"Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton-Reading as Deliberate High Culture Sunday Salon

My first reaction to a book as wonderfully written as The Age of Innocence is simply to let the words flow over me, to bask in the beauty of the language and to allow my sensibility to be controlled by beauty of the work. Some of the sentences in the book are so well crafted I reread them several times just for the sheer pleasure of doing so.

I think here the form of these sentences is part of the meaning. Age of Innocence tells us a lot about how one can live within the beauty of the written word, with no concern for its meaning. The lead male persona in the book,
Newland Archer, has a deep relationship with the books he reads and does retreat into them.

There are several themes one can mine in this book (and mind). It tells us a lot about the relationship of men and women, America to Europe, old culture to new, parents to children, passion to practicality. In accord with the theme of my blog, I will post a bit about what it tells us about the reading life of the characters of the book, how they use books to create culture, to see refuge, to create bonds and exclude others.

In the High Society of New York State late 19th century it was important to read the right books

"In an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macarame lace and wool embroidery on linen, collected American revolutionary glazed ware...they liked novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more comprehensible, spoke severely of Dickens, who had never drawn a gentleman"

This displays the use of reading to reaffirm our beliefs, to read the books proper to our station in life.

Books can also be used as part of a mentoring relationship.

"the shy interest in books she was beginning to develop under his guidance".

Books are also physical property. One of the great pleasures of the Reading Centered Life for many of us is to get new books. Every week there are dozens or more blog posts about new books one has gotten in the mail.
Imagine how this feeling was magnified when the books had to cross the ocean on long voyages.

"That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently.
a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of Guy de Mauspassant's incomparable tales, and a novel called
Middlemarch ...he had declined three dinner invitations in favor of this feast: he turned the pages with the
sensuous joy of the book lover".

Every one seriously into The Reading Life can relate to how social obligations become a burden that gets in the way of our real life, our reading time.

"he built up within himself a kind of sancturary...little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities, thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him...Outside of it he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency".

Newland Archer's books becomes more real to him them than what the world thinks is his life. Who among us that has done time in the corporate world or academia has not ended a long meeting lost in thought among the books we love, with no idea at the end what the meeting was about. (But we have learned to fake it.)

There is a lot more about the reading life, about how history books create what we think is history out of the mass of events that take place, and much more in Age of Innocence. To me personally, the deepest meaning is in the beauty of the words. Listen for a moment to this sentence and think about why Edith Wharton used the word
retailing" rather than retelling like very one else would:

"The queer cosmopolitian women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one they meet, and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the objects of their confidences..."

Life recasts it self as a story, not as a newspaper article. The Europe created in the mind of Newland Archer (a first name worthy of Pynchon) is also a literary construct out of the books he cherishes.

I am embarked on two long term reading projects-the novels of Henry James and those of Edith Wharton. It will take me several years to complete this project. I hope in time, maybe after my one year blog anniversary in July 2010 to host a James/Wharton challenge. (I guess that would attract a rowdy crowd!!)