How I read -- and live

By Edwin Shneidman

I am a thanatologist, a person who specializes in the study of death and dying as well as suicide prevention. Although my patients — suicidal and dying persons — have been my teachers, without books I would be illiterate. For me, a library is a sacred place. My avocation is reading.

I have always read “aggressively,” that is, in the middle of practically every sentence, I pause for a split second and try to complete the sentence in my own way. That brings a certain tension and excitement to the act of reading and allows me to have an active dialogue with the author.

Recently, I had a memory that has been dormant for more than 80 years. I must have been 4 or 5. I was attempting to read a book with my Aunt Dora — a bright, young woman, 30 years my senior. When we were in the middle of a sentence, she would say to me: “And how do you think that turns out?”

All my life I have read in this participative way, leaning into sentences. This allows me to see every book as a whole. And, as a child, I must have grasped the one essential attribute of books: that, like life itself, books are finite. (This puts me on guard about grandiose words like “forever,” “eternal” and “afterlife.”)

There is, of course, an unspoken and somewhat grandiose goal in anticipating the end of an author’s sentence: It is to improve what the author has written, to say it better, to make another (perhaps more cogent) point.

The most difficult book in which to anticipate the end of a sentence — by far the most exciting book in my life — is “Moby Dick.” It’s virtually impossible to read ahead in this novel because very few people had Herman Melville’s linguistic creativity and power of active imagination. A master of the one-liner, he was an even greater master of absolutely original three- and four-worders such as “he tasks me, he heaps me” and “reality outran apprehension.”

Each life is an opus. My conceit lies in my aspiration: I would like to live a magnum opus, becoming more than a journeyman thinker. I have been helped in this quest by three things: my restlessness, my habit of reading proactively and my deep need for a few intense relationships.

And so it is that I’ve always lived a trifle off center, shunning an absolute state of balance, if there’s such a thing at all. It’s a way of life that requires constant alertness and an eye for new interpretations in seemingly ordinary situations. It puts a dash of excitement in the recipe of a life worth living.

For making such a life possible, I am grateful to my parents, spouse, children, grandchildren, mentors and friends. But I give a billion thanks to my individual brain cells for providing me with an endlessly fascinating, introspective theater in which I have been provided the only reserved seat.

Shneidman is professor emeritus of thanatology.