Book in Hand…

H&M sweater (similar)
Le Chateau skirt (c/o) (similar)
Aldo boots
Massimo Dutti handbag (similar)
RayBan sunglasses
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (c/o)
Location: New York Public Library – New York City, New York

I am almost more me than me in these photos. That was the first thought that passed through my mind when I looked at them all in a row when we got back from New York. We’ve never done a shoot that so perfectly captured the essence of who I am. And that wasn’t what we intended to do when we took these photos, although looking back now, I realise that it was almost inevitable – we were at a beautiful library, and I was dressed all in black, with a book in hand.

For me, reading is like breathing – I can’t live without it. At least, that’s what I always thought. I was an obsessive reader growing up, regularly finishing forty or fifty books a month in my quest to read every single word written by Ann M. Martin. (Yep – my big dream at ten was to be a member of The Babysitters Club. Pretend for a minute like you’ve forgotten that I don’t like kids. Apparently I didn’t think I’d actually doing much babysitting if I joined the gang.) In university, I always carried a tote bag, even though I am quite minimal when it comes to what I take when I leave home, so I could bring a book and a notebook with me.

And then, sometime in my mid-twenties, I stopped reading. I came up with lots of creative justifications for why I abandonned my habit of always carrying a book. The best, and most lasting, was that I was working on writing my own books, and reading would be a distraction. In truth, I didn’t really know why I stopped. But, except when we went on vacation and I felt totally free of other demands, I couldn’t force myself to focus on reading. It was my great unacknowledged tragedy for years. Not every readers is a writer, but to be a writer, you need, I think, to have a deep and abiding passion for the written word. And when you have that, you can’t help but read – you need to. How could I lose something like that?

I didn’t know. But in late 2018, I started travelling a lot for work. I could always read on airplanes, where there is nothing else to do. And the more I read in the air, the more I read in the rest of my life, too. The habit of never leaving home without a book came back to me, so strongly that I couldn’t fathom how I’d ever given it up.

…that is, until I picked up The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brrigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke is an writer I’ve loved since high school, but I admit, I’m not sure he was a great novelist. The Notebooks… was his only attempt at fiction, and I think he played to his strengths by returning to poetry. There isn’t much plot in The Notebooks…, but there are some observations that struck me as astonishingly profound. Rilke wrote my feelings about listening to music a hundred years before I felt them. And he summed up for me why I couldn’t read for years a century before I lived that experience.

Somehow I had a premoition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

I spent a lot of my twenties feeling overwhelmed. That feeling extended to books. There were just so many. How could I choose which one to read? And choose the next one after that? Paralysed by indecision in the face of an abundance of choice and aware I could never get to all the books I wanted to read, I simply gave up.

There is no way I will ever be able to read all the books in the world. Or even all the books I want to read. But what changed is that I engaged to try. I intend to read all of the books, and even if I fail, which I inevitably will, I will find joy in every book that I do pick up along the way.

I’m back to never leaving home without a book. And there’s nothing that makes me feel more like myself.

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