What better time than summer for a hot take?

I am an English instructor; that means I read for a living—and of course the whole reason I subjected myself to this increasingly impossible career track is because I have always loved to read in the first place. Jorge Luis Borges famously said that he considered himself more a reader than a writer, and I do as well. I’m one of those weirdos who brings a book with me wherever I go, even if it’s to a party or a concert or a camping trip or what have you, because (in the words of all those 2nd amendment enthusiasts I knew in Utah), I’d rather have it and not need it then need it and not have it.

In an era when something like 60% of all Americans never read another book again after college, I get frustrated that I have only been able to finish about 50 or so books a year since the kids were born. Printed-on-paper is of course my first preference, but I will happily whip out the kindle app on my phone if I find myself stuck in a line at the DMV, or a grocery store, or while sitting in the dark trying to get the kids to sleep at night. I say all this not to brag or any nonsense like that (heaven knows there are plenty of well-read snobs in this world who completely miss the point of the books they consume, just as there are straight-up illiterates all across God’s green earth who are among the kindest, most generous people you will ever meet), but only to establish that reading for me is a compulsion, a passion. I’d rather be reading than not.

Yet the one place I never bring a book to is the beach—that is, the one place where it is more socially acceptable to read in public than anywhere else.

The reasons why I don’t similarly avail myself of this social ritual are obscure even to myself. I live near the ocean nowadays you see, and one of the genuine perks of teaching is that I have summers off, so consequently I take my kids to the beach a lot. It would of course be a safety concern for me to have a nose in a book while trying to keep an eye on small children playing near a riptide, but let’s be clear: I was also not bringing a book to the beach long before the kids were born. Nor is my aversion to beach-reading from any clumsy concern that the salt-water will damage the pages; the sands are obviously crowded with beach-readers galore who keep their books clean just fine, and I’m reasonably certain I would as well. Nor is it even simply that I’d rather be splashing in the waves than sitting on the sand, because I never bring a book to the beach in the winter months either, when it’s far too cold to get in the water.

And I should be overjoyed anytime I see anyone reading anywhere, including the beach! Again, something like 60% of all Americans never finish another book after college; if someone is reading a book on the beach, at least they are reading. Yet still I find myself actively baffled, even mildly irritated, anytime I spot someone with a book by the seaside. And why should that be, I keep asking myself?

I suspect that a part of it is simply that the ocean feels too big to read next to. By way of contrast, you would never flip through a book at the rim of the Grand Canyon, or on a mountain peak, or on the International Space Station, so why would you at the ocean? I fear that familiarity breeds contempt, that because it is so much easier to drive to a beach than it is to drive through the Arizona heat or scale a mountain side or launch into outer space, so we fail to appreciate just how massive the ocean is, of what an absolute miracle it is that it even exists. You remember the part in Helaman 16 when the people become so accustomed to miracles that they begin to ignore them? The same happens to far too may of us at the sea. We treat it far too much like a backdrop, rather than confront its mystery directly. That is, you don’t read at the ocean, you read the ocean directly. You might as well read a book during a Temple endowment session, or while making love to your spouse, as read in front of the ocean.

As Hugh Nibley argued in his own defense of the Temple, there is more information communicated to us in a single photon of light than we can possibly hope to decipher in an entire lifetime (it’s why for him, the Temple is an inexhaustible fount of light and knowledge, rather than some dull, rote ritual), and the same can be said of every drop of water in the incomprehensibly massive ocean and every glimmer of sunlight that reflects off its sprawling, glimmering surface. We know less about the depths of the oceans than we do about the stars above us, yet even just the surface alone is an incomprehensible mystery. It’s not that a book becomes trivial when you are standing before the awesome mystery of eternity–of which the ocean is at once both a metaphor and a metonym–but rather that, at the ocean, you are now reading from the biggest book of all, the infinite one from which all other books are derived, contained, and illuminated. Reading at the ocean is like a Pharisee reading from scripture on the sanctity of the Sabbath, all while the Lord of the Sabbath Himself is standing right in front of you.

At the beach, the book in your hand is but the paltry Cliff Notes version of the massive text before you, one that cries out everlastingly out to be read. The Book of Revelations and Doctrine and Covenants alike inform us that the the Celestial Kingdom will be a “sea of fire and glass,” where all things will be revealed. Your book in hand is but the one small drop of infinity you take away with you when you can no longer be at the ocean; the ocean itself is where you confront the infinite. Immerse yourself in a good book? Immerse yourself in the sea instead, and thereby be possessed of all books ever written.