Hermeneutical Headaches or, Why Libraries Make Me Dizzy

I love to read. I also find reading excruciating. I'm usually reading a number of books at a time which is nothing unusual, but what might be different about me - and which my wife, Marie, at least finds insane - is that I usually know how many pages I have left to the next chapter and to the end of each book. It's a cliché for avid readers to say they're sad when a good book comes to an end. I do have that experience, but usually I can't wait until I finish a book so I can start another one.

The root source of my impatience (let's call it what it is) arises from the combination of my wanting to read every beautiful, informative, clever, important, in short: every worthwhile book, while, having worked in bookstores for seven years, being pretty well aware of just how many worthwhile books are out there. It's a lot. But this is only the beginning. The main reason libraries (my shorthand for the sum of human knowledge) are prone to having deleterious effects on me is that not only do I want to read so many books, but I want to already have read them.

Mark Twain said that "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read". I take his meaning to be that people want the cachet of having-read the classics: showing off a degree of education, name-dropping esoteric authors and making highfalutin literary references (I think 'highfalutin' is the language Huck would use - [that was a shameless ploy to show I've actually read Twain]). I may be as guilty of this literary snobbery as the next person but that's not the real reason I want not just to read, but to have-read, well, everything.

The first reason is that what I enjoy even more than reading a book is discussing an already-read book with another. The opportunities for that are few and far between these days though, so that's not really it either. More than anything else, what makes my head spin around stacks of books is the hermeneutical circle involved in making one's way through them. The hermeneutical circle as applied to a particular work is the idea that one understands the work as a whole in terms of its constituent parts, and understands each part in terms of one's understanding of the whole. If we take a book like the Bible for example, we would obviously say that one doesn't understand it until one has read the whole thing. The concept of the hermeneutical circle would add that one can't have a full understanding, even of Genesis, till one has gotten through Revelation. But once we've done that, we have to re-read Genesis in light of our new understanding, which changes our view of everything else, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Suffice it to say that if we read through a book once, we've only just begun.

If this picture isn't daunting enough, we have to add in all the knowledge outside of the book that is required to read (understand) it more fully.( Notice I didn't say outside the text! [Oh shame on me, another "look-at-how-smart-I-am" reference.]) So let's say I want to read a certain novel I've heard great things about. So I read it. Then I read it a few more times, studying all angles, the beginning in light of the ending and vice versa etc. Then I think, I should read it in the original French. So I learn French and read it again. But the novel is set in the Sixteenth century, so I should read everything I can about that period. But the author wrote it during World War II, so I should read everything I can about that period to understand the author's context. But what if I'm not sure how this whole reading and learning thing works at all? I need to read books on linguistics, hermeneutics, the philosophies of language and interpretation, learn those work's original languages, historical contexts etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty far down.

Tentative Conclusion:

Perhaps if one were able to fully read any one text, one would by definition have read every text; one would be - omniscient.