Eat This Book

Manguel is fascinated by the metaphor, and on occasion the practice, of the ingestion of the word by the reader. Thus, in his chapter on "Learning to Read":

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication. The child learning to read is admitted into the communal memory by way of books, and thereby becomes acquainted with a common past which he or she renews, to a greater or lesser degree, in every reading. In medieval Jewish society, for instance, the ritual of learning to read was explicitly celebrated. On the Feast of Shavuot, when Moses received the Torah from the hands of God, the boy about to be initiated was wrapped in a prayer shawl and taken by his father to the teacher. The teacher sat the boy on his lap and showed him a slate on which were written the Hebrew alphabet, a passage from the Scriptures and the words "May the Torah be your occupation." The teacher read out every word and the child repeated it. Then the slate was covered with honey and the child licked it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words. Also, biblical verses were written on peeled hard-boiled eggs and on honey cakes, which the child would eat after reading the verses out loud to the teacher.

--page 71.

And in his chapter on "Metaphors of Reading", he picks up the idea again in a more extended passage:

Just as writers speak of cooking up a story, rehashing a text, having half-baked ideas for a plot, spicing up a scene or garnishing the bare bones of an argument, turning the ingredients of a potboiler into soggy prose, a slice of life peppered with allusions into which readers can sink their teeth, we, the readers, speak of savouring a book, of finding nourishment in it, of devouring a book at one sitting, or regurgitating or spewing up a text, of ruminating on a passage, of rolling a poet's words on the tongue, of feasting on poetry, or living on a diet of detective stories. In an essay on the art of studying, the sixteenth-century English scholar Francis Bacon catalogued the process: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

By extraordinary chance we know on what date this curious metaphor was first recorded. On July 31, 593 B.C., by the river Chebar in the land of the Chaldeans, Ezekiel the priest had a visiopn of fire in which he saw "the likeness of the glory of the Lord" ordering him to speak to the rebellious children of Israel. "Open thy mouth, and eat what I give you," the vision instructed him.

And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein;

And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.

Saint John, recording his apocalyptic vision on Patmos, received the same revelation as Ezekiel. As he watched in terror, an angel came down from heaven with an open book, and a thundering voice told him not to write what he had learned, but to take the book from the angel's hand.

And I went unto the angel, and said unto him. Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make they belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten, it, my belly was bitter.

And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.

Eventually, as reading developed and expanded, the gastronomic metaphor because common rhetoric. In Shakespeare's time it was expected in literary parlance, and Queen Elizabeth I hersself used it to describe her devotional reading: "I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holye Scriptures, where I pluck up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences, eate them by reading, chewe them up musing, and laie them up at length on the seate of memorie . . . so I may the lesse perceive the bitterness of this miserable life." By 1695 the metaphor had become so ingrained in the language that William Congreve was able to parody it in the opening scene of Love for Love, having the pedantic Valentine say to his valet, "Read, read, sirrah! and refine your appetite; read, and take your nourishment in at your eyes; shut up your mouth, and chew the cud of understanding." "You'll grow devilish fat upon this paper diet," is the valet's comment.

--pages 170-72.