A Horse at Night by Amina Cain
Review by Claire Thomson
Every January, certain corners of social media are filled with people announcing their reading goals for the year — fifty, sixty, even 365 books. Max Liu’s recent Guardian piece advises people considering attempting to cram as many books in as possible for the sake of a public challenge to simply not bother. Instead, ‘resolve to read for pleasure, not as a chore.’
Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night takes this advice further. Cain’s book on writing invites us to consider reading neither a chore nor a pleasure, but an essential part of a fulfilling life. It is an ideal corrective to slavishly tallying up the books we’ve read on Amazon-owned Goodreads. A Horse at Night is not a cynical book. Its earnest and thoughtful celebration and exploration of the pleasures and powers of reading is disarming.
As she takes us on a journey through her personal canon, Cain offers us a timely and important apology for the symbiosis of reading and life. And between reading and writing. Perhaps the book’s defining sentence comes early in the text: ‘At night I am surrounded by my books, not the one I am writing.’ Your books could be the ones you’ve written and published, those piled by your bed yet to be read, those which comforted you as a child, or those ruined by your squint underlining.
Cain’s citations are generous. This is not a creative writing manual but an invitation to the personal canon which has sustained Cain’s creativity and person. As Sara Ahmed says: ‘… citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.’
The book’s title belies its breadth. The paths Cain follows in A Horse at Night range far beyond books and writing — from plants to animals, from film to painting. Whatever the topic, Cain is concerned with the boundaries between mental interpretation and physical experience, between wild and domestic and between human and animal. She invites us to question how much those binaries were ever really there.
Discussing a passage in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, Cain writes: ‘After one gets out of the bath the feeling stays for a while. The same thing happens with reading, of course. When one closes a book it doesn’t mean the feeling of the book closes too.’ For Cain, reading and writing linger in the body.
The idea of projection is important to the book. Cain argues that much of reading, writing and engaging with the world around us involves a degree of projection. ‘What we see in our minds we make real.’ Some of the book’s strongest sections concern the inequity of this projection. When we commit an impression or a feeling to paper, we might hope to do so with authority. All we can truthfully say is that our words explain how it felt to us, how it seemed: ‘I project what I want, what I’m obsessed with, onto my writing more than any other place.’
There is a haunting quality to Cain’s description of what reading does to us. We can never truly let go of what we have read, much less what we have written. And how does anyone choose what remains unwritten? \Like thinking and talking; what remains in the mind and what actually gets said. What is it that should be written down? What should be drawn or painted? Which details are the ones that will illuminate the text, making it memorable?’
In asking these questions about writing and art, Cain also asks them of life. How do we know which experiences we’ll remember, or want to? We can’t know. But A Horse at Night invites us to be anchored by what we read and what we might write along the way.