This morning I opened a book I have never read before: Nabokov's Lectures on Literature. Then I turned to this page:

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. . . . We must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.

He goes on, of course: on and on and on. Apparently the book fates require me to go on too. But I'm glad I didn't read this book before I wrote my own rereading memoir, and I'm quite nervous about reading the Mansfield Park chapter. (My own Mansfield Park attempt might be archived somewhere on this blog; I forget. Anyway, it was in Sewanee, fall 2008.) As N. points out: "The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat." Yes, well, you see what I mean. He sits in the big chair. I sit on the stool. I'm used to the stool, but sometimes it does get a little hard.