Whenever people mention my so-called passion for reading, I always start to bristle. After all, to be known as a book lover -- how grotesque. It's like being called a eunuch or an old maid; one always hears that faint sneer of disdain and condescension mixed with pity. To be bookish is to be mousy, repressed, a shy wallflower, incapable of getting along with people, dreamy and poetic, helpless in the real world.

Shocking as it may seem, my real "love" isn't so much for reading as for pleasure -- it merely happens that learning new things delights me, as do fast-paced stories, imaginative wordplay, distinctive prose styles. Should I be congratulated for being a self-indulgent hedonist? I certainly wouldn't read books if they were boring, irrelevant and soporific -- which is how most high-school kids regard the classics of world literature. No, I read for excitement. Everything else is secondary. In another incarnation I might spend all my free hours quaffing Dos Equis down at Mo's, or watching "Law & Order" reruns or chatting up hotties in tight skirts. In fact, who's to say that a life is more enriched by Gibbon or Eudora Welty than it is by playing electric guitar in a rock band or puttering on weekends in a weedy garden or taking whining kids on hikes in Yosemite? Not I.

Of course, nobody does just one thing all the time, not even the most myopic of bookworms. Yet few committed readers -- that is, those who particularly value the life of the mind -- fully escape the sense of leading second-rate, second-hand existences. The world swaggers with aggressive overreachers, fiercely competitive visionaries, and confident glad-handers on the make, while we, mere spectators of this tohu-bohu, thoughtfully register fine perceptions and various soulful thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Privately we suspect that all the clichés really are true. We scurry away from the bright, hard-edged Outside into our cozy Wind-in-the-Willows dens and book-lined studies. How cautious we are, how careful our habits! Perhaps we should wear cardigans and always look mildly dazed -- down-at-heel Omegas in a world of strutting Alphas.

In our more despondent moods we even wonder: Wouldn't life be richer, fuller somehow, as a snappily dressed realtor or a serious, down-to-earth engineer or the city manager of Akron? Or even as something utterly outlandish -- an alligator wrestler in Florida, a gambler in New Orleans? Why not? Oh, to oversee, sell, build, take risks, to do anything but sprawl in an overstuffed chair, sip pale green tea (need those anti-oxidants!), and learn about ancient libraries, 18th-century biography and other people's love affairs.

Which is more pathetic -- to live such a passive existence, or to despise it? "Can anything," wrote Lytton Strachey, "be more bitter than to be doomed to a life of literature and hot water bottles when one's a pirate at heart?" Take my own sad case: A Rust Belt kid, in whose veins flows the blood of Cossacks, who grew up hunting with slingshots, bows and rifles, who studied Scarne on Cards and taught himself to deal seconds, who ran away from home at 14 for five days and hitchhiked around the East Coast, who in his youth worked on farms, in steel mills, even as a Fuller Brush salesman, who could install a new clutch on a '58 Ford and used to race a dark-blue GTO and once crashed a Honda motorcycle, who slept in flophouses in Mexico at 17 and at 21 drank pastis in Marseille every afternoon for a year, who got in fights and was shot in the arm by his favorite cousin and who to this day always carries a knife -- how could such a typical American male have become a mere Reader, that apotheosis of the nerd and the wimp?

Alas, it was all too easy.

Gertrude Stein once wrote she felt that nothing in life had ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. And, with few exceptions, I know that nothing in life has been more thrilling than reading books, whether a Rick Brant "electronic" adventure -- is it true that author John Blaine used to live around here? -- or Tarzan or Tender Is the Night or "Hamlet" or Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde or "The Waste Land" or Wuthering Heights. To study the engravement of Flaubert's sentences or Updike's, to follow the subtle wit of Jane Austen and Muriel Spark, to guffaw with S.J. Perelman -- who could resist the seductive patter of these sirens and sorcerers of the page? I certainly couldn't. Ever.

Yet now, after more than four decades of reading, I sometimes wonder if books have repaid me well enough for all I've given to them. Aren't they, for example, supposed to help us endure the sorrows that the years bring? But the pangs suffered during life's myriad vicissitudes are, in my experience, seldom assuaged by even the wisest words. I've revered the great moralists all my adult life -- Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Stendhal and Freud have been my mentors, my heroes. But at times of crisis I've wept and pleaded and ached with yearning or sadness and found no relief in their writing. Instead, solace has more often come from a caress or a kiss, from tender words, a prayer or, ultimately, only from the slow, annealing passage of time.

Perhaps I'm simply not an especially good reader, albeit a steady and even relentless one. Does a critic like Elizabeth Hardwick or Frank Kermode feel so oddly ambivalent about books? I visited the poet, translator and teacher Richard Howard earlier this summer. His apartment off Washington Square in New York is chockablock with poetry, criticism, fiction. His bathroom walls sport hundreds of photographs of writers. Howard has obviously designed a life around the printed word -- and he struck me as deeply happy, a man doing that for which he was intended. I envied him his serenity.

For me, though, books -- for all the exhilaration they afford -- have also been sources of confusion and anxiety. Consider: Through reading we learn to weigh possibilities, to be vigilantly aware of nuance and sensitive to multiple viewpoints. All well and good -- until there comes a day when suddenly you need to be decisive. Should I sell my house or add on? Should I leave my husband for my lover? Should I quit my job and head on down that long, lonesome highway? How does one decide? Novel readers laboriously try to unravel the Gordian knots of life, when a sword thrust usually works a whole lot better. Too much consciousness -- a disease, a positive disease -- generally leads to endless dithering and vacillation. Like the people in Cavafy's poem, we begin to envy the barbarians: They make things simple. Alas, reading never teaches clarity; it only teaches complexity.

And so, at a certain age, you wake up near dawn and wonder: What does it profit a man if he gain a whole library and lose his immortal soul? Does a reader, lying on his deathbed, think back to the time he lingered over Thomas Browne's Urn Burial or discovered the poetry of Robert Frost or first opened the pages of Lolita? Or does he recall the look of the sky in Provence at dusk, the first night he saw the woman he loved unbutton her blouse, the taste of a ham sandwich on rye with sweet pickles, the rush of driving a loud, souped-up car way too fast, or listening to Gene Pitney on the radio singing "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," or that time he won two stuffed bears at a shopping-plaza carnival, or the particular languorous happiness of long summer afternoons at the beach? We don't remember days, said Cesare Pavese, we remember moments. I doubt that we remember books.

What matters in life? Aren't the classics supposed to answer that fundamental question? Well, they don't. Instead they simply present you with options, choices, possiblities, alternatives, ambiguities. All of which can be stimulating and even useful to a disinterested mind. But if you really need to know what to do? Then they're no help at all. Maybe everyone except me has always recognized this. Certainly professors and scholars tend to bungle their lives as often as housewives or factory workers do. Probably more often, in fact. Books can obviously add color to our daydreams, sharpen our hungers or soothe us with the peace of the page. One can impress a minuscule subset of human beings by quoting lines from Roethke ("I knew a woman lovely in her bones") or by identifying Monroe Stahr as the hero of The Last Tycoon. But one can obviously be perfectly, or at least reasonably, content without reading anything at all. Perhaps more so.

And yet. So much of life passes us by, unappreciated, the beauty or preciousness of a particular moment only evident in retrospect. Then gradually time leaches away the remaining vivaciousness, until we are left with only the faintest of outlines and just a few brightly colored moments, the ones that will flutter through our dying minds. It's heartbreaking how much is taken from us. I spent four years in graduate school and can hardly recollect a single class, can scarcely visualize Ithaca, N.Y. Nothing much survives. But as the old Latin tag has it, litera scripta manet -- the written word remains. I open Crime and Punishment and Raskolnikov and his world spring forth from the page in all their gloomy vivacity. My past will never live again; only wraiths dwell among the shards and slivers. Nothing whole remains. Not so Dostoyevsky's ever-fresh, immortal novel.

I feel ambivalently about books out of envy. "There comes a time," said novelist James Salter, "when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real." More and more, I think this is true. The days of a man's life (or a woman's), no matter how brutally we may engage with the outside world, are as grass: "As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more." Litera scripta manet. Time to write a book.

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place on Thursdays at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.