'It Can Be Exalting'

“Do you ever feel that you spend too much time with books?” The answer true to the spirit of the age would be to respond in the positive and ’fess up to the years wasted, money lost, opportunities missed, relationships scuttled, life in general squandered. That would earn me sympathetic murmurs and pats on the shoulder from my fellow addicts, gathered here in a church basement. (“I can quit anytime I want.”) But that’s not the case. I have no regrets for devoting a hefty proportion of my life between the pages of books, especially when I think of popular alternatives. The question was posed by a friend, a retired attorney who is my age and as well-read as anyone currently in my life. “Apart from my family,” he writes, “especially my grandkids, my life in retirement is taken up mostly by reading.” What else is a septuagenarian to do besides, in my case, writing? The driver of my reading is only secondarily a hunger for ideas. Rather, it’s a hunger for words. My friend writes: “This…