In praise of arbitrary limitations

Penjing demonstration, Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, OR.

Last year, I read 75 books.

To some people, this will seem like a lot. To others it won’t. It’s relevant to me because I’d had “read more books” as a new year’s resolution for several years running; despite this, since 2017 or so I averaged around 20 books a year and dipped in 2020 to fewer than 10 books that were not children’s books.¹

This bothered me because, like many people who’d been bookworms as kids, “reading a lot” felt like a vital part of my self-concept. I was that kid who had to have books taken away from me in school to force me to pay attention, who skipped recess to hang out in the library, who had to be sent to the principal’s office in third grade because I failed to come back from a trip to the bathroom and was found, an hour later, sprawled on the floor in an empty hallway, reading my way through a display shelf of chapter books for the upcoming book fair.² And that still felt like part of me, despite the fact that I hadn’t regularly read for pleasure since I started college more than a decade prior.

And I couldn’t figure out why I’d stopped. In college and law school I’d had the excuse that I was reading 500 pages or more of dense academic text per week, and I had no brain left over for other reading. But then I graduated, and still something was missing—some voraciousness, some sponginess. I didn’t soak things up like I remembered doing once. Something in my attention span was broken, some piece missing that made the whole machine run screwy.

I wondered if it came from the same part of me that sometimes opened the same website tab three or four times in the same browser, seeking different entertainment in the same places. I wondered if books had just gotten worse.

In late 2020, a friend sent me a 25-book reading challenge, one she’d done a few times before. A little more ambitious, I thought, than my pre-2020 twenty-ish book average. Enough of a crunch to lend some urgency, some sense of accomplishment; not so many that I gave up two months in. I modified the challenge slightly and made it my new year’s resolution to finish it. And then I read 75 books in a year.

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Last month, my wife and I decided we would each write a sonnet by the end of March.

We took diverging paths to the goal – she writes poetry regularly, I’ve basically never made an attempt. I checked out the Norton anthology The Making of a Sonnet from the library and spent a week with it before I even allowed myself to start having ideas.³

It’s a beautiful anthology. The best thing about it is that it’s all sonnets. It starts out with a couple of essays on the form, gives you five pages or so on the history, and then it’s just sonnets for the next 400 pages, arranged more or less chronologically. You just pick it up and mainline sonnets for as long as you like. You get the feeling, why would anybody write more sonnets? They’re all right here.⁴ You start to think, I know what a sonnet is like; I’ve come to understand everything you can do with a sonnet. And then somebody updates the form slightly for a new century—somebody allows for one additional or one fewer rhyme per unit—and you, coming across the first new iteration in the anthology, imagine you know what it feels like for those silent monks who are allowed to speak one day a year, when the day comes.

The sonnet is a particularly self-explanatory form, I learned. The first collection of twenty-six sonnets in the anthology are sonnets on the sonnet. Since the form came to England with Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early 1500s, the first task of the poet is to stand outside his or her own mind and watch it wrestle with the form, and try to describe the combat. “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines / And keep him there,” announces Edna St. Vincent Millay, to start the entire anthology.

There’s one in there I remember from high school – Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,” with that marvelous line, In truth the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is--

…and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

There are sonnets about absolutely everything, of course. But among the everything, the sonnet has become the English-language form considered most appropriate to explore the idea that tight constraints invite variation that is both measured and infinite. The unmoving must give definition to motion, “as ocean bed bears up the ocean, / As earth’s core bears the earth” (Louise Bogan).⁵ The play of shadows thrown against the wall requires a wall.

So I read sonnets for a couple of weeks; I went a few messy, truncated rounds against the form; and then I made a sonnet about the rounds I’d gone.

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At the end of a sonnet, what you have is having written a sonnet. At the end of 75 books, what I have is having read 75 books.

I don’t feel I came any closer to my youthful sponginess, nor became some better version of my current self. I look at the list and am already frustrated by how little I remember, even of the ones I liked most. I find myself wanting to do the entire year over again but, you know, really pay attention this time.

Still—I loved my time in bookshops in 2021. Those first nine entries on the list, with the unusual constraint of having had to be written in a certain geographic space, drew me inevitably to books in translation, which I’d only incidentally engaged with before. I found that 25 became 75 because a measured goal led to variation. I could circle one topic or time period or collective of authors for weeks before moving on to the next item on the list.

And I rediscovered voraciousness. I started carrying a book around with me and reading it on buses, on lunch breaks, in line at CVS. I walked into a telephone pole staring at a book instead of my phone for the first time since before smartphones were invented. My wife and I found a copy of A Man for All Seasons in a used bookstore and read the whole thing aloud together over one long, lovely evening.

Wordsworth describes the sonnet as a plot of ground, a narrow cell, a study carrel, a workshop, the inner chamber of a tubular flower—in all cases a place to which you go. We love roofs and walls. We know, I think, as Wordsworth says, that liberty has weight. We have to hold it up over our heads with the help of something load-bearing.

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“It’s like being vegan,” a vegan friend said recently. She was talking about the house she and her husband had spent a year gutting from the inside, which they’d made a pact early on to rebuild only with salvaged materials.

We were sitting inside the house’s accessory dwelling unit, a nearly-finished shed apartment with an entire wall given over to three tall, narrow windows, set at different heights, bridging the space between the first floor and the lofted bedroom. “Like, how you end up doing more with cooking when you’re vegan, because you have to put arbitrary limitations on yourself.” She gestured at the windows. Their tallness and narrowness had something of a Gothic cathedral, set under the vaulted roof of the shed. “You go in and the only decent thing at the salvage store that day is these giant skinny windows, so… what do we do with those?"

I was imagining some future tenant filling them with hanging plants, or small stained-glass panes; anything in them would catch the light and throw it across the whole apartment. They made the space feel twice as big.

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This post was edited on 3/24 to correct formatting errors in the footnotes. A couple of words were also added for clarity.

1. Not that there’s anything wrong with children’s books. I think a lot of us could have used some good children’s books in 2020. Incidentally, Gerald Morris’ Arthurian retellings for middle schoolers are still some of the best children’s literature out there.

2. The teacher loathed me and used the incident as grounds for public humiliation through the rest of the school year. The principal couldn’t figure out what she wanted him to punish me for. This was an important lesson about the nature of authority.

3. I’m pretty sure a premature idea is worse than no idea. With sonnets, I think you have to really work to not have them until it’s time. If you have ideas before you know the rules, you’re too tempted to throw out the rules and the whole project is out the window.

4. Though the editor’s note at the very beginning apologizes first and foremost for not including more sonnets.

5. This sonnet has 3.5 stars on poetrynook dot com. I want to interview the web designer who first decided to put a 5-star scale on poetrynook dot com, and then every single person who has since left a rating on that 5-star scale for Louise Bogan’s mid-20th century poem “Single Sonnet.” I just want to know how this happened.