/ reading
I may refer you here to things that I don’t agree with either in whole or in part, but let me make it clear that I endorse Krauthammer’s opinion of the Van Jones matter wholly.
Not as a stranger
I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.
Four out of five books I read these days are books I’ve read before. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany, a novel cut to the measure of the Samuel Johnson maxim just posted and a story as involving on the fourth read as it was on the first some twenty years ago.
Why so much rereading, and all of it satisfying? For reasons having to do with the lyric power of that line from the epic of Job, that opening anthem of the Burial Office of the Book of Common Prayer. To read again words that fortify, words to live with is, as the poet L. E. Sissman said, to “return not as a pilgrim but as a familiar, almost a friend.” To put the same thing in a lapidary way and without being the least bit lugubrious about it, I reread books for the same reason I keep coming back to church; because I know I’m going to die. Sissman continues:
A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.
John Miller interviews Sarah Ruden
- MILLER: Would the Aeneid be better if Virgil had finished it?
- RUDEN: It’s hard to imagine how a finished work would have been better. The remaining twelve books, according to later sources, were going to be about the war ending and the Julian dynasty becoming established. But this existing story is cool for ending where it does. An essential thing about a classic is that it is just handed to us to struggle with, like life. It serves our freedom and dignity by allowing us to make up our minds about most of the meaning.
- The most esteemed Greek tragedies end almost this way, right after the climax. You might get a summary of what has happened, but you don’t get everything tidied up. Critics from Aristotle onward have disliked an author barging in as a fixer. The deus ex machina is the oldest manifestation of this attitude. It declares, “I, the author, am telling you what fate is like and what the gods are like, and assuring you that virtue and suffering will always be rewarded, in spite of what the myth and your own experience tell you.”
- It’s not clear that Virgil would have produced a Roman version of this, but I bet it would have been tempting to give the second half more ideological force than the first half had. This is the endemic disease of sequels, which I first noticed in reading Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. Little Women was interesting — tragic, full of disappointment and stupidity and compromise; it was believable. In the sequel, a lot of mawkish puppets were acting out Alcott’s father’s educational theories. It’s not just a phenomenon of the movies, but goes clear from the later Euripides to the later Tarzan episodes, where Jane and Boy create a mid-fifties suburban jungle treehouse.
- MILLER: Why should people even bother with Virgil today? Isn’t he just a dead white male?
- RUDEN: Well, I have an intense and intimate relationship with literature. I look in an author for some of the things I look for in a friend or a lover. Most of the authors I choose are dead and white, which makes sense. They are privileged. Their own grievance is small enough to be put aside, so that they can take in what’s happening around them. Who wants to live with somebody who can’t do this?
- Put more bluntly, why would I live with someone who treats me like a moron, as if I can be entertained and instructed, and asked to give something meaningful in return, by someone with nothing in her brain but the mean things done to her or her ancestors?
- Virgil would have been stumped to be told that someday a woman would translate him, but he respected me much more than race-gender-class authors do, by respecting the complexity of the world, which is a respect for all possibility. Worrying about him being dead, white, and male is like worrying about the gender, color, and mortality of the Labrador who pulls me out of a lake and saves my life. For me, having something to think about is life.
- MILLER: What’s the point of learning a dead language such as Latin? Isn’t it more useful to study Spanish or Chinese?
- RUDEN: I picture the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who squeaks, “But I’m not dead yet!” and “I’m feeling better!” and “I think I’ll go for a walk now!” to keep from getting loaded onto the cart with all the actual corpses. Only a deliberate whap on the head kills him.
- Who says this language is dead? Is literature dead? Is the West dead? Check in early next year, when my book on Paul of Tarsus comes out, and see how reading the “dead” language of Koinē Greek can challenge what is actually dead in us.
News regarding the oldest part of Oxford University’s Bodleian library, called Duke Humfrey’s Library. The university’s Health and Safety Officer has taken away all the stepladders. “Laurence Benson, the library’s director of administration and finance, said: ‘The library would prefer to keep the books in their original historic location — where they have been safely consulted for 400 years prior to the instructions from the Health and Safety office.’”
So the books will be kept where they have been safely consulted for more than four centuries but due to someone looking after the health and safety of bibliophiles, a third of the books in the library will never again be consulted, safely or otherwise. “Of all tyrannies,” said C. S. Lewis, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Epistemology, baseball, and my father
I was in Candlestick Park that night with my father and my cousin Chubby. Chub’s been skinny as a rail since he could walk, but he was chubby when he got the nickname and everyone calls him Chubby to this day. But this isn’t a story about him. I won’t tell you here why he was with us that summer in New Mexico where we lived; why he was with Dad and me in Candlestick Park on August 9, 1968. This is a story about epistemology, baseball, and why I do not disbelieve my father when he tells me something.
People remember 1968 for lots of reasons, but historians of baseball remember it as The Year of the Pitcher. The Tigers’ Denny McClain won 31 games that summer, still the modern-era record for most wins in a season, and had an ERA of 1.96. The Cards’ overpowering Bob Gibson had an ERA of 1.12. The Giants’ ace, Juan Marichal, led the National League in wins with 26.
Bob Stevens, the sportswriter for the San Francisco Chronicle who covered the Giants from ‘58 to ‘78, wrote, “If you placed all the pitchers in the history of the game behind a curtain, where only a silhouette was visible, Juan’s motion would be the easiest to identify. He brought to the mound beauty, individuality and class.” Marichal is warming up on the mound when Dad says, “The Mets are gonna win this game.”
The Mets are big-time underdogs. This is my Dad. He roots for underdogs. New York has two good young pitchers in Nolan Ryan and Tom Seaver, and they have Jerry Koosman, but none of them are pitching tonight. Dick Selma is. Selma’s not bad, but the Mets hit like nuns; they don’t hit at all or, if they do, they don’t hit hard. New York’s best slugger is Cleon Jones from Plateau, Alabama. The Giants boast Willie McCovey, Willie Mays, Bobby Bonds, and Jesus Alou. Marichal, the Dominican Dandy, is 20 and 4 coming into this game.
Here’s the play-by-play:
Top 1st: Marichal pitches a 1-2-3 inning. Tommie Agee flies out to center; Larry Stahl strikes out; Cleon Jones strikes out looking. I raise my eyebrows at my father. He says, “The Mets are going to win this game.”
Bottom 1st: Bobby Bonds strikes out looking; Jim Davenport flies out to center; Willie Mays strikes out swinging.
Top 2nd: Ed Kranepool—who was 17 when he broke into the Big Leagues—leads off with a single; Ed Charles singles to left, advancing Kranepool to 2B; JC Martin singles to right; Kranepool to 3B, but Charles is thrown out at 2B trying to stretch his hit to a double; Phil Linz hits a sacrifice fly to left field. Martin on 2B; Kranepool scores. Buddy Harrelson is given an intentional walk; Dick Selma grounds out to end the inning. Mets 1, Giants 0. Dad smiles.
Bottom 2nd: Willie McCovey grounds out to 1B; Dick Dietz walks; Jesus Alou hits a ground ball double play.
Top 3rd: Tommie Agee singles to CF; on a wild throw pickoff attempt by Marichal, Agee takes 2B and 3B; Stahl grounds out; Cleon Jones grounds out, scoring Agee; Kranepool singles to center; Charles grounds out. Mets 2, Giants 0.
Bottom 3rd: Bob Schroder fouls out; Hal Lanier grounds out; Marichal strikes out. Mets 2, Giants 0.
Top 4th: Martin flies out to the shortstop; Linz grounds out to SS; Harrelson is hit by a pitch; Selma grounds out.
Bottom 4th: Bobby Bonds leads off with a home run; Davenport singles to LF; Mays grounds into a double play; McCovey strikes out. Mets 2, Giants 1.
Top 5th: Agee is hit by a pitch; Agee steals second; Stahl flies out to LF; Jones flies out to CF; Kranepool flies out to CF, stranding Agee. Mets 2, Giants 1.
Bottom 5th: Dietz walks; wild pitch, Dietz to 2B; Alou grounds out to 1B, Dietz to 3B; Schroder hits a sacrifice fly to LF, Dietz scores; Lanier grounds out to 1B. Mets 2, Giants 2.
Top 6th: Charles grounds out; Martin grounds out; Linz strikes out looking.
Bottom 6th: Marichal is hit by a pitch; Bonds singles, Marichal to 2B; Marichal is picked off 2B by Selma; Davenport walks, Bond to 2B; Mays flies out to RF; McCovey doubles to CF, Bonds scores, Davenport scores, McCovey to 3B/advancing on throw to home; Dietz walks; Alou strikes out looking. Mets 2, Giants 4. “The Mets are going to win this game,” Dad says.
Top 7th: Harrelson grounds out; Al Weis grounds out; Agee flies out to CF.
Bottom 7th: Cal Koonce pitching in relief of Selma; Schroder grounds out; Lanier grounds out; Marichal doubles to LF; Bonds strikes out.
Top 8th: Stahl grounds out; Jones single; Kranepool flies out to 3B; Charles single to CF, Jones to 3B; Martin strikes out looking.
Bottom 8th: Davenport grounds out; Mays flies out to C; McCovey walks; Barton walks, McCovey to 2B; Alou grounds out. Mets 2, Giants 4.
Top 9th: Ron Swoboda, pinch hitting for Cal Koonce, singles to CF; Harrelson singles to CF, Swoboda to 2B; Art Shamsky, pinch hitting for Weis, strikes out; Agee singles to CF, Harrelson to 2B, Swoboda scores; Stahl hits a grounder forcing Agee out at 2B, Harrelson to 3B.
There are two outs. Cleon Jones hits a towering pop up to third base. “I told you, Dad! The Giants win!” Harrelson, on third, running on contact with two outs, crosses home plate. A formality. It won’t count. Stahl, running from first, rounds second.
“The Mets are gonna win this game!” Dad insists. This is the willing suspension of disbelief. This is Coleridge at Candlestick Park. My father has accepted as true the premises of his work of fiction that the Mets will win this game, all in exchange for the promise of entertainment. “It’s not over,” he says.
Cleon thinks it’s over. His bat thrown to the ground, he’s walking to first base. Because he’s trained to do so, Stahl runs to third and passes in front of Jim “Peanut” Davenport. The Giants’ third baseman peers into the dark above a city named for Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of my church. He’s looking up into the sky as Francis did when he was nine (i.e., in 1190), the age I am in this story. The boy bought some birds from the market and let them go. They flew low over his head like parakeets, as if to thank him.
Davenport is waiting for the sky to tilt or something, and return what the kid from Plateau put up there. It does. The ball descends on Peanut and glances off his glove before falling, finally, to the ground. E-5. Harrelson scores/unER; Stahl scores/unER. Cleon Jones to 1B. Jones is caught stealing. Mets 5, Giants 4. It’s unbelievable, if not to my father.
Bottom 9th: Ron Taylor, pitching in relief of Koonce, gets Schroder to groundout; Ty Cline flies out to center; and Jim Ray Hart fouls out to 1B. Mets 5, Giants 4.
“I told you the Mets would win this game,” Dad says, gloating. The Mets won the game. I have it on good authority, mystified. And that is where it began, in San Francisco, on August 9th, 1968, my inability to disbelieve my Dad.
Coleridge was on opium when he wrote, “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake—Aye, what then?” As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale. I remember it the way I remember a dream. But in my hand I hold a flower. The box score.
Postscript: My father and I are faithful Detroit Tigers fans, and ‘68 was a vintage season. The Tigers faced the mighty St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Bob Gibson struck out 17 Tigers in the opener, setting a World Series record that still stands. The Cards took three of the first four games, but the Tigers battled back to win the next two. In the decisive seventh game of the series, Detroit’s Mickey Lolich out pitched Gibson, and the Tigers triumphed by a 4 – 1 score. It was Lolich’s third victory of the series. But that’s another story.
Lent, and the world's oldest profession
To be a Christian is to engage in a kind of combat, and Lent mirrors that ordeal. A time of preparation for baptism on Easter, Lent is a commemoration of Christ’s fast in the wilderness for forty days. Jesus is driven by the Spirit into the wild to do combat with the adversary who, in a garden, tempts a woman to eat the fruit and see what happens. Satan is the inventor of the world’s oldest profession: advertising. “See this apple? You need this apple. Price: one soul. You can afford it.” We fall for it. Jesus doesn’t. If we come to Holy Saturday recognizing that, we will have observed a Holy Lent.
Here’s a tool I use that virtually eliminates adverts from my screen reading.
the decline of reading
There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.
Caleb Crain in the New Yorker
Becoming Screen Literate
When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.
Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.
The overthrow of the book would have happened long ago but for the great user asymmetry inherent in all media. It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.
Kevin Kelly, the NYT
It is early days. But I am getting a greater sense of how and why Shakespeare really does something to our inner reality, making me feel more alive in more unpredictable mental ways when I read or see his work. I am also getting a sense of an underlying shape to experience, as though the syntax in front of my eyes were keying into mental pathways behind them, and shifting and reconfiguring them dramatically in the theatre of the brain.
Philip Davis on Shakespeare and Neurology, in Literary Review
What does it to do our brains to engage in long periods of reading a single text, to try to keep in mind the arc of a narrative that runs hundreds of pages? What kind of neurological work do we do as we strive to keep track of the details that add up to such a large story? Do people who are habituated to such a discipline experience benefits elsewhere in their lives? Are there other kinds of things that they can better concentrate on, like long quiet movies, or symphonies, or extended jazz improvisations? If you read long, complex stories about ordinary human lives, do you become more attentive and sympathetic to the lives of people you meet? (Or, maybe, less so?) If you don’t do this kind of long-form reading, do you miss out on any useful intellectual, or moral, development?I don’t know the answers to these questions, though I sure wish I did. But Steven Johnson’s essay doesn’t move me one inch closer to such answers. This is what happens when a newspaper asks someone to evaluate work that he or she has an explicit and long-standing interest in refuting. I suspect that the NEA report has some significant problems, and that it’s based on a somewhat romanticized notion of the Good Old Days of reading, but Steven Johnson’s not the guy I would turn to to get the straight dope on the matter.
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Alan Jacobs teaches English at Wheaton College.
