On the Decadent Pleasure of Reading Difficult Books

It's a way to understand our modern world, this reading in the dense and difficult

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” - Spinoza

So yea: have expensive food delivered to your door, shop for wonderful clothes online that will be delivered to your doorstep in a few minutes. There’s a lot of very exciting gambling to be done also, on your laptop. You could win big. And my gawd, just check out the cornucopia of free porn available now. Stuff’s steaming you may have missed out on! Until now, that is: it’s there, probably. And indulge in a personal relationship with an AI chatbot that lets you know how wonderful you are.

What? Still not happy? Still bored from overstimulation? Your interiority resembles the cover of the White Album? If so, how do you know? Maybe try all that stuff s’more. Double down. Go harder. You can do it.

How come all that stuff doesn’t bring actual fulfillment? You’re still distracted from distraction by distraction? Why didn’t They tell you this was gonna be this way?

I’m going to make an argument meant for one person. I don’t know who that person is, but maybe they stumble upon this hidden backwoods of the Internet and become persuaded to put down the need to drown out outside voices and go inward. No, it’s not meditation, but it seems close to it. Find something to read - an actual book-book that you can carry from room to room, leaf back a few pages to make sure you’re keeping track, know the names of all these characters, etc. Make notes inspired by something in the book, grapple with something dense. Gargantua and Pantagruel. Tristram Shandy. Mason & Dixon. The Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy. The Red and the Black. No fear. Lose yourself in the vast wilderness of some great big fat book, ya know? The ones that everyone wants to have read but no one you know has?¹ Or: pick something that’s 96 pages but will kick your ass it’s so weird and impenetrable. Today I got lost in a book I know I’ve read twice already, but it’s been four years since my last time with it.

Here’s a passage:

Santa Lucia: eyes jellied on a plate.

The thrust of serpentine was almost green

all through the mountains where the rock cropped out.

I like sundowns, dusks smelling of madrone,

the wildflowers, which were not beautiful,

force little wills rooting in the yellow

grass year after year, thirst in the roots,

mineral. That have intelligence of hunger.

-from “Santa Lucia,” by Robert Hass. It’s from a 68 page book of his poetry titled Praise. Poetry like this keeps me weird, and allows me to break with everyday life. Kinda like a psychoactive drug. Hell: it is a drug, this.

I was reading one of my favorite Fat Novels that I understand now, in the Academy, is commonly thought of as an indulgence in snootiness, part of the elitist canon for white men, privileged by some writer who felt entitled to write something “experimental” and thick, overflowing with allusion, the very emblem of Our Enemy, etc:

The young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies as overgrown children: the words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not often nice: their testiness and outrageous mots were such that his intellects resiled from: nor were they scrupulously sensible of the proprieties though their fund of strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf.

-from “Oxen of the Sun”, Ulysses, Joyce, p.400 in the tattered clothbound Modern Library version I’m using.

Yea, so: WTF was that? It’s Joyce, imitating the English prose style of Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Chesterfield. He’s been narrating a scene in a hospital where a woman is about to give birth and there are many young men in the waiting room, some drunk. The “mind” thinking these thoughts seems to be the hero, Leopold Bloom, but it’s complicated. Joyce started this chapter mimicking his idea of the origins of English in Latin, and, by emulating the oldest styles - yea, like Beowulf - he’s gradually building up his mimicry and parody of prose styles in English as they chronologically appeared in history, mirroring the gestation of the baby about to be born. Nine months with the entire history of English evolving as the story of one night in the hospital in Dublin on June 16, 1904 takes place. By gawd this is stunning virtuosity! And thanks to the gods of Joyce scholarship - with their notes and annotations - that have helped me get a grip on this stunning, ultra difficult section of the book. Now I barely need an annotation, but there was a time I did need ‘em. And what of it?²

This is a dimension of Mind, reading dense, difficult, slow-going, obscure texts. When we read such stuff, we’re closer to Champollion or the people who cracked the Enigma Code than were are to some beach reader enjoying, say, Dan Brown.³

106 years ago, The Wasteland, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and Ulysses were all published. These were never “popular” texts. But now there are nominally many times more “educated” people. Do they read this stuff? Naw, man…

To read difficult books: sustained attention, seriousness, cosmic good humor, honesty, sensitivity, rigor, ability to withstand the opaque…a way to understand the dizzying, withering speed of the world right now. Tim Parks and a few others argue this sort of reading is necessary to understand ourselves and others. You go under the surface, where hardly anyone seems to be going these days. It allows for a perspective in 2026 in a way that may be shocking.

And it has nothing to do with “optimizing” your life for quicker, easier…something…so you can get on to doing…something. Paradoxically, the daily immersion in opaque, weird, difficult texts will, I argue, make you understand what “optimizing” is all about. But you have to see for yourself; I can’t do it for you. No one can.

One of Pynchon’s old friends from Cornell, Jules Siegel, once asked him, Why all the difficulty? And Pynchon reportedly said, “Why should things be easy to understand?” A Pynchon scholar named Albert Rolls thought this could be further reformulated thus: Why must things be hard to understand? And Rolls proffers an answer: Working through difficulty facilitates one’s ability to get past the shallow liberty afforded by easy pleasures and achieve genuine freedom.⁴

John Higgs wrote about difficulty in literary modernist texts and argued that the very point of it was a quality of sustained attention and alteration of consciousness in reading such books as Ulysses. I agree, having already compared dense, difficult texts to drugs above.⁵ Aleister Crowley’s acolyte, Israel Regardie, wrote, “Obscurity has many purposes, one of which is the breaking of SET.”⁶

Wilson, out of his own time, both a writer of fat dense encyclopedic novels that Northrop Frye called “anatomies,” and a reader of such books, pointed to Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information and the level of predictability in a text, from one moment to the next.⁷ No doubt LLMs are using this now. But where is the human experience? Where is the style? Where is the intrinsic weirdness of the writer of such books? If the LLMs come up with something that mimics this, it’s only ‘cuz it was trained on Borges, Pynchon, Joyce, Ashberry, Pound, Bolaño, Krasznahorkai, etc. RAW loved info-dense texts, and it’s very difficult to not see this as something linked to his love of chemically altered states. He often called such things a “yoga.” Here he is in a letter to Timothy Leary, who was concerned about using Aleister Crowley in their jointly-written text:

Crowley probably understood more than you realize. (He never - well, he hardly ever - said exactly what he knew. It was his pleasure to make his readers work to decipher him. If I hadn’t been a Pound and Joyce fan for 20 years before discovering A.C. I wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to set out the decode his codes!⁸

Gurdjieff, along this line of thinking, had his own scholars of such texts as Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson say that he was so intentionally confusing so it required deep study to understand what he was getting at. Gurdjieff: “I bury the bone so deep the dog has to scratch for it.” This harmonizes oddly - in major and minor 7ths? - with Joyce’s “I put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.”

Jonathan Lethem writes about how stupid social media/Internet has made us with reading and hails the New York Review of Books re-issuing serious authors; praise for the Long Novel; Lethem speaks to me when he writes, "Consideration of books and writing has never before been so oppressed by the tyranny of 'Long Now' - or 'present shock', to steal a phrase from Douglas Rushkoff. Or at least it seems that way to me, permanent retrograde citizen of the out of print and out of fashion; I developed my passion for novels while working in used bookstores. I've spent my life since that time being baffled at how difficult it is to get a conversation started about noncanonical writing that's more than a few years old. Even the early novels of a towering figure among us, DeLillo, say, can seem too dwindled in the rear-view mirror. Wasn't this supposed to be the news that stayed news?"…which seems a nod to Ezra Pound's "literature is news that stays news", and RAW's inability to write a best-selling thriller.⁹

Pound scholar William Cookson discusses difficulty and the duration of reading required to crack the texts addressed here: it’s like you’re a detective arriving at a crime scene.¹⁰

To quote Peter Sloterdijk: you must change your life. This is one way. I’m merely suggesting it. You know what to do.

Have I read all these books? No. Even the ones I’ve read cover-to-cover I haven’t read. These texts are inexhaustible, a value in literature that seems, if not gone already, rapidly receding in the red-shift of Shallow, Idiot Culture. I will come back to them over and over. They each represent Worlds with vast mental spaces to stretch out in. In this, they satisfy a certain religious impulse in myself to want to be something that’s much larger and awesome than myself, and for any of these texts that succeeds in allowing me to “do” this, the author seems to fade backwards, towards the vast Author. And it lasts for a few months before I move onto some other mega-expansive work.

It’s kinda my thing to not be a part of Idiot Culture, so those of us - the sorts that read the OG - seem to be part of a cyclical monastic life of readers. There was once a time when there was no public education, and almost everyone was illiterate. And maybe you’ve heard this, but I’ll go on anyway: There were weirdo monks though, reading and copying texts all day, every day. Lectio divina, etc. Their consciousnesses were markedly different and there eventually came a time when they told jokes about their superiors in the order, and sought drinking and women. Some of these readers concocted stuff like the Carmina Burana. I didn’t learn this in school; I got it from reading texts like Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages, which I read about when Pynchon said he and his friends read it at Cornell.

1. I seem to be paraphrasing Twain’s definition of a “classic.” Or maybe it was Wilde?

2. On Ulysses as a snooty bullshit novel in March, 2022, Jessica Crispin. Pete Buttigieg and Jeremy Corbyn seemed to have lost points for saying they love Ulysses. This is the idiotic world we live in: vote for a loud racist moron-grifter whose never read a book and is only out to steal from you, cuz those people who actually read books just think they’re so damned smart and dammit, I’m a lost, clueless, unhappy loser so I wanna take you down with me, ya damned book-readers. Or so the 17 year old in me often thinks.

3. Nothing against Dan Brown. If you’re enjoying your text I’m in solidarity with you, but I hope you move on from him to someone who would have liked to write very similar texts and make that much money from them, but couldn’t. A writer like Robert Anton Wilson, who actually DID write such texts and we should have little doubt Brown read RAW. But RAW, while trying to write a blockbuster, was incapable of writing something so light and page-turning. And it’s ‘cuz his reading did him in. Once you know Pound, Joyce, Crowley, Pynchon…you’re fucked. You can’t help but write for others more like you than a mass audience, and you price your way out of best-sellerdom. Or at least that’s what I think happened with RAW.

4. Thomas Pynchon: Demon In The Text, Albert Rolls, p112, footnote #38. An earlier working title for Gravity’s Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures. Talk about irony!

5. see Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs, pp.44-51, for a more sustained argument on this topic.

6. Eye In The Triangle, Regardie, p.xviii

7. Information Theory seems, in these senses, related to Mark O’Connor’s “The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels,” from 2011: at times a baffled tedium overcomes us during very long novels, but then suddenly there’ll occur a hilarious set-piece or a set of philosophical ideas that are so interesting they function like how a terrorist captures and holds prisoners: because he’s not killing us, he’s being nice to us…and after a spell, we love him for this. O’Connor’s “tempted” to think of the readers dedicated to Finnegans Wake are the “Patty Hearsts of literature.” O’Connor’s is one of the funniest ideas about reading long fat dense books that I’ve seen. Along these lines, Prof. David Letzler’s book The Cruft of Fiction analyzes our readings of “mega-novels” like Underworld, Finnegans Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow, etc, and asserts that, like code-writers who accomplish their task but use unnecessary, excessive code that’s - “cruft” in the lingo - we can learn to navigate our info-dense worlds by learning to spot these sections in a novel and take them very lightly, maybe less seriously, or skip them altogether: see op.cit, pp.233-238: we get better at building cognitive hierarchies, via discernment of what’s “important to pay attention to” vs. cruft. This situation in reading stuff like The Recognitions or The Man Without Qualities will serve us in our non-reading lives of info-overload, or so I understand Letzler’s idea.

8. RAW letter to Leary, May 4, 1974, courtesy of the stash of Leary Archives and the good folks at the NY Public Library.

9. Originally in a 2015 essay in Book Forum, it’s collected in Lethem’s More Alive and Less Lonely, pp.61-63.

10. A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, pp.xx-xxi