On Rereading

Rereading Grendel by John Gardner, which was my favorite book after senior year English class in high school (along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard), I'm getting a subtle sense of how my mind has changed. Rereading for me is often a practice in reading with two minds, because the specter of who I was when I first came to the book (or, for Catcher in the Rye, the last four times I came to the book) reads with me. Just in these first two chapters of Grendel, I see, and not without some degree of unhappiness, how much more intimately I understand the beastly flailings of my angsty, existentialist hero. I also see that I have long misquoted Grendel's near-death epiphany in the rotting tree. He realizes, not "Blink by blink, I create the universe. I alone exist," which is how I've remembered it since I was 17, but:

I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink. -- An ugly god pitifully dying in a tree!

It was adolescent bravado (and shoddy scholarship) that caused me to misremember, to shorten that anguished realization about the alienated nature of being into what became (for me) a statement of brash adoration for the self-centered artist.

Rereading Catcher so many times, through so many periods of my life has brought me to a point where the text doesn't change as much under my eyes. I remember and feel the same emotions, but they strike me fivefold. The text, somehow, is still new. And each time I visit, Holden lives in me for a few weeks, and I am morose but awake to small beauties, I am sensitive to phonies and craving the kind of simple honesty and openness it seems difficult to find anywhere but children.

I am glad to have disabused myself of the notion, perhaps for always, that rereading is a form of stagnancy, that by returning, I risk not moving forward. These texts, the good ones, are always new.