Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Daily Eagle. Here he began developing his notion of democracy as a society of “free readers”, untainted
by fanaticism and political schools, whom the text-maker — poet, printer, teacher, newspaper editor —

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must serve empathically. “We really feel a desire to talk on many subjects,” he explained in an editorial on
June 1, 1846, “to all the people of Brooklyn; and it ain’t their ninepences we want so much either. There is
a curious kind of sympathy (haven’t you ever thought of it before?) that arises in the mind of a newspaper
conductor with the public he serves.… Daily communion creates a sort of brotherhood and sisterhood
between the two parties.”
At about this time, Whitman came across the writings of Margaret Fuller. Fuller was an extraordinary
personality: the first full-time book reviewer in the United States, the first female foreign correspondent,
a lucid feminist, author of the impassioned tract Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Emerson thought that
“all the art, the thought and nobleness in New England … seemed related to her, and she to it”.
Hawthorne, however, called her “a great humbug”, and Oscar Wilde said that Venus had given her
“everything except beauty” and Pallas “everything except wisdom”. While believing that books could not
replace actual experience, Fuller saw in them “a medium for viewing all humanity, a core around which
all knowledge, all experience, all science, all the ideal as well as all the practical in our nature could
gather”. Whitman responded enthusiastically to her views. He wrote:
A passionate reader, Margaret Fuller. (photo credit 11.1)
Did we count great, O soul, to penetrate the themes of mighty books,
Absorbing deep and full from thoughts, plays, speculations?
But now from thee to me, caged bird, to feel thy joyous warble,
Filling the air, the lonesome room, the long forenoon,
Is it not just as great, O soul?
For Whitman, text, author, reader and world mirrored each other in the act of reading, an act whose
meaning he expanded until it served to define every vital human activity, as well as the universe in which
it all took place. In this conjunction, the reader reflects the writer (he and I are one), the world echoes a
book (God’s book, Nature’s book), the book is of flesh and blood (the writer’s own flesh and own blood,
which through a literary transubstantiation become mine), the world is a book to be deciphered (the
writer’s poems become my reading of the world). All his life, Whitman seems to have sought an
understanding and a definition of the act of reading, which is both itself and the metaphor for all its parts.
“Metaphors,” wrote the German critic Hans Blumenberg, in our time, “are no longer considered first and
foremost as representing the sphere that guides our hesitant theoretic conceptions, as an entrance hall to
the forming of concepts, as a makeshift device within specialized languages that have not yet been
consolidated, but rather as the authentic means to comprehend contexts.” To say that an author is a
reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being as a book, to describe the
world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the reader’s craft.
Such metaphors are very ancient ones, with roots in the earliest Judaeo-Christian society. The German
critic E.R. Curtius, in a chapter on the symbolism of the book in his monumental European Literature and
the Latin Middle Ages, suggested that book metaphors began in Classical Greece, but of these there are
few examples, since Greek society, and later Roman society as well, did not consider the book an everyday
object. Jewish, Christian and Islamic societies developed a profound symbolic relationship with their holy
books, which were not symbols of God’s Word but God’s Word itself. According to Curtius, “the idea that
the world and nature are books derives from the rhetoric of the Catholic Church, taken over by the
mystical philosophers of the early Middle Ages, and finally become a commonplace.”
For the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Fray Luis de Granada, if the world is a book, then the things of
this world are the letters of the alphabet in which this book is written. In Introducción al símbolo de la fé
(Introduction to the Symbol of Faith) he asked, “What are they to be, all the creatures of this world, so
beautiful and so well crafted, but separated and illuminated letters that declare so rightly the delicacy
and wisdom of their author? … And we as well … having been placed by you in front of this wonderful
book of the entire universe, so that through its creatures, as if by means of living letters, we are to read
the excellency of our Creator.”
“The Finger of God,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, recasting Fray Luis’s metaphor, “hath
left an Inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of Letters, but of their several forms,
constitutions, parts and operations, which, aptly joyned together, do make one word that doth express
their natures.” To this, centuries later, the Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana added,
“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin,
are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.”

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Our task, as Whitman pointed out, is to read the world, since that colossal book is the only source of
knowledge for mortals. (Angels, according to Saint Augustine, don’t need to read the book of the world
because they can see the Author Himself and receive from Him the Word in all its glory. Addressing
himself to God, Saint Augustine reflects that angels “have no necessity to look upon the heavens or read
them to read Your word. For they always see Your face, and there, without the syllables of time, they read
Your eternal will. They read it, they choose it, they love it. They are always reading and what they read
never comes to an end.… The book they read shall not be closed, the scroll shall not be rolled up again.
For You are their book and You are eternal.”)
Human beings, made in the image of God, are also books to be read. Here, the act of reading serves as a
metaphor to help us understand our hesitant relationship with our body, the encounter and the touch and
the deciphering of signs in another person. We read expressions on a face, we follow the gestures of a
loved one as in an open book. “Your face, my Thane,” says Lady Macbeth to her husband, “is as a book
where men may read strange matters,” and the seventeenth-century poet Henry King wrote of his young
dead wife:
Dear Loss! since thy untimely fate
my task has been to meditate
On Thee, on Thee: Thou art the Book,
The Library whereon I look
Though almost blind.
And Benjamin Franklin, a great book-lover, composed for himself an epitaph (unfortunately not used on
his tombstone) in which the image of the reader as book finds its complete depiction:
The Body of
B. Franklin, Printer,
Like the cover of an old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering & Gilding
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be lost;
For it will, as he believ’d,
Appear once more
In a new and more elegant Edition
Corrected and improved

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By the Author.
To say that we read — the world, a book, the body — is not enough. The metaphor of reading solicits in
turn another metaphor, demands to be explained in images that lie outside the reader’s library and yet
within the reader’s body, so that the function of reading is associated with our other essential bodily
functions. Reading — as we have seen — serves as a metaphoric vehicle, but in order to be understood
must itself be recognized through metaphors. Just as writers speak of cooking up a story, rehashing a
text, having half-baked ideas for a plot, spicing up a scene or garnishing the bare bones of an argument,
turning the ingredients of a potboiler into soggy prose, a slice of life peppered with allusions into which
readers can sink their teeth, we, the readers, speak of savouring a book, of finding nourishment in it, of
devouring a book at one sitting, of regurgitating or spewing up a text, of ruminating on a passage, of
rolling a poet’s words on the tongue, of feasting on poetry, of living on a diet of detective stories. In an
essay on the art of studying, the sixteenth-century English scholar Francis Bacon catalogued the process:
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
By extraordinary chance we know on what date this curious metaphor was first recorded. On July 31, 593
BC, by the river Chebar in the land of the Chaldeans, Ezekiel the priest had a vision of fire in which he
saw “the likeness of the glory of the Lord” ordering him to speak to the rebellious children of Israel.
“Open thy mouth, and eat what I give you,” the vision instructed him.
And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein;
And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein
lamentations, and mourning, and woe.
Saint John, recording his apocalyptic vision on Patmos, received the same revelation as Ezekiel. As he
watched in terror, an angel came down from heaven with an open book, and a thundering voice told him
not to write what he had learned, but to take the book from the angel’s hand.
And I went unto the angel, and said unto him. Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and
eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.
And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey;
and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and
kings.
Eventually, as reading developed and expanded, the gastronomic metaphor became common rhetoric. In
Shakespeare’s time it was expected in literary parlance, and Queen Elizabeth I herself used it to describe
her devotional reading: “I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holye Scriptures, where I
pluck up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences, eate them by reading, chewe them up musing, and laie
them up at length in the seate of memorie … so I may the lesse perceive the bitterness of this miserable
life.” By 1695 the metaphor had become so ingrained in the language that William Congreve was able to
parody it in the opening scene of Love for Love, having the pedantic Valentine say to his valet, “Read,
read, sirrah! and refine your appetite; learn to live upon instruction; feast your mind, and mortify your
flesh; read, and take your nourishment in at your eyes; shut up your mouth, and chew the cud of
understanding.” “You’ll grow devilish fat upon this paper diet,” is the valet’s comment.
Saint John about to eat the Angel’s book, depicted in a seventeenth-century Russian broadside. (photo
credit 11.2)
Less than a century later, Dr. Johnson read a book with the same manners he displayed at the table. He
read, said Boswell, “ravenously, as if he devoured it, which was to all appearance his method of studying”.
According to Boswell, Dr. Johnson kept a book wrapped in the tablecloth in his lap during dinner “from an
avidity to have one entertainment in readiness, when he should have finished another; resembling (if I
may use so coarse a simile) a dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve, while he eats something else
which has been thrown to him.”
The ravenous reader, Dr. Johnson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. (photo credit 11.3)
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a
book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world’s text; thus a circular metaphor is created for

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the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not,
Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain
meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader
become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield
something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven’t yet grasped.
That is why — as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again — no reading
can ever be definitive. In 1867 he wrote, by way of explanation:
Shut not your doors to me proud libraries,
For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing,
A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you ye untold latencies will thrill to every page.

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POWERS