The Things He Reads

I figured it's time I plugged my friend Raskolnikov's blog, which is comprised almost entirely of excerpts from books he reads. This appeals to me on three levels.

First of all, the blog is a good resource. Sometimes a passage gives you a better feel for a book than a dust jacket blurb or endorsement. If you're an avid reader, I'm sure some of it will pique your interest. And if you're not the sort who's likely to pick up something by, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, you may still be interested in reading a snippet of his writing that someone else found interesting.

Raskolnikov's project is also interesting to me because it's a kind of an anti-blog. It seems the blogosphere (and indeed, a fair chunk of the internet in general) is primarily a mechanism for broadcasting the thoughts, opinions and experiences of anyone with enough free time and self-importance to proclaim them.* In such a culture a mysterious, apparently Russian bookworm, a man (woman?) who resists entirely the urge to rant, ramble or pontificate on whatever strikes his fancy, who presents instead the thoughts of better thinkers, the words of better writers, is something of an anti-hero. A rascal, if you will.

And sometimes when I read this blog I feel a little of what I've felt in the presence of a Torah scroll. I sense a kind of holiness in copied words that is lost in printing presses and electronic databases. I'm not sure how well I can articulate this, but I feel like there's inherent value in copying out a text - value beyond whatever readers may get out of it. I guess I see it as a way of identifying oneself with the words, something like repeating liturgy or submitting to religious rules. Maybe I'm making too much of this - in my experience, actually copying texts is pretty mundane. But I guess most spiritual disciplines, in practice, feel mundane to me.

*My opinion of we bloggers is not so bleak as this paragraph might suggest. There are two sides to the coin. But it's refreshing to me to read a blog so free of the (often unwarrented) self-interest that seems to be inherent in the medium.