Reading Matter

I subscribe to a great many journals, among them, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books.  I have a large table next to my reading chair where these are deposited when they arrive awaiting my perusal.  Since I travel a lot, and when at home, spend countless hours at the gym, these tend to pile up unread, especially because when I become enchanted with a novel, I suspend all other reading projects to plow through the narrative.  Thus it comes about, as is now the case, that I have a neat pile of the TLS, the LRB, the NYR, not to mention The New Yorker Magazine.  Daffy as I am, I have opened almost all of these when they first arrived, glanced here and there among the pages, and then scrupulously placed them on the pile.  Today was an occasion to give the pile some attention, and I have been reading for many hours.  And, of course, what always happens is with me yet again today.  I sometimes have only the merest memory of what I dimly perceive I have read before, while most of the time every issue seems to be virgin territory.  This leads me to the melancholy fact that I might as well stop reading them altogether since I cannot remember enough to justify the effort and the expense--subscriptions to these journals are not cheap!  Yet, I continue to subscribe and to read from the piles of back issues, for I have the fond belief that as I read, the facts and opinions I have digested go into some undefined pool of intelligence in my brain, so that when I talk or read still further this encyclopedic knowledge--somehow not available all the time to my conscious mind which must stutter and sputter in conversation trying to recall the facts of the matter under discussion--underlies the broad strengths of my discourse.  Total baloney, but comforting, nonetheless.