On Rereading

There is a particular kind of loneliness in rereading a book you loved at twenty. Not because the book has gotten worse — though sometimes it has — but because you can feel, on every page, the ghost of the person you were when you first read it. I reread *Giovanni's Room* last winter, a decade after I first read it on a train somewhere in Italy, twenty-two years old and convinced that sadness was a sign of depth. I remembered loving it fiercely. I remembered feeling that Baldwin had somehow described my interior life back to me more precisely than I ever could myself. The second reading was different. Not worse — richer, actually. But I could see things I had missed: the way David's self-deception is not just psychological but moral, the way his cruelty toward Giovanni comes from the same place as his cruelty toward himself. At twenty-two, I had romanticized his paralysis. At thirty-two, I found it heartbreaking in a different key. This is what rereading teaches you: you are not the same reader twice. The book sits still. You move. I have a friend who refuses to reread anything. Life is too short, she says,...