Read Widely and With Abandon

Avid readers know that there are books out there that change your life, that make you better. It's the same with most forms of writing. It's one of the reasons why I make my students read poetry, which is more compact and intense. But what's often impossible to predict are exactly which books will provide someone with that transcendent, sublime experience. This is because it's not always something inherent within the work itself, not always the result of art on the part of the author that touches a person so deeply.

I'm reminded of an anecdote the late great Umberto Eco shared in the 1983 preface to his book How to Write a Thesis. He recounts meeting a friend who questioned a story Eco told about the origins of his own thesis project. Eco attempted to demonstrate the idea that no work is too insignificant to provide the foundation for a thesis project by sharing the origins of his own thesis inspired, he believed, by an argument mentioned in a paragraph of an out-of-print text by an old long-forgotten priest that he found one day randomly in a newsstand. Eco's friend liked the story but claimed that there was no such book and that Eco had invented it. Eco, eager to show his friend that he was honest, took him back to his home, pulled the book off of his shelf, opens it to the very passage that inspired his own thesis, and made an unsettling discovery. There was the page as he remembered, there the passage delineated by the bright red exclamation point he'd made all those years ago, and yet, as Eco read the passage again, he realized that the author had never made the argument that he'd attributed to him all those years ago. Eco's own mind, using the text unconsciously as a springboard for his own thoughts, had come up with the argument while he was reading.

I tell this story for a reason. There are books that make us better. Sometimes they make us better because they share truths we need to hear. Sometimes they inspire a great thought in our minds. Sometimes they awaken in us a sense of the sublime - a reminder of a greater, more terrible reality that exists behind the veil of this world. And sometimes they simply hold a mirror up to our own souls and show us who we really are. 

This is the lesson, then, of academic humility. Books are the great inheritance of humanity. It is not only through books that we can come to understand the mind of another (the author) and can also come to more completely understand ourselves and each other. We should read widely and with abandon any work that takes us and itself seriously (this is not to say that we should read only those works that are serious in tone, but those works whose authors felt they had something important to share whether tragedy or farce, picture book or thousand-page treatise). We should seat ourselves at the feet of anyone who seeks to share his mind with us - not as blind sheep who accept any idea set before us but as humble students open to revelation no matter whose hand held the pen that gives it to us.

We must read the so-called classics, yes, for those authors have written something that has struck a chord with humanity in general. We must read these for the sake of the general humanity that resides within ourselves. And it is possible and even nearly certain that several of these classic works will touch us on a deeply individual level as well. But these are not the only things we should read. Because we are not merely human beings in a general sense, but also individuals, we must read to understand ourselves. Moments of self-revelation can and do come from the works that common consensus has labeled as great, but they are not limited to those works. Mortimer Adler contended that reading was an active process. True reading requires an active mind. An active mind can find meaning in unlikely places drawing on connections culled from the individual experiences of that mind. The meaning is not necessarily inherent in the text in these cases but is discovered as the reading mind uses the words and examines itself. 

I have several examples of this from my own life. I have my favorite books like everyone - books that I feel combine artistry and truth in ways that are beautiful and moving. Jane Eyre, The Divine Comedy, The Faerie Queene, the sonnets of John Donne. Very few people would argue about the importance of these works or debate the necessity of reading them. However, I think that the three works I've read that have changed my life in the most significant ways (I'm excepting the Bible from this) are not ones that would qualify as Great Works of Literature (they're written masterfully, but don't, I think, have a universal quality that defines a true classic). 

"Allowables" by Nikki Giovanni taught me that fear cannot dictate what I view as moral. There are real, knowable moral principles, and my feelings do not change what I am and am not allowed to do. The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason helped me understand some fundamental things about myself that I'd been struggling with for several years. Was this the goal of the book? Is anyone else likely to have this experience upon reading it? No, but my own mind used characters and events from the novel to give definition and understanding to my own struggles. And finally, Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury touched me in a profound way and gave me, I think, an experience of the sublime. I don't think that if I read it again I would have the same experience. I'm afraid that it would not touch me in so profound a way a second time. But the last time I read it I felt like I experienced a sensation of the awesome and terrible power of love. Why? I don't know. 

This, then, is why we ought to read - not as a means of escape from reality, but as a way to understand reality and our place in it. This is why it is so important to push our students to read. As we grow older it is easy to become narrow, to fall into patterns of self-deception, to live lives of quiet desperation as Thoreau put it. One of the best ways to avoid this (in addition to loving other people) is to read well. 

There's a beautiful thunderstorm going on at the moment. I'm going to take this opportunity to curl up with a book, and I hope that you do too.