I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.

Four out of five books I read these days are books I’ve read before. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany, a novel cut to the measure of the Samuel Johnson maxim just posted and a story as involving on the fourth read as it was on the first some twenty years ago.

Why so much rereading, and all of it satisfying? For reasons having to do with the lyric power of that line from the epic of Job, that opening anthem of the Burial Office of the Book of Common Prayer. To read again words that fortify, words to live with is, as the poet L. E. Sissman said, to “return not as a pilgrim but as a familiar, almost a friend.” To put the same thing in a lapidary way and without being the least bit lugubrious about it, I reread books for the same reason I keep coming back to church; because I know I’m going to die. Sissman continues:

A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.