space, conjuring up and losing herself within the mountainous terrain the book describes.
By Austin’s account, this kind of imaginative activity was crucial in relieving her isolation, in creating a sense of connection to forces and people beyond herself. Reared by a remote, indifferent mother, largely unsympathetic to Austin’s intellectual ambitions, she saw books as the only evidence that she was not alone in her curiosity and aesthetic appreciations, “that there were people in the world to whom these things were not strange, but exciting and natural” (132). More particularly, Austin praises books for providing her a sense of correspondence and intimacy with other objects. After reading Seven Lamps of Architecture, a book “associated in her mind with her father’s reading,” Austin describes how
Mary had wanted just to turn and savor the work in her mind, make it real for herself that there were buildings in the world like that, strange and lovely whorls and intricate lacings and vinelike twistings of forms in stone; that you could go to them; that she herself might go there sometime. (132)
Austin’s dual desire for authenticity and for connection creates the effect of a reader imbricated in the structures she reads about—her descriptions of wanting to “turn … the work in her mind” read as an analogue to the “vinelike twistings of forms in stone.” Her reading not only assuages her loneliness, it also provides her with what Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit call “inaccurate selfreplications,” forms that correspond to the self without being absolutely reducible to it.99 It thereby allows her to achieve a profound connection with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world, what Austin elsewhere describes as “a continuing experience of wholeness” (283). In the introduction to Earth Horizon, she writes, “It has always been a profound realization of my life that there was a pattern under it.… It was to appreciation of this inherency of design that I came as a child, reassured of its authenticity; felt it hovering in advance of moving to envelop me in its activities, advising and illuminating” (vii). To be “envelop[ed]” by a pattern or design is, for Austin, to be cloaked, willingly, by sentient forces greater than the self, to experience “the totality which is called Nature” (vii). It is this sense of nonsubjugating fusion that reading books like Old Red Sandstone and The Seven Lamps of Architecture seems to generate. The unfolding of the narrative creates an unfurling of environs, so that the self is set adrift among the elements. In the process, unitary identity gives way to a sense of collaborative merging with author, text, ancestral forces, and material earth.100
Austin’s vision of communion was, of course, inflected by her deep immersion in Native American tradition. Reading for her facilitated a connection not simply to an individual but to the specific landscape in and about which she read (the mountains of New Mexico, the architecture of Venice). In this way, she is a fascinating, albeit perhaps not altogether typical, model of the phenomenon of readerly communion I am outlining. More to the point is the example of Henry David Thoreau, who, like Austin, imagined the activity of reading as radically remaking time and space, but with more interpersonal consequences.
In the section of Walden (1854) entitled “Reading,” Thoreau begins by differentiating the exalted activity of scholarship from the more prosaic occupations of “accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity,” “founding a family or a state,” and “acquiring fame even.” The former, he insists, deals with “truth,” and, in taking this up, “we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.” Reading, then, is significant because of its removal from the quotidian world of contingency, a point reinforced in his next sentences:
The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.101
Here Thoreau suggests that reading belongs to an alternative chronometry divorced from linear or progressive time. The temporal lapse between when an author writes, or, in Thoreau’s language, “raises a corner of the veil,” and when a reader reads is imperceptible—“no time has elapsed.” The writer’s revelation, even if it happened centuries ago, is made simultaneous with the reader’s discovery: “I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did.” Why is this? Because at the moment of reading, reader and writer are fused and inseparable: “It was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.” In other words, it is the reader who ultimately enables and makes real the author’s initial discoveries, a variation of Maurice Blanchot’s radical reader response position—“What is a book that no one reads? Something that has not yet been written.”102 Likewise, in perusing the ancient book, the reader is inhabited by the subjectivity of the author who “reviews” his original discoveries through the reader’s own eyes. The result is a profound imbrication of the two beings, so that writer and reader exist in one another (“I in him,” “he in me”), and the time between them is suspended—“neither past, present, nor future.” That Thoreau describes this alternative temporality as “really improv[ing]” suggests his interest in aligning reading with a form of productivity not reducible to traditional notions of progress.
Thoreau’s account of the curious bodily fusion between reader and author recalls Austin’s description of her forays into Old Red Sandstone—“the feel of the author behind the book.” Both are examples of what Annamarie Jagose has called the “transformed relationalities” that are made possible and necessary by rethinking temporality.103 In other words, if reading brings with it new ways of understanding time and space, it also, in the process, suggests new relationships between readers and the players associated with a book’s narrative world (author, character, fellow reader, etc.). For Thoreau, the book thus creates an intimacy unlike that found in any other art form:
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.104
What is significant about the “written word,” the book, as distinct from painting and sculpture, is its relationship to the material body of its reader. It is not, as is the case of the visual arts, viewed abstractly from afar, but rather “breathed from all human lips … carved out of the breath of life itself.” Thoreau is not unaware of the paradox of the book’s reception: On the one hand, it is easily reproduced and disseminated and thus “more universal than any other work of art.” On the other hand, its ability to be grasped and spoken aloud renders it an intimate part of the reader’s bodily experience. It is thus capable of both reaching the masses and physically engaging with the individual, a point that anticipates Walter Benjamin’s claims some eighty years later about the art form in the age of mechanical reproduction.105
