What a Book, a Life, and a River Have in Common

When I was young, my father used to reread Don Quixote. I remember him telling me that each time he returned to Cervantes, he discovered something new, some meaning or insight that had escaped him before. At the time, I found that difficult to understand. The book was the same book. The words had not changed. The story had not changed. How could there possibly be something new to find?

Only many years later did I begin to understand what he meant.

Recently I have been reading the Bhagavad Gita with the commentary of Shankaracharya. What has fascinated me is not only the philosophy itself but the extraordinary richness contained within a single word. A name such as Keshava may be understood in several different ways simultaneously. One meaning belongs to mythology, another to theology, another to psychology, and still another to metaphysics. A single Sanskrit word can open into an entire landscape of associations. One begins by asking what a word means and ends by asking what consciousness itself might be.

As I read, I have noticed something curious. At first the Gita appears to be a story. There is a battlefield, a warrior overcome by grief, and a divine charioteer offering counsel. Yet after a time it becomes something else. It becomes guidance. Then it becomes philosophy. Soon one finds oneself wrestling with questions concerning memory, dreams, identity, action, and the nature of reality. The text remains exactly where it always was, yet it seems to reveal deeper layers with every return.

The same phenomenon occurs with other books. It occurs with the Bible, which can be read as history, moral instruction, theology, poetry, symbolism, or mystical insight, depending upon the reader and the stage of life at which it is encountered. I suspect it also occurs with many of the great works of literature. A person reading War and Peace at twenty does not read the same novel that he reads at sixty. The pages are identical, but the reader who turns them is not.

This realization brought back my father's observation about Don Quixote. Perhaps the reason he found new meanings each time was not because Cervantes had hidden them more carefully than other writers. Perhaps it was because the reader himself had changed. Each year had added new experiences, disappointments, joys, losses, and questions. The book remained where it had always been, but the consciousness approaching it was different. New eyes saw old words.

This idea reminds me of one of the most beautiful passages in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. After years spent pursuing wealth, pleasure, ambition, and worldly success, Siddhartha returns to the river. There he meets Vasudeva, the ferryman, who does not instruct him through doctrines or philosophical systems. Instead, he teaches him to listen. He teaches him to listen to the river.

At first such advice seems almost absurd. What could flowing water possibly teach about life? Yet gradually Siddhartha begins to hear what Vasudeva hears. The river contains many voices at once. It contains youth and old age, birth and death, departure and return. It contains laughter and sorrow, success and failure. All of these currents flow together, and yet the river remains one river.

I sometimes think great books resemble that river. We approach them at different moments in our lives, bringing different questions and different experiences. The child who opens a book is not the same person as the adult who later returns to it. The young student searching for information is not the same reader as the older seeker searching for wisdom. Because we change, the book appears to change. In reality, what has changed is the conversation between the reader and the text.

Perhaps that is why certain books never grow old. They are not exhausted by a single reading because they are not speaking to only one version of ourselves. They speak to the child, the dreamer, the skeptic, the parent, the philosopher, and the elder. Each returns to the same pages and hears a different voice.

When my father reread Don Quixote, he believed he was returning to a familiar book. Now I suspect something else may have been happening. The book was reading him as carefully as he was reading it. Each visit revealed not only new meanings within the pages but new depths within the reader himself.

Like Siddhartha's river, the great books continue to flow whether we stand beside them or not. We return to them after months or years and discover that they have been patiently waiting for us. The words are the same. The story is the same. Yet somehow everything is different.

And perhaps that is one of the mysteries of a life devoted to reading: we never truly return to the same book, because we never truly return as the same person.