Index Cards by Moyra Davey or a Meditation on Reading
Moyra Davey is an artist whose work comprises the fields of photography, filmmaking, and writing. She has produced several works of film, the one I’m familiar with is Les Goddesses, where Davey introduces the proto-feminist philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as her children and her lovers and draws parallels between her experiences and her family, and Wollstonecraft’s family.
I discovered Moyra Davey a few years ago, when I came across her essay “The Problem of Reading,” which is included in her book Index Cards, published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions. Davey’s “problem of reading” is not the problem of reading or the habit of reading, but rather the problem of reading choices. “What to read?” writes Davey, “is a recurring dilemma in my life.” It is also an ongoing issue in my life. Given that our time is limited, the problem of “What to read next” becomes real and urgent, for a reader, anyway.
If you search the term “What to read next,” on the internet you will see 10s of webpages that can help you find your next perfect reading based on your mood and preferences. Not sure how their algorithms work but it never worked for me. I suppose it depends on what kind of reader one is. In “Hours in a Library,” Virginia Woolf distinguishes between “the man who loves learning and the man who loves reading… and there is no connection between the two.” The man who loves learning is a “sedentary, solitary enthusiast,” who is searching for truth. A reader, on the other hand, is active and tireless, “a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open minded and communicative, to whom reading is more of the nature of brisk exercise in the open air than of sheltered study.” If knowledge sticks to him well and good, “but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what it suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.”
As much as I admire Virginia Woolf, I don’t completely agree with this distinction. I love learning and I love reading. My reading choices are determined by my desire to delve deeper into a subject and by my curiosity to explore new ideas, to expand my knowledge and to feed my imagination. The challenge is to find the balance between the two. I must admit that I am not always successful in finding this balance.
Davey’s Index Cards is not only about The Problem of Reading, though. It’s a collection of writings about reading and writing, writings about accidents or other mediums of art such as photography. Her writing is intuitive and personal. To me it felt like a meditation on reading and writing, a subject that interests me and I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. To paraphrase Chekhov, if you have only a life to live why would you like to spend it on reading, or writing. Why don’t you do something else, like go sailing or make money, or just be lazy. What is on reading or writing, which is very solitary and infinitely harder that make us want spend our lives around and within books.
I do not have an answer to that. But books are among the few things that haven’t just been completely arrested by the pandemic, books continued to be printed and to be written, and read, more than ever. I don’t know but to me that shows the need that people have for books, for stories, especially at moments like this. Reading helps us see more than is otherwise seen and focus on what ultimately matter.