Melon forever

Hello, and welcome back to The Span, your preeminent source of non-sports blogs from Defector. This week, we’ve got a defence of the academic humanities, a consideration of athletically gifted but emotionally stunted men on TV, a tribute to pop music ephemerality, and a harrowing journey to save the life of Melon, the most beautiful cat in the world.

Plus, Kelsey is back, and she’s learned to embrace the joys of rereading.

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My house is full of books that I have not read. I buy them at local bookstores as if it is my job alone to sustain the publishing industry, as if at any moment I might no longer have access to literature and be stuck only with the mountain of books I have collected in my life. The stacks of unread, unloved books are a constant reminder that life is so short, that even as someone who reads every day all year long forever, I will never make a dent in the mammoth amount of printed work that exists. Reading books that are new to me, if not actually new in the world, colors the periods of my life. I often cannot remember what I was doing at a specific time of year, but if I look at the list of books I read, I can remember various situations in which I read them. I have prioritized this novelty of consumption all my life until this year. 

It began with Wuthering Heights. I re-read it almost immediately after reading Anna Karenina for the very first time, and my brain felt awash in the luxury of reading sentences that were cared for, plots that an author really worked to build, characters that didn’t feel like slap-dash renderings of the author themself. While reading Wuthering Heights, though, I realized that I, myself had changed. It had been more than ten years since I read it last, and my relationship to the work had grown. Then, it happened again when I re-read Middlemarch. I had felt reluctant to return to it, worried that I would have grown too much, and that it would no longer fit. But I was wrong. Because I knew what would happen and had walked the path of that story before, I was able to notice Elliott’s small repeated constructions, her tics as a writer, the phrases so lush I wanted to stop and lie under them for hours like a giant shady tree. 

Re-reading, I always assumed, was for the kind of people who can fall into fandoms easily. I naively thought that the main benefit to re-reading or re-watching any piece of culture that you loved was to be soothed. After Middlemarch, I reconsidered. This summer, while on book leave, I decided that I would only re-read. I wanted to be influenced only by work that I thought was good, novels I knew that I loved and that could inspire me to create the kind of work I envy and clutch at. I re-read Another Country by James Baldwin, Sula by Toni Morrison, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, All The Living by C.E. Morgan, and a half-dozen other novels that were each—at the time I read them—the best novel I had ever read. I felt comforted, but I also felt as if my appreciation for them grew because even after all this time, they still moved me. It is how I imagine a very old and lucky couple must feel, to see the beloved of their youth with deep-creased wrinkles and stuttering steps, and feel overwhelmed by the longevity of affection that can exist. How lucky it is that we can have that kind of relationship with a work of art as well. 

With my draft finished and waiting for me to be ready to edit it, I will return to reading something new to me. There are still so many books in the world, and how else will my list of things to re-read grow in the future if I do not continue to seek the best books I have ever read from the slop of thousands of others. But I do plan to make re-reading more of a priority in my life, to carve out space to revisit the books I know are worth reading again, because they have more to offer me, because they’re so good that even twice or three times cannot be enough. 

-Kelsey