Beginning a Book You Will Not Finish

You are about to read a story about a man named Dahl who was brought before a committee to explain why he had never finished a book.

But that is not quite right. You are about to read several beginnings of that story, none of which will reach their end, because the man in question — Dahl, let us call him Dahl, though his name shifts depending on who is telling it — would not have wanted it any other way.

Here is the first beginning.

The hearing was scheduled for ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning in July. Dahl arrived at nine forty-five because he had always been punctual, not out of respect for institutions but because waiting in hallways suited him. He liked the quality of light in public buildings before the business of the day began — the way it fell across linoleum without intention.

The building was on a side street near the harbor. He could smell the sea. He had eaten breakfast that morning: bread, a soft-boiled egg, black coffee. The coffee had been slightly too hot and he had waited for it to cool, watching steam curl above the cup, and the waiting had been neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It had simply been waiting. This is the kind of detail that will matter later, when the committee asks him to account for his inner life, because Dahl’s inner life is composed almost entirely of such moments — the steam, the temperature, the light on a floor — and he does not experience this as poverty.

The committee room was on the second floor. Five chairs behind a long table. Dahl took his seat in the wooden chair facing them. The chair was hard but not uncomfortable. He did not adjust his position.

“You understand why you’ve been called,” said the woman at the center of the table. She had short grey hair and reading glasses she did not use. They sat on the table in front of her like a verdict she had not yet opened.

“You want to discuss the books,” Dahl said.

“We want to understand,” she corrected him. “Your file indicates that you have borrowed two hundred and fourteen books from public libraries over a period of eleven years. You have returned all of them. You have finished none of them.”

This was accurate. Dahl did not dispute it. He was aware of the sun coming through the window behind the committee, catching dust in the air, and he noticed the dust the way he noticed most things — as a fact, not a symbol. Dust in sunlight. The world doing what it does without asking permission.

“Not one,” said the man to her left, younger, with a pen he kept clicking. The click had a rhythm. Dahl listened to it. “Two hundred and fourteen books, and you have never read past — what is it — ”

“It varies,” Dahl said. “Sometimes thirty pages. Sometimes sixty. Once I read a hundred and twelve pages of a novel about a man who builds a boat, and I was, I think, happy. But I stopped.”

“Why?”

“Because the boat was nearly finished.”

The committee exchanged looks. The man with the pen stopped clicking it. A woman at the end of the table — she had not spoken yet and would not speak for the rest of the hearing, but she took notes in a small red notebook — wrote something down. Dahl did not wonder what she wrote. Other people’s interpretations of him had always seemed to belong to them, the way a shadow belongs to the object rather than to the light.

“You stopped because the boat was nearly finished,” the chair repeated.

“In the novel, yes. The man had been building it for a long time. The prose was exact about the joinery, the way the planks curved, the smell of the wood. I could feel the shape of the boat forming. And then I realized I did not want to see it completed. Completion would have turned it into something — a vehicle, a symbol, a finished thing. While it was being built, it was all possibility. I preferred the building.”

Here is where the hearing stalled, and here is where we must pause, because Dahl’s answer to this question — to every question the committee would ask for the next hour — is the center of the story, and the center of the story is a place the story cannot go, not yet, perhaps not ever, and so instead of hearing his answer you will hear another beginning.

You are reading a story. You may or may not be aware of this. The words are arriving in order, each one trailing the last, and you are following them the way you follow a path — without thinking about the act of following, which is to say with trust. You trust that the path leads somewhere. This is the contract between a reader and a text: that the accumulation of sentences will produce, eventually, something — a meaning, a feeling, a resolution.

Dahl did not trust this.

Or rather — and the distinction matters — Dahl trusted it completely, which is why he stopped. He stopped not because the books failed but because they succeeded. Thirty pages in, sixty pages in, he could feel the machinery working. He could feel the narrative pulling him toward its conclusion the way gravity pulls a stone, and the pull was not unpleasant, but it was, for Dahl, unbearable, because the conclusion was not his. It belonged to the book. It belonged to the author. It belonged to the structure. And Dahl, sitting in his kitchen with his coffee cooling and the light falling across the table in that particular morning way, wanted to belong to nothing.

This is difficult to explain to a committee.

Here is the third beginning, which is the same story told by the committee’s secretary, Farah, who typed the minutes on a laptop whose keys she struck with a force that suggested she was not recording the proceedings but arguing with them.

The defendant presented himself calmly. Average height, brown hair that needed cutting, hands resting on his knees without fidgeting. He did not appear nervous. He did not appear anything. This was, if Farah was honest, the most unsettling thing about him — not the books but his failure to perform the anxiety that the situation seemed to require. The other committee members leaned forward in their chairs. They frowned. They took notes. They performed the gravity of judgment. Dahl sat still with an expression that was not defiance and not indifference but something Farah could not name, and the namelessness bothered her.

The committee chair asked him to describe his reading process.

“I open the book,” Dahl said. “I read the first sentence. If the first sentence is good, I read the second. I continue this way for some time.”

“And then?”

“And then I become aware that I am reading.”

The committee waited for him to continue. He did not continue. The silence was the kind that occurs when someone has said something true and the room has not yet decided whether truth is what it wanted.

“You become aware that you are reading,” the chair repeated.

“Yes. The book is in my hands. The words are on the page. I am in my kitchen, or on the bus, or in bed, and the words are producing images and feelings and the images and feelings are not mine. They are the book’s. And for a while I don’t notice this, and that not-noticing is, I think, what people call reading. But then I notice. I feel the page between my fingers. I hear the bus. I see the coffee. And the story, which had been a world, becomes marks on paper, and I cannot un-notice this, and the book and I are in the same room but we are no longer in the same country, and I put it down.”

Farah typed this. She typed it accurately because that was her job, and she did not add commentary because that was not her job, but she noticed that her hands paused at the phrase the book and I are in the same room but we are no longer in the same country, and the pause was not mechanical. She had been a secretary for the committee for six years. She had typed the testimonies of people who read too much, people who read the wrong things, people who defaced library books with annotations so personal they constituted confession. But she had never typed the testimony of someone who simply surfaced. That was his word. Surfaced. As if reading were submersion and living were air and between them a boundary he could not stop himself from crossing back through.

You are still reading. You have not stopped. Perhaps you considered it — a flicker of awareness, a moment where the words became shapes on a screen rather than a story in a room — but you continued. Dahl would have found you interesting. Not because you are reading but because you have chosen, somewhere in the silence between sentences, to keep choosing. You are performing an act of sustained trust that Dahl could not perform, or would not.

Here is what the committee could not understand, stated plainly because Dahl was a plain man and the Mediterranean light outside the hearing room did not require ornament:

Every book is a small death.

Not a metaphorical death. An actual death of the present moment, in which the reader agrees to stop being where they are and to be, instead, where the text puts them. The reader gives up the coffee, the bus, the bedsheet against the shin, and receives in exchange a world made of words, and this exchange is, for most people, the entire point. You leave yourself. You enter the book. You return changed, or entertained, or moved.

Dahl could not make this exchange. He could begin it — the first ten, twenty, fifty pages were a loosening of the self’s grip on its own coordinates — but at some point the exchange completed itself, and he felt himself absent from his own life, and the absence was so sharp that it woke him, the way a dreamer is woken by the dream becoming too vivid, and he was back in his kitchen with the book in his hands and the coffee cold and the light changed.

He did not mourn the books. He felt, each time, a small clean clarity. He was here. The page was there. The distance between them was real and it was a kind of honesty the books themselves could not provide, because books require you to believe their world is more important than yours, at least for the duration, and Dahl could not believe this — not because his world was extraordinary but because it was his, and its ordinariness was specific and irreplaceable, and the coffee was this coffee, and the light was this light, and no sentence, however perfect, could substitute for the fact of sitting in a room in the actual morning of an actual day.

The committee deliberated for forty minutes. Dahl waited in the hallway. He sat on a bench with a cracked vinyl seat. The linoleum was green. A water fountain at the end of the corridor dripped at intervals just irregular enough to prevent prediction. A fly landed on the window and cleaned its front legs. Dahl watched the fly the way he watched most things — with attention that did not seek meaning, that simply registered the legs, the wings, the glass, the light behind the glass. The fly was a fly. The window was a window. The hallway was a hallway in a building on a street near the harbor in a city where people finished books and believed that finishing was a kind of virtue.

When they called him back in, the chair read the committee’s finding. Her voice was level but there was something in it — a note of frustration, perhaps, or bewilderment — that the level tone could not entirely contain.

“We find,” she said, “that your failure to complete any of the two hundred and fourteen borrowed texts constitutes a pattern of disengagement inconsistent with the responsibilities of an enrolled reader. We note that you have offered no medical, psychological, or circumstantial explanation for this pattern. We note that you have expressed no remorse.”

“Remorse,” Dahl repeated. Not as a question. Just the word, held up and looked at.

“You are aware that reading is considered a civic participation.”

“I am.”

“And that the completion of borrowed texts is part of the social contract between the reader, the library, and the community.”

“I return them on time,” Dahl said. “In good condition.”

“That is not the issue.”

“I know.”

“The issue is your interior relationship to the act of reading. Your failure to complete suggests a refusal of empathy, of narrative investment, of — ”

“Of being somewhere else,” Dahl said.

The room went quiet. Outside, the harbor made its harbor sounds — ropes against masts, water against stone, a gull — and Dahl sat in the silence the way he sat in all silences, as though silence were a room with good light and no furniture.

You are approaching the end of this story, which means you have done what Dahl could not, or would not. You have followed the sentences to their conclusion. You have trusted the path. But I want to ask you something, here, near the end: Did you notice the moment when you forgot you were reading? Was there a passage — the fly on the glass, the hallway light, the coffee cooling — where the words dissolved and you were simply there, inside a world not your own? And if so, what brought you back? What was your version of Dahl’s noticing — the instant when the page reasserted itself as a page?

Because this is the trial. Not the hearing on the second floor of the building near the harbor. Not the committee with their findings and their conviction that finishing is a form of moral participation. The trial is here, between you and these sentences, and the verdict is happening now.

Here is the last beginning, which is also the ending, because in this version of the story there is no committee and no hearing and no Dahl. There is only a man — call him what you like — sitting in a kitchen in a coastal city on a Tuesday morning in July. The light comes through the window at an angle that is specific to this hour, this season, this latitude. He has a book open on the table. He has read forty-one pages. The book is good. The book is about a traveler who arrives in a city and discovers that every street leads to a different story, and each story contains the beginning of another story, and the traveler never reaches any destination because the destinations keep multiplying, and the man in the kitchen finds this beautiful, but he is also aware of his own hand on the page, and of the coffee, and of the particular way the light falls on the table like something that has traveled ninety-three million miles to illuminate a surface that did not ask to be illuminated, and this awareness — this stupid, ordinary awareness of being a body in a room holding a book — fills him so completely that the book becomes, for a moment, unnecessary, and he closes it gently, the way you close a door when you know you will not return but do not want the closing to sound like leaving, and he sits in the kitchen in the light and he is here and the book is there and the morning is the morning and he is, for a few seconds that do not belong to any narrative, free.

Not free from something. Not free toward something. Free the way the light on the table is free — without object, without purpose, without meaning anything at all.

Then the seconds pass. He picks up his coffee. He looks out the window. The harbor is doing what harbors do.

He will not finish the book. He will return it to the library next Tuesday. He will borrow another. He will begin it with the same attention and the same certainty that at some point the reading will break and he will surface into his own life, gasping, blinking, alive in a way that the story cannot accommodate, and he will close that book too, and the librarian will scan the barcode and place it on the return cart and it will go back to the shelf where it will wait for a reader who will finish it, and that reader will be someone else, someone who can stay inside the story until the story decides to let them go, and Dahl — we will call him Dahl, because a name is a kind of frame and a frame is a kind of story and a story is a kind of beginning — Dahl will walk home along the harbor where the boats lean on their ropes and the water is green and opaque and the sun is direct and means nothing and illuminates everything.

You have finished. Dahl has not. Both of these things are true. The committee would like you to choose.

You are free to close this page.