‘The things that can make life pleasurable remain the same,’ wrote Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages. ‘Now, as in the past, these are reading, music, the visual arts, travel, love of nature, sport, fashion, social vanity, and the intoxication of the senses.’ Clearly, there was no waning of reading habits in Huizinga's day. To him, reading was a sine qua non. And in his reading, the home-loving Huizinga, a man whose work centred largely on the history of his own surroundings and his own country, roamed distant frontiers. As a private lecturer on Buddhism, he avowed his preference for exploring the vast periphery of the history of civilization.

But even as an explorer, he read to come home. Huizinga read in the manner of someone who is remembering something. Rudy Kousbroek observes, while discussing Baudelaire's poem Correspondences in his essay ‘The forest of symbols’, that literary symbolism affects us so deeply because it has the quality of a recollection. ‘Searching for repetition is perhaps our most fundamental impulse.’ Reading is searching for what we already know, however veiled and encrypted. It is searching for something important that we have lost. For Huizinga – and this is his own analogy – reading evoked the emotion of an exile gazing at his mother country. Once again we encounter the central theme of his work: repetition and renewal.

Long past the middle of his journey through life, in 1932, Huizinga wrote an essay about reading. In a characteristic contrast, he saw books as ‘friends and foes’. They were foes because they existed in such alarming quantities. Yet it was precisely this abundance that provided freedom of choice. ‘Reading [lezen] is – both by the word's origin and by the nature of the activity – choosing, singling out, gathering, picking. If there is one activity that expresses free will, it is reading.’ Similarly, Huizinga described the writing of history as reading, gathering – picking wild flowers. The freedom of the reader-gatherer was the open context of history: each flower altered the appearance of the entire bunch.

Reading, like writing, was a creative activity. If a writer succeeded in conjuring up a different reality for a reader, this was in part the reader's own achievement.