The fanatical reader is not only anxious, he or she is curious. And surely human curiosity—condemned as it was by certain Fathers of the Church as being of no purpose since the coming of Christ, and even prohibited, since we now have the Gospels—is one of the determining factors of all our actions? A capital element in the search for knowledge, in scientific discoveries or technological progress, the essential force behind human endeavor. And curiosity has no end: it is without limits. It feeds on itself, is never satisfied with what it finds, but must always press on, exhausting itself only with our dying breath.
… And reading
expands indefinitely our perforce limited experience of reality, giving us
access to distant ages, foreign customs, hearts and minds, human motivations,
and everything else. How can you stop once you have found the doorway offering
the chance of escape from an inevitably constricted environment? Liberty was
within arm’s reach, so all I have to do was read and read, more and more,
hoping to escape my individual destiny. Then I had only to add to this
boundless curiosity a certain methodical tendency, which drove me to read all
the works of a given write, or all the books written on a certain subject, or
the literature of a certain period, or country, and to wish as I went along to
keep the books I had read, adding new ones that might be connected to them,
gradually acquiring more topics I was interested in—and there I was—a
bibliomaniac reader.
Jacques Bonnet Phantoms on the Bookshelves. Trans. Sian
Reynolds. MacLehose Press, London. 2008
