Are you even sure what sex you are?

On re-reading Virginia Woolf's Orlando

“Never read books, my boy”, warned the famous cricketer W.G.Grace, “it spoils your eyes for the game”.

Worse, even , than that, books are never safe. They take you to places you never thought of visiting. In my last post, I spoke of how anxious I felt, as a young Christian, reading Yeats’s line “Homer be my example, and his unchristened heart”. Just to read the lines was enough to make you abandon Christianity altogether, whereas, pass a day or two, and find yourself in another mood, and a few pages of Thomas a Kempis will make you want to join a monastery. The distinctions between what is “real” and what is going on inside your head, and what the contents of the book are doing to that inside of your head, these are difficult lines to draw. Perhaps one of the reasons Britain has, on the whole, been a more stable country than, say, Russia or France over the last centuries, is that the British leaders who have had much time for reading, such as Gladstone or Balfour, have been in the minority, and most British Prime Ministers of modern times have been distinctly unliterary. No danger of them sailing off into the realms of fantasy - or, at any rate - not because of what they have been reading. It was bookworms who started the revolutions in France and Russia and Germany.

Those of us who are addicted to reading sometimes forget what a very strange experience it is. I am not completely sure that I have ever read a convincing account, by a philosopher, or a neuroscientist, of what is happening when we do it.. when our minds swoop from the chair in which we sit, to descry new world, and we feel like watchers, silent upon a peak in Darien.

Our eyes play over a page. (As far as Western history relates, it was St Ambrose of Milan who was the first person seen reading SILENTLY. St Augustine, in his confessions, comes upon Ambrose silently sitting with a book on his lap, and had never before seen anyone doing this - reading, not not aloud.) Our eyes, then, play over the page. Our brains - but far more than our brains, our whole souls, enter into the world depicted on the page. And our brains/souls/selves make such instantaneous adjustments! At one moment, we read a shopping-list or instructions about operating a washing-machine. The next we are reading Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and we are alone with him on the mountain in his magnificent, defiant, agony. The next, when we have laid the Grecian tragedy to one side, we are in a shop with Bertie Wooster, pouring scorn on a cow creamer.

It’s the sheer speed and the immediacy and the imaginative power of the activity which is a sort of miracle. Whoosh! And you are there, in another world. In the case of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, you are even in another body and another sex.