The Man Who Read The O.E.D.

Appetite and ambition waxed with what it fed on, and he conceived the notion of reading the Oxford English Dictionary. The whole thing, in fact, all twenty volumes, all 21,730 pages.
According to Mr. Shea, it took him a year. Subsequently, he wrote Reading the OED (Penguin, 2008)–done in the spirit of those memoirs by explorers who have crossed some preternaturally wretched stretch of wilderness, often for no clear reason.

Let us say at once that the book is entertaining and reasonably short. There are twenty-six chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. In each chapter, the author outlines some aspect of his progress (his struggle, for example, simply to find a place to read systematically for months on end) and each chapter ends with a list of interesting words beginning with the chapter letter. You can learn something, and It is a fun read.

But, how is the philosopher to react to such an undertaking?

Certainly, all generous hearts warm to his spirit. Mr. Shea we salute you, we do.

At the same time, we have a couple of reservations.

First, is this not a fundamental misuse of the very nature of the work? The OED is not meant as a continual text. It is a storehouse of particular information meant for retrieval. What is the τελος? It is like introducing yourself to every single person at the Rose Bowl game.

Is this in fact some sort of neo-or pseudo-Gnostic attempt at total knowledge?

Nahh. Not this time.

Perhaps it can be seen as an act of noble respect, a beau geste on a jumbo scale. Fair enough.

And yet, for all the details of his adventures (including a surrealist trip to a conference for lexicographers) Mr. Shea neglects one aspect of this experience, and that is the experience itself.

He does not tell us much about actually reading the OED–that is, the immediate experience of sitting with the text in front of you and reading page after page, after page, after page. For day after day after day after day.

Now it has to be said, first, that this is a thing generally neglected in literature.

In a recent film, Bilbo Baggins walks (along with some dubious dwarves) a distance likely that from Washington to Chicago. But there is nothing in the movie (or in the book) about the experience of walking for whole days at a time over rough territory. How do your legs feel, the first day, and the twentieth? What do you think about? Do travellers chat?

No, first our characters are here, then they’re there. The day-by-day and mile-by-mile between gets a slow montage if anything.

It is possible that, for most times and occasions, this deficiency is unavoidable. After all, seventeen hundred words, for example, on the quality of light in Sam Spade’s office in the first chapter would slow the Maltese Falcon to the point where people would throw it across the room.

Not that a few authors simple don’t give a darn.

Proust took as long as Proust wanted, and in our own time, Nicholson Baker got up a whole book about a man making breakfast in his kitchen. But micro detail wears out its welcome after a bit. Let’s try it out.

The volume (volume IV, in fact, Creel to Duzepere), the volume, so like those solemn volumes in my Aunt Leonie’s library, the ones I pawned when I had run out of furniture) is heavy enough to make lifting with one hand difficult. Weight comes into it and so does balance.

The jacket is a glossy dark blue with yellow lettering (“Second edition” is in white as if a qualification). The yellow of the lettering is not bright, but edges toward the soft gold or the skin a man gets in southern climates. Below the title is single terse red line, like a red cuff or lapel in the Windsor court costume.

August servitor!

The back cover is plain dark blue and it carries in its depth the lamp and the window curtains. There is a bar-code in the lower right corner of this austerity , like a someone from the sciences, say a biologist, sitting incongruously in a gentleman’s club in the Faubourg St. Germaine.

We set volume IV (one can hear the ghost of Roman trumpets in those archaic numerals ) on a small wooden stand on our desk, and it at random on pages 532 and 533. There is a soft sound as air is displaced by the spreading wings, as pages never before separated turn toward you.

The two spread pages stretch out to either side before you (already the occasion is solemn and the reader is the acolyte) with a narrow valley of shadow between them. The invisible mass, the ocean below the flashing surface, is deep enough to swell up like a wave in graceful opulence and the edges of these pages fan out just a little to each side , like a corps de ballet, just visible enough to frame the principle dancers. The cliff on one side shines in the window light, the other side is shadowed like the future.

To the extreme left and right, the inside flap of the dust cover presents a straight dark blue bar, like the edge of a stage and the strict horizontal of the cover’s top

The paper itself is white, without gloss, and opaque, a transcendent simplicity which manifests the thousand things below heaven.

A single glance at the text on both pages together is enough to fill the whole central vision of the eyes (this from about two feet away). The book is tall enough that it is difficult to focus on the top and bottom together. The two pages together cannot be seen in a glance; it requires scanning, and so it takes command of the reader by its width.

The words appear as six grey columns, studded with bits of dark (these are the headwords). The columns lean away from the reader, bent by the swell of the pages. The two centre columns lean in and down into the valley between them. As with the edges, one column (on the right this time) catches the daylight and the other is obscured.

At the top of each page, to the right and left are words in dark capitals: DESPITOUS . . . DESPONDENCY and DESPONDENCY (again!) . . . DESPOTISM. They look a little like the crenulations on the ends of a high wall, and between them are the page numbers. Sentries possibly.

Enough of that. Even if done with more skill (much more skill that we can manage) the best that could be achieved is a kind of hallucinatory vividness, an unnatural clarity, such as if sometimes found in photographs.

But the thing is per se false. It is true to the phenomena, but It is false, to experience itself, which is always partial and mutable. That is why there is nothing so spooky as lucidity.

Words cannot do everything.

What was it like walking that far? Tolkien might have answered “It was non-time, it was nothing. It was a bore. What was it like? Try it.” Words can tell you a lot about a rose, but if you want to experience a rose, get a rose.

A final remark. There are 21,700 plus pages in the OED, with three columns to a page. That is, 65,100 columns. We have experimented and judge that reading a column at a moderate rate, takes about ten minutes of concentrated work. To read the OED, therefore should take about 651,000 minutes. How long this is in years, at perhaps 12 hours a day, we will leave as an exercise . . . .