In all the languages of the world – and there are about seven thousand of them – there are many handy words that we never get to use because they don’t appear in the English dictionary. In German, for example, kummerspeck is the regret you feel when you have put on weight because of eating too much, and the word layogenic in the Tagalog tongue of the Philippines describes something or somebody that looks good from far away but not so good close up. Another such useful expression that came my way recently is from Japanese, which has many precise descriptive words. It is tsundoku, meaning the buying of books that you never read, or never finish.
This particular habit is a chronic problem for some of us, especially in high summer when we are being pressured by newspaper lists of summer reading, designed to make us feel guilty. If an appealing book is featured in some list of top ten picks by a literary celebrity, it seems almost churlish not to at least try to read it. And so it arrives in the house and becomes part of the furniture, on a bookshelf (or the floor, or a desk, or a bed, or anywhere there are a few inches of space) and sits there, waiting to be read and radiating tsonduku.
This would be no problem apart from the small inconvenience of clutter and the larger inconvenience of guilt. A blank cell phone or computer screen creates no guilt, which is why they are so popular. The World Wide Web may contain all the knowledge and literature in the world, but it is invisible, so we don’t have to think about it. But unread books are too real and substantial to be switched off. They sit on the shelves looking at us accusingly, year after year, like abandoned lovers. Then one day, we just can’t stand it anymore and either read it or get rid of it, which creates yet more guilt.
I was a bookseller once, which perhaps explains my problem. Like all booksellers I had a dual relationship with books as commodities and as friends I didn’t want to lose. Somewhere along the line I got into habit of picking up just about anything in print and then failing to read it. Even worse, I acquired the habit of half-reading several books at once, in slices as it were, resulting in a strangely kaleidoscopic literary experience.
I could give you a long list of my tsonduku books, but we don’t have the time. One of them, until recently, was Peter Gay’s monumental biography of Sigmund Freud. I hesitated not only because of its size but because, although I know Freud’s theories in outline, as most people do, I don’t know how he arrived at them in detail, by the process of analysis. I have always considered myself a rare example of psychological normality, but suppose I am missing something. The wisdom of the greatest figure in psychoanalysis might reveal that I am as neurotic as everybody else.
I am about a quarter of the way through the book. It is 1912 in Vienna, where the participants in the bitter psychoanalytic battles of the time — Freud, Jung, Adler, and the rest—seemed intent on driving one another mad, and they didn’t have far to go. So, I think I already have my answer. I don’t need to read the rest of the eight hundred pages for reassurance. They were all crazy. By comparison, I am normal. Freud can remain tsonduku.
