Caleb Crain has a lovely post on re-reading Moby Dick for the umpteenth time, but in his 50s. He writes:

What’s it like to read Moby-Dick when you’re Ahab’s age? There are probably a number of things I no longer see as acutely as when I had young eyes, but some elements are now in sharper focus. When young, I had only the vaguest sense, in any given chapter, where Ishmael was, geographically speaking. For me then, the important seas to be swimming through were of metaphor and feeling. Now I see that Melville is actually pretty careful to map the Pequod’s journey; in late middle age, my internal GPS module keeps better track of where I as a reader am supposed to be—so much better track that it’s a bit of a comedown to realize that the epic events of the novel happen in specific actual places, not just in elemental spheres.

Crain’s meditation strikes a visceral and personal chord in me. As an older reader—I’m 57—I’m more attuned to questions of time and place within any text than I used to be. Architecture and structure are more important to me, now, and those specifics of time and place are some of the ways in which I keep my sense of the larger form of any text, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.

When I was younger, and I wonder if this is true of other readers, questions of psychology and personality, the inner life of a character in a novel or a historical figure in nonfiction, were the only things that I could grasp. As adolescents and younger people, we live so much in our own heads; worldliness seems like science fiction. At least it did to me. It’s almost as if, when we’re young, minds and other minds are the only things we can imagine to be real.

In middle age, I find myself paying so much more attention to the external world around me, whether it’s the built environment or the natural world, not to mention the political world. I fixate on trees, birds, bugs, and other critters (the kinds of thing that little kids pay attention to) and on buildings and structures and streets. The physicality of the world impresses itself upon me in a way that it did not when I was younger.

My relationship to historical time has changed, too. I remember when I was an undergraduate in history classes, trying to keep straight the differences in centuries, and what happened when and where, was something I had to work at, particularly in the early modern era, in which I took many courses. Trying to distinguish between the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries was a chore of almost insuperable difficulty. I see the same kind of lostness in my own students, struggling to keep straight the differences between the 20th and 19th centuries. Everything that happened before the last few decades seems like ancient history.

I’m now reading, as I’ve mentioned, several histories of capitalism, many of which follow the Braudel-ian route back to the eleventh century or so. Situating myself now within the different centuries feels like a more natural, almost instinctive, way of reading. Aden becomes a thing in the 11th century, Genoa in the 13th century, Antwerp in the 16th, and so on. My sense of time matches the movement of my eye on a map. My younger self would have raced past those details of time and place, latching on instead to the big arguments and claims. My 57-year-old self feels like they are lifelines to any form of real understanding.

One of the things that I admire about Sven Beckert’s new book on capitalism, which I am reviewing, is how attentive he is to this kind of reading and writing. He creates an extraordinarily clear temporal geography, tracking the movement of central stops and depots of capital from Japan to West Africa, century by century. The reader always knows where he is, in time and place. That’s no easy thing.