I have an acquaintance at my gym who I see reading “Nicholas Nickleby” by Charles Dickens while he rides the exercise bike. He is a doctor – a radiologist, as is his wife. His daughter attended UC Berkeley, and his son is currently at UCLA. Their family is educated, prosperous, and happy. There are plenty of shit birds out there the world would be better off without, but this family is just the opposite — they are impressive people, a joy to be around. Watching him slog through that loooong book by Dickens from the 19th century makes him look like an archaic throwback to the age of print and libraries, even as he lives in the age of TikTok and Instagram – an era of shrinking literary skills and increasingly bite-sized attention spans.
I was impressed. I saw a kindred spirit.
I wondered if he would love “Anna Karenina,” one of my favorite novels. I was going to buy the book and give it to him as a gift. So I casually asked him about it, and of course he had read “Anna Katerina.” And he had read all the other important works by Tolstoy, as well as Dostoevsky. He had read most of Charles Dickens, and God knows what else. This is the type of serious reading which accumulates over a lifetime among serious readers.
That got me to thinking. I first read “Anna Karenina” at UCLA in the last 1980s when I took a Russian literature course with a visiting professor from the Soviet Union. I loved listening to that amiable professor with his thick Russian accent, musing about Tolstoy and “mother Russia.” I got to sit courtside and observe up close Leo Tolstoy: his musings on the peasantry, God, and “History” while waiting for tea next to the samovar. This professor was from a country, the Soviet Union, which was enemy to mine, but I loved that man and the trip he led me through the idiosyncratic, fascinating psychology of that weird genius Tolstoy. The professor gave us two weeks to read “War and Peace.” I went home, did the math, and read some 150 pages per night. I finished the book on schedule. Then he gave us one week to read “Anna Karenina.” I got that one done, too. Those are happy memories of enriching exercises.
But they were also over 35 years ago.
I have long thought to read “Anna Karenina” again when I retire. It will be a form of congratulating myself on my greater time to do what I want: retirement, freedom. But there are other reasons: To read a great book a second time after many years is to see it with different eyes – you are a different person, so you see it in a different light; and you pick up things you might have missed in the first reading when you do it a second time. That makes it well worthwhile.
But why am I waiting?
If I really wanted to, I could read it sooner. Yes, I still have a full-time teaching job. Yes, I still have a daughter at my high school who requires my time and attention. I am trying to get a small business off the ground. My spare time is limited. But I could still read that book.
But I want to save “Anna Karenina” for the moment I retire. My working years are beginning to wind down, and afterward I hope to return, in some way, to the state I was in during college, when my working life was just beginning to unfold. “Anna Karenina” will serve as a bookend to both eras – the beginning of my working life and the end of it. There is balance in that.
So I will wait.
“Anna Karenina” will be there waiting for me.
I have read that the number one activity for retired folks is to watch TV. Someone slap me across the face if that is how I spend my retirement! I did not work for 34 years and earn a pension only to sit on the couch and stare passively at pixels dancing on the screen. I want to read all those “large loose baggy monsters” from the 19th century – “Anna Karenina” and “Nicholas Nickleby.” I want to actively engage the classics of literature. I will refuse the digital opium of modern media. I want the age of print. Instead of TikTok and Instagram, give me Tolstoy and Dickens –
So help me God, Amen.
