Why Read? (13 page)

Education is a gamble. Socrates was gambling when he asked his young friends to put their beliefs into play. Jesus was gambling
when he told streetcorner denizens, in whose eyes he saw something unsatisfied, to get up and follow him, put aside the begging
bowl or the tax collectors' book. The Buddha gambled when he told people that they could free themselves from the wheel of
incarnation through meditation and awareness of the noble truths. This is what teachers, great and small, do: they wager that
they can help people become one with their highest promise. Freud once said that the aim of therapy was to turn misery into
common everyday unhappiness—and one admires the tough-mindedness in his remark. But Thoreau, himself an estimable figure,
talked about bringing the past into the thousand-eyed light of the present, and living forever in a new day. And from what
I can tell from
Walden's
best pages, sometimes he did.

Thoreau and Emerson do not wish to throw out the past. Emerson, for his part, wrote a book on representative individuals,
historical figures from whom we might learn. And Whitman said, in his preface to
Leaves of Grass,
that America does not repudiate what is done and gone. Rather, we draw on it for fresh life, ingest it and make it new, as
the body does its food. If you've become a teacher, you've already entered the game on the Emersonian side; you're there to
change people, help them live better. The scholar Andrew Delbanco quotes Emerson to exactly this effect: "The whole secret
of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible. And they are. They want awakening."

My first real teaching job was at a place called the Woodstock Country School, a tiny boarding school in Vermont. The headmaster,
Robin Leaver, who was an educational genius after his fashion, worked chiefly from one premise. "Every kid who enters this
school," he'd often say, "has something that he can do at least half-well and probably a lot better; it's something he can
take joy in; and it's something that he can use to make the world better. Your job as a teacher is to help each kid find that
thing." We had marvelous students at Woodstock; some of them seemed to have a dozen or so gifts ready to unfold. But the ones
who got the most tireless and affectionate attention from the teachers were the ones who seemed to have little or maybe nothing
going for them. These were the kids that the world outside liked to call losers. In fact, their parents sometimes told us
precisely that: "My kid's a loser. Good luck with her." Leaver, who had an affection for, and understanding of, sixteen-year-olds
that I've never seen surpassed, would have to work hard to stop himself from detonating when he heard this sort of talk; usually
he succeeded.

Every week, we got together in a faculty meeting and discussed each student. There were as many as seventy-five, so the meetings
would sometimes go for three hours or more. The kids in the most trouble got the most time. I can still see Robin leaning
over at us, vast smile, blond hair, movie-star good looks, nearly absurd for someone head mastering a school in outer nowhere,
saying somewhat ironically (somewhat): "You call yourselves teachers and you can't find
anything
in the world that Michael Long is interested in? Nothing? Nothing?" Someone might observe that he'd seen Michael following
Bruce around. Bruce was the farmer who grew crops on the school grounds and kept up the land. "Then what are we waiting for?"
Leaver would say, "Let's put him to work with Bruce. He can study English and math next term."

Sometimes these shots in the dark worked, sometimes not. But what did have an effect was the students' developing awareness
that the people who taught at the school would do anything, anything, to deliver them from wasted lives. Given that affirmation,
the students were often inspired to start searching on their own.

Twenty-five years after Woodstock closed, at a reunion on what had been the school property, Robin and I talked about why
the place had finally run aground. I said it was because to make ends meet we had to take too many kids who had too many problems.
They were impossible. No, said Robin. Those kids would have come along. But some of them needed years and years at the school;
we just didn't have enough time. In some empirical, practical sense, what I said may have been true. A few of the kids we
were accepting at the end were borderline dangerous. But the one who spoke then in the true spirit of democratic education
was surely not me.

Proust

PERHAPS THE LAST century's most persuasive theorist of positive influence is Marcel Proust. In luminous passages, he tells
us how he developed as a reader, and then how, having himself become a writer, he hoped that he might affect others.

Proust observes: "The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of
judgment of part of its independence. 'What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.' Such a view rests
on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that
their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralyzed . . . There is
no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.
In this profound effort it is our own thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his."

In a society that loves technique and training, but is wary of emotion not routinized by the newspaper or the sitcom, one
must be willing to learn how to feel, then frequently to be reminded. This was the gift that Wordsworth gave to John Stuart
Mill, who was, when he encountered the poet, dead in his life of feeling; a perpetual inner frost seemed to have taken hold.
From this condition Wordsworth delivered him. Eliot tells us that one of the main functions of poetry is to give names, however
complexly metaphorical the names might be, to emotions that have abided for a long time unspoken in the heart. To name feelings
with poetic sensitivity, Eliot suggests, is to make them live yet more strongly. So, learning to feel with Ruskin, Proust
learned to feel as himself.

The contemporary novelist Robert Stone describes his goal as a writer this way: "I want my reader to recognize what I've made
and say, 'That's it. That's the way it is.'" No one describes this process of recognition, this benign literary influence,
more gracefully than Proust, in the passages I cited in part at the beginning of this book: "But to return to my own case,"
Proust writes, "I thought more modestly of my book, and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those who would
read it as 'my' readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be 'my' readers but readers of their own selves, my book
being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers—it would be my
book but with it I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I would not ask them to
praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether 'it really is like that.' I should ask whether the words that they
read within themselves are the same as those which I have written (though a discrepancy in this respect need not always be
the consequence of an error on my part, since the explanation could also be that the reader had eyes for which my book was
not a suitable instrument)."

Here Proust is remarkably sanguine about the possibility of the reader recognizing himself precisely in the mirror of the
book's words. But often there is more to it than that. Recall Emerson: he that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must
carry out the wealth of the Indies. Or, more dramatically, Kierkegaard: he who would give birth to himself must know how to
work. And so the visions of even the poets often need to be brought into line with our own aspirations and with the tempers
of our times. Timeless in their uses as they may be, it can take skill to make them work here and now. As Proust in a more
skeptical mood puts matters: "Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute
it."

Form and Feeling

WORDSWORTH SAID THAT he sought knowledge, but knowledge not purchased through the loss of power. Part of what makes literary
education so important is that it offers something more than abstract knowing. It gives us wisdom that is replete with emotional
force. The emphasis on form is what preserves art from the programmatic detachment that often informs more intellectualized
ways of rendering experience.

There are many ways of thinking about form, from Kenneth Burke's Aristotelian view that form is the setting up and satisfying
of expectations in the reader, to Kant's idea that form lifts the art object out of the push and toss of daily life and makes
it a source for disinterested contemplation. But to me, form is best understood as the primary way that writers infuse their
words with feeling. It provides the music of the work. Form is the sequence of notes that a sentence plays out, thus giving
an emotional content to what could otherwise be a merely cognitive experience. And form is also the grander, symphonic structure
of the work that lets us know in larger-scale terms what it would be like to live this vision—not moment to moment, as sentences
do, but month to month, year to year. Where are the highs, where the despondencies?

The astounding comic buoyancy of a Dickens novel, its unflagging episodic invention, sprawling variety, and highhearted tone,
all contribute to a sense of what liberalism of Dickens's kind can be. For Dickens, liberalism isn't condescending, nor is
it ever grudging; rather, it confers a vitality on the believer that makes him affirm life and hunger for more. And this is
a function of the rambunctious form—sometimes it's an antiform, I suppose—of Dickens's major novels. Preeminently, form creates
and reveals emotion.

The archetypal literary plot, the one adumbrated by Aristotle in
The Poetics,
can itself summon strong feelings. Many of us see ourselves in the protagonist who enters the world with strong desires, meets
opposition and reversal, changes through struggle, and emerges richer—if in nothing else than in breadth of consciousness.
For many, this pattern illuminates life. As Robert McKee, a thoughtful analyst of film, says, "Most human beings believe that
life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves;
that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence [s]; that their existence [s] operate through continuous
time within a consistent, causally interconnected reality; and that inside this reality, events happen for explainable and
meaningful reasons." An adroit deployment of conventional (or one might call it "archetypal") plot brings these convictions
about life home to the reader with considerable impact—though the work need not articulate them overtly. Balzac's sense of
what life is about—struggle, rivalry, triumph, bitter failure—is almost perfectly in tune with the values implicit in traditional
novelistic plotting, and that is one of the reasons that his books read as satisfyingly as they do. In his best novels (I
think of
White Noise
in particular) Don DeLillo departs from most of the assumptions that McKee lays out, not only in the way he renders character
but also by shaping his books without readily apparent beginning, middle, and end. His cogent rebellion against novelistic
form is, at least to me, as fruitful as Balzac's affirmation. It remains for the reader to say what form or antiform might
put him into the best relation to his own experience. What is gained and what lost when you map your life according to the
archetypal plot—or when, in DeLillo's fashion, you refuse that mapping?

It's quite possible that attempting to shape one's life, or interpret it, in conformity with traditional plot will lead to
nothing but frustration. All of the relevant assumptions about character and cause and effect might lead to self-idealization
and the failure that often attends it. But such a shaping could also offer intensity and focus. The individual who shares
DeLillo's sense of the relatively haphazard way of the world may be better tuned to withstand life's vagaries, though for
him, the dangers of fading toward entropy abide.

Literary beauty, to my mind, is the effective interfusion of feeling and thought. At the point of interfusion, though, there
is no sentiment and there is no form—they have disappeared into each other, in the way that Apollo and Dionysus disappear
into one another in Sophoclean drama, as Nietzsche understood it.

Form tells us how it feels to live the author's truth. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of
mankind is Man." Pope's opening lines from the Second Epistle of "An Essay on Man," with their vigor, point, and strong but
contained energy, make modesty—"presume not God to scan"—into a source of extreme self-assurance. Awareness of human limitation
can quicken the spirit more, the lines suggest, than commitment to impious daring. In the music of the lines, in the form,
is an entire attitude, a bearing. Form conveys to us how someone who spoke these lines feelingly might comport herself, how
she'd move and talk and sit. Wordsworth's phrase "hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity" exudes a tentative
melancholy evocative of the loneliness that suffuses a poem from which God has departed. The poem's view of the world is as
much in its sonorous vowels as in its overt sense. Both Pope's lines and Wordsworth's are studies in perfect interfusion,
both studies in literary beauty. "That's how it is. That's true." A reader could say as much of either of them.

Disciplines

The kind of reading that I have been describing here—the individual quest for what truth a work reveals—is fit for virtually
all significant forms of creation. We can seek vital options in any number of places. They may be found for this or that individual
in painting, in music, in sculpture, in the arts of furniture making or gardening. Thoreau felt he could derive a substantial
wisdom by tending his bean field. He aspired to "know beans." He hoed for sustenance, as he tells us, but he also hoed in
search of tropes, comparisons between what happened in the garden and what happened elsewhere in the world. In his bean field,
Thoreau sought ways to turn language—and life—away from old stabilities.