By myself reading for days

Taking an absorption vacation

In December, I came across the idea of an absorption vacation. The idea is to go someplace other than your home, by yourself or with a companion who is totally on board, and to spend time in an activity that you find completely absorbing, apart from the responsibilities and distractions of everyday life. No laundry, no smart phone, no paid work, no appointments, no caretaking, minimal cleaning and cooking (unless preparing gourmet meals is the activity you want to lose yourself in, in which case, you’re invited on my next absorption vacation). No obligations.

Just a clean, beautiful, comfortable, quiet space, meals that require a minimum of effort and cleanup, your activity, and you.

There is a beautiful, lovingly restored old inn a mile from my house that offers locals one weeknight a year, during the off-season, where you pay what you like for a room. Earlier this week I checked in by myself for two nights, bringing a small suitcase, snacks, a 12-pack of seltzer, and a stack of books. I also brought an unreasonable number of bath and skin care products, because I’d booked a room with a clawfoot tub.

I ordered in my dinners and turned off my phone. And I read. I read in a chair, on the bed, in the tub. I read in the downstairs solarium and in a small library on the second floor. I took myself out for breakfast and read at a cafe I don’t usually go to, by the fire, while eating crepes. I stayed off social media. I slept long one night and stayed up too late reading the other night. I drank a lot of delicious coffee from the Jura.

I read, as it turned out, books about snow. Today, February 8, it is sunny and over 60° in Ithaca. Normally (“normally”) it would be around 30°. And so I read myself into winter: Animal Life by the Icelandic author Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir; Smilla’s Sense of Snow by the Danish author Peter Høeg; and, after reading Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book in the Dark Is Rising sequence by the English writer Susan Cooper, which takes place by the sea in summer, I started the second book, The Dark Is Rising, which takes place at winter solstice in a land of snow. In the vicissitude of climate collapse, I retreat into a world of snow.

My ability to become absorbed in the book I’m reading has been compromised over the years: by adult responsibilities, yes, and lack of sleep, which I suffer from chronically. Perhaps by the years I spent reading nothing but philosophy and other nonfiction; I had to relearn reading fiction, and reading for pleasure. By the dissociation of chemotherapy and the great unraveling of menopause. But I think the biggest culprits have been consuming social media and reading online—scanning for information, jonesing for dopamine hits.

I read more slowly than I used to, and I have a harder time sinking into a story, losing track of myself and the time. On this vacation, I kept pretending what I want to be true: that what matters to me is not how much I read but how much I enjoy it. But the point of the vacation, for me, was to read a lot, and to read for long uninterrupted stretches. To remember what it is to become absorbed by story, and to get through a few books, because my TBR list is long, and people keep writing books.

I didn’t fully succeed in either goal—to read as much as I wanted to or to sink in as deeply as I longed for. Even though reading is all I did. But absorption vacation is not about goals! It’s not about finishing a chapter or a draft, or getting through a bunch of reading for an exam, or meeting an athletic challenge. I know that two nights—only one full day!—is not so much time, and that it might take a longer stay for me to sink deep into the stories. But the next time I take an absorption vacation, I will remind myself to have no expectations, however implicit.

I returned home content and relaxed, filled with the beauty of the place I stayed, the words I read, and the time I took to be my happily introverted self.