in praise of re-reading

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

I am an insatiable re-reader.  My favorite books, as I think I've mentioned, have been re-read more than a dozen times.  As soon as I finish a truly good book, I want enough time to have elapsed that I can start it again.  I've had many discussions about this, and some of the greatest literary minds have declared that you should never need to read a book more than once.  You should read it, it should affect you, and you should have gleaned from it all that you can in that first reading.  But I think that is the authors selling themsleves short.

Of course you can learn a great deal from a book the first time around.  Any good writing should be able to facilitate that.  But I think that - especially depending on the book - learning is different than understanding.

I was first given C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces as a Literature prize from my 8th-grade teacher - who also happened to be my aunt, and perhaps had personal investment in the formation of my mind and heart...just perhaps.  I read it, and I loved it.  I remember that.  But I also remember reading quickly, and not worrying about the parts that were a bit confusing.  I knew I'd be back. 

Since then, I've revisited the ideas that I "learned" the first time, but understood more fully with the clarity that years and experience bring. [I sound so old and wise...I'm not.  No delusions there.]  For example, the passage above almost knocked the breath out of me when I read it on vacation this weekend.  No matter how many times I had read the words before, I had never understood it with the depth I did on Sunday.  Perhaps I'd understand it even better today, on Tuesday.  C.S. Lewis was fifty-eight when he wrote this book, and generally acknowledged to be rather smart.  It doesn't take much intellectual humility to admit that I surely still don't understand everything he was trying to convey.  That thought makes me happy...it means I can re-read it again.