Reading Beyond the Words

An excerpt from Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s “Ruined by Reading.”

I never looked at a picture--really looked--until I was in college. To satisfy a requirement, I took a survey course in art history and spent three class hours a week in the dark, being shown slides. The young instructor evidently found it natural and useful to brood in the dark over the intricacies of pictures; his devotion gradually dislodged my learned or inherited contempt. I saw that pictures, too, could be read, that everything in them was a sign, just as words and phrases were signs. The picture was its own kind of story, with each line and brush-stroke, each color and placement of an object bearing the narrative along; they had been selected from an infinity of choices, put there on purpose, and they added up. . . .

Why do you think the painter put those broken eggs right there? the teacher asked. What do they do to the space they occupy? To the space around them? Why the ruined castle in the background? Or the splotch of red up in the corner? Instinctively I had asked the same questions about words in books. My thoughts had shaped themselves aurally, through the sounds of the words. Meanwhile, I had looked at paintings and photographs the way I looked at anything in my line of sight--a tree, a house, a traffic light--as if it were simply there: the given. Now I began to see, and to think through seeing. It dawned on me that a picture was something made, that the wonder of it, beyond any particular beauty or skill of execution, was that it existed at all, that it had overcome and overlaid blank nothingness, as words convert a blank page into the bearer of a story.

Above all, there was the pure visual pleasure a picture could give, a pleasure beyond what might be read in it. This pleasure the instructor did not discuss; perhaps it was obvious to everyone but me. Yes, it must have been: After all, I never expected or needed my music history professor to point out that a passage was beautiful. I took that for granted. I heard it.

The pleasure of looking came slowly, and I have not yet learned it through and through. Possibly no sensory pleasure that we haven’t felt at least dimly in childhood is ever thoroughly our own. (If we have not enjoyed our bodies as infants and children, for instance, can we appreciate eroticism as adults? Is such a deprivation possible?) Nowadays, looking at a picture, I am now and then speared by a sharp joy in the eyes, and I know this must be what art lovers perpetually feel: the pure ecstatic shudder of the retina, which is so rarely given to me. Even when it is, I must acknowledge that my tastes, still childlike, run to the “pretty.”

Color and design delight me (Matisse and Monet), and composition too (Cezanne and Michelangelo). Well, why on earth not? They ask no special acuity of the viewer. Of course these are sophisticated artists, and by conscious effort I have learned what makes them sophisticated, but what I enjoy about them is the primitive feeling of visual “rightness,” as in a sonata’s harmonious chord resolution. Too often I’ve turned away from paintings that are harsh, troubling, downright “ugly,” or else dull and muted--all of them pictures that better eyes than mine perceive as excellent.

And this shrinking from the difficult, the inharmonious and the subtle is precisely what irks me in readers who complain that a book is “too depressing” or “too demanding,” too long or complicated. No way to explain that a book’s merit has nothing to do with its degree of good cheer or that a “depressing” book can give exquisite pleasure. I suspect that to take a similar pleasure in “unpretty” paintings, I would have to have been born with different genes, or been taught at an early age to love the act of seeing.