Reading One: Enjoying (on William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”) [Section 1 of 2]

(Continued from here.)

I once had a problem with my daughter Eva. She was almost eleven years old and loved to read. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that for homework Eva’s teacher wanted her to write in a journal about what she read. It’s not that the teacher wanted Eva to write anything sophisticated, just to talk about what she loved in this or that passage of a book of her choosing. She didn’t have to write a lot, a page or two a week would do. Fifteen minutes a day. But each day when I reminded her, she made this face, scrunched up her eyes and nose, and said, “I’m busy. I’ll do it later.” And then the night before it was due, simply: “I’m not doing it.” Eva was attending a so-called “open school” where one of the central beliefs is that a child ought to participate actively in her learning, select “home” activities that are fun and engaging. I reminded her of this:

“But Eva you picked this assignment together with your teacher. I mean, you chose this. And besides, you love to read.”
“Yeah,” her voice rose, “I love to read, Dad, read, not write about it.”
“But maybe it would be good to discover what you love about it, no?”
“That’s not how I read,” she countered, “I just read it, finish it and I’m done.”
“But,” I offered, “don’t you want to be able to talk with others about what you’ve read, to tell your friends about books you’ve liked, just to share the good feeling, and maybe even to get them interested enough to want to read it too?”
“I just wanna say that ‘this book is great, you should read it.” And with that, she stalked off into her room.

Of course, getting a child to do something they don’t want to do is not an unusual situation. At this very moment, parents all over the world are facing something similar and solving it, or not, according to their own resources, values, and the pressures of the moment. I might naturally have turned for advice to more experienced parents, or to the innumerable parenting manuals available today, or, even to works specializing on child development, psychology or education. But I didn’t consult any of these resources. Instead, I responded with my own resources: a combination of love for my child, my own experiences as a reader, and my ideas about reading drawn from years working as a literature professor.

That work as a professor included an experience that in some ways resembled Eva’s struggles. I was part of an interviewing team searching to hire a faculty member in Latino studies. The person we were interviewing was a rising star in the field and had finished a book manuscript on some writers she was characterizing as diasporic Puerto Ricans. Her very valid point was that if one saw them this way instead of as just Americans one would see something previously unseen in their writing. Among the authors she discussed was William Carlos Williams.

Now to be truthful I didn’t know a whole lot about her field, or about the other writers she worked on and I don’t in fact know very much about Williams. I’ve read a biography and some of his books, but I’ve never carried out a scholarly investigation of Williams’ writing. That’s probably why when I heard the name I got excited. One of my favorite poems of all time is Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” and I was curious to know what she thought of it as an “expert.” I expected that she’d unfold for me some new intensely joyful corner of this poem. So after the other committee members, specialists in her field, talked with her about theory and culture and the canon of American studies, it was my turn.

I said, “This isn’t really an interview question. I just really love “The Red Wheelbarrow” and wonder what you have to say about it.”
She paused and replied, “I haven’t thought about it.”
I persisted, “Do you like it?”
She was enthusiastic: “Oh yes, of course! I love that poem!” And then, after a pause and with less enthusiasm, she concluded, “it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the stuff in the Williams chapter.”

I was disappointed, and though I kept it to myself, I felt as though she had failed or worse, actively committed some transgression. If she loved a text but couldn’t find room for it within her theoretical paradigm, there must be something wrong with her theoretical paradigm and something wrong with her, too, that she would sacrifice a beloved poem for the sake of methodological neatness (or worse, academic fashion). But as time passed, I realized she was not the problem. Nor do I think I was the problem.

I simply wanted to have a certain kind of conversation about a poem, but that conversation couldn’t really get off the ground within the circumstances in which I was trying to have it. By that I mean not only the setting of an academic job interview, but the conventions of academic training and of professional reward. The experience became an index pointing me back to my own feeling of the increasing intolerability of what had come to feel like a mutually exclusive set of imperatives. One must either read for fun or read for professional success; read for joy or read for work, read for love or read to think, in short, the very same set of oppositions that seemed to be governing my daughter’s impasse in her homework.

John Dewey (1859-1952)

Around the same time, I ran across a passage from John Dewey’s book, Art as Experience. I wasn’t looking for any solutions in Dewey, but rather just allowing myself to be led by my fascination with his clear and concrete way of talking about art. I emphasize that because it often happens with reading to live that encountering texts without pre- calculation often leads to surprisingly relevant insights. Dewey was an American philosopher, an heir to the so-called Pragmatist tradition expounded by William James earlier in the century. I had loved James’ style of writing and his informality, but had turned to Dewey because, in part, he wrote directly about art.

The particular passage that struck me was part of Dewey’s discussion of the ways in which art and our experience of it challenges certain assumptions that philosophers might make when looking at the world. In this case, Dewey was looking at theories of art as illusion, dream, escape, or play. Dewey objected to these theories not because art cannot be all of these things, but rather because art is so much more than all of these things. In fact, art, according to Dewey is the experience of the boundary dissolving between these things and their supposedly mutually exclusive opposites of reality, waking life, imprisonment, or work. Seeing it this way, in turn, led Dewey to question the much more fundamental philosophical dichotomy between subject and object, or self and world.

When we view art as an “escape” or a “release” from reality, Dewey believed, we implicitly suppose “freedom can be found only when personal activity is liberated from control by objective factors.” We implicitly take what Dewey called “experience” – the ceaseless exchange of matter and energy of a live creature growing in and with its surroundings – and we first freeze it in time and then split it into two opposed and mutually exclusive halves. On one side is the live creature, which we call a “subject” or “self,” together with its desires. On the other side, the surroundings, including other subjects, which we call “objects” or “others,” together with the limitations we perceive these surroundings impose on us. Therefore in viewing art as an escape from reality we implicitly pretend to isolate our “self” from everything that we perceive as “outside” of and oppressive to it. “Play” then becomes the name for what we can do when we suppose ourselves to be free of objective limitations. “Work,” by contrast, becomes the name for what we do the rest of the time, when we numbly or sullenly submit to those limitations – or attempt to manipulate them from a utilitarian distance -- and thereby protect our “self” through a detached intellectual posture. All the while, we forget that we made these distinctions and opposed them to each other.

But for Dewey, “the very existence of a work of art is evidence that there is no such opposition between the spontaneity of the self and objective order and law.” True, Dewey admitted, “the contrast between free and externally enforced activity is an empirical fact.” However, he added, “it is largely produced by social conditions and it is something to be eliminated as far as possible.” It is a sad mistake to see this social and historical condition as natural and immutable. And perhaps even sadder to see it and just let it be. After all, as Dewey points out, “children are not conscious of any opposition between play and work.”

Of course, here I remember thinking “Well he doesn’t know my kid.” But I see that it wasn’t until the structure of school, the importance of grades, and the assigning of homework entered her life that Eva started to experience the difference between learning as play and learning as work. She was, after all, nearly eleven and already much exposed to, this opposition between play and work, and also to my modeling of it. Dewey’s point is that there’s nothing natural or given or unchangeable about this and art can be a way to rub away at this stark opposition. It invites us to participate in and experience as integrated what have become for most of us two mutually exclusive ways of engaging a world of existence that we have divided into two mutually exclusive parts.

I’d like to recast this opposition between play and work into a slightly different vocabulary. The philosopher Neal Grossman devotes a chapter of his commentary on Spinoza’s Ethics to the latter’s theory of desire and emotion.

I want to draw your attention to a few pages in Grossman’s Healing the Mind because of their affinities with the problem at hand. Grossman emphasizes the critical role that the cultivation of the nonjudgmental awareness of affect plays in Spinoza’s Ethics. In emphasizing this role, Grossman pauses to describe what he calls “social schizophrenia” or “the split or incongruity between inner feelings and outer behavior.” His argument is that from early childhood we are trained, subtly and not so subtly, to constrain not only our affects but our awareness of those affects so that we will be able to behave in conformity with social expectations. Moreover, Grossman argues, we have been trained so thoroughly that we take our training for nature, and so have strong unconscious view that “such schizophrenia is necessary and normal and that a person who has not succeeded in separating his ‘personal’ life from his ‘professional’ life is in some sense immature.” Grossman goes on to enumerate the devastating consequences of this dynamic for individuals, for societies, and for the planet as a whole but also movingly insists that since this dynamic is not in fact natural but rather devised by human beings we also have the freedom to devise alternatives.

All of this dovetails nicely with Dewey’s ideas on work and play and its associated oppositions. What is particularly striking about this part of Grossman’s argument is that he brings the chickens home to the academic roost. Within the academy, Grossman points out, the phenomenon of social schizophrenia manifests itself as an opposition between reason and analysis on the one hand and affect and appreciation on the other. “The triviality,” Grossman writes,

of most academic research lies in just this point: the kind of analysis given by people who are not personally connected with what they are analyzing – and academics are especially trained to be this way – is necessarily shallow and will at best belong to . . . to the ‘true but useless’ category. . . . Analysis that is separated from inner life is precisely the schizophrenic split that is the root cause of humanity’s collective death wish.

Grossman’s reflections on social schizophrenia and its academic manifestation help to clarify the problems Eva and I had experienced and that Dewey’s reflections on work and play elaborated philosophically. How could I write affirmatively of the joy of loving and thinking that engaging books roused in me without stalling my career? How could I work within the academy in such a way as to make a space for that sort of writing, for myself and others with less institutional power, and still leave other colleagues and students free to do their work the way they saw fit? Why did I have to love privately and think publicly? How in the world did we get to the point where it seemed possible to really do either of these things – loving and thinking – without the other?

We are ensnared in a series of oppositions arising in our minds and related to their enforcement by social institutions and practices: play and work, self and other, subject and object, desire and obligation, affect and intellect. The naturalized hold these oppositions have on our way of experiencing and thinking about the world is the source of much suffering. The suffering arises not from the oppositions themselves but from the fact that we take them to be reflections of the way the world really is, independently of our views of it. We could, for example, see them as mental tools we have devised to accomplish certain purposes and which we should feel entirely free to set down for the accomplishment of other purposes.

Conversely, the erosion of these oppositions and the loosening of their grasp on our experience and thought play a major role in reading to live and in my understanding of what reading can be. And, by extension, in my understanding of the way that reading can be a practice of cultivating joy and freedom in our lives. The question might be simply how to heal. How do we recover from our compulsive, addictive dependence on these oppositions? How do we dissolve or elude the imaginary barrier on either side of which we conceive these dichotomous terms stand? It is perhaps no accident that Grossman’s argument comes in a commentary on Spinoza, because Spinoza provided what is for me perhaps the most compelling and inspiring methods for responding to this problem. Spinoza offered in his Ethics an encompassing and complex view of God, nature, human nature, and how, in particular, humans can move toward greater freedom.

But at the heart of this broad and profound vision is the following simple advice: 1) your emotions and feelings are signs that you are inevitably engaged in the world, for better and for worse; 2) your emotions and feelings provide you with information about the current state of your engagement, particularly whether you are being nourished or harmed by it; 3) attempting to ignore or repress your emotions and feelings does not make them go away, it only deprives you of important information; 4) observing your emotions and feelings and studying their relationship to the actual state of your engagement with the world is already in itself a nourishing, joyful, empowering act and can, moreover, lead you to begin to reconfigure your engagement with the world so as to maximize your nourishing encounters, and positive emotions and feelings, and minimize you harmful encounters, and negative emotions.

The more we become aware of our emotions and feelings, which means first and foremost becoming aware with our bodies (Spinoza’s term for what our bodies feel, for example pleasure or pain, is “affections,” contemporary neuropyschologists like Antonio Damasio in Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorry and the Feeling Brain call this “emotion”) the more we come to understand the complex network of cause and effect which not only impacts our bodies but also leads us to form ideas (whether adequate or inadequate) about what is going on with our bodies. These ideas are what Spinoza calls “affects” and contemporary neuropsychologists call “feelings.” As we develop this understanding and awareness, we begin to realize that while our affects may be responses to external events, i.e. you might really yell at me and my body might really tense or freeze up and sadness might really arise in my mind, our affects are not caused by those events.

Grasping this subtle distinction subtle distinction that our affects are responses to, but not caused by external events, not only rationally and intellectually, but with our whole being, is the lived practice of Spinoza’s Ethics. In so becoming aware of our affects and comprehending them, we increase our freedom in the sense that we increase our ability to behave according to choices grounded in this awareness and comprehension rather than in blind enslavement to our attachment to passing pleasures or aversion to passing pains. We can come to understand these pleasures and pains not as problems to be solved but as information about our dynamic relation with some part of the world. We find that we need not, must not, repress our affects, especially painful affects, in order to free ourselves of their roller-coaster effects. We can learn to experience, be aware of, and understand our affects and use the information they provide to make more joyful choices.

Specifically, for Spinoza, we apply reason to the information they provide to form what he calls “adequate ideas.” The term “adequate” here, for Spinoza, means something like “accurate,” but with an important specification. An “adequate” idea of some thing or event for Spinoza is accurate when it allows us to grasp, at least partially, the chain of cause and effect, which led the appearance of that thing or event. Or, in Spinoza specialist Steven Nadler’s paraphrase:

“an adequate idea of x is an idea that makes possible a full explanation of x. It shows how x is related to its total causal and logical grounds and reveals the absolute necessity of x and everything about x. Inadequate ideas, by contrast, are ‘mutilated and confused.’ . . . Inadequacy is thus a matter of ignorance or a ‘privation of knowledge.’ . . . One knows something about the thing, but not enough to be able to state truly why it is such.”

A similar insight concerning the importance of understanding affect lies at the heart of Buddhist thought and practice. The Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein reaches a comparable point when he writes “the emotions [Spinoza’s affects, Damasio’s feelings] that we take to be so real and are so worried about do not exist in the way we imagine them. They do exist, but we can know them in a way that is different from either expressing or repressing them.” This, according to Epstein, is the shared aim of Buddhist meditation and psychotherapy. Stephen Batchelor likewise observes, for example, of the way in which awareness of the experience of hatred can defuse it: “To stop and pay attention to what is happening in the moment is one way of snapping out of such fixations. It is also a reasonable definition of meditation.”

Stopping and paying attention to what is happening is also a reasonable way of summing up what Spinoza advises we do with our affects in his Ethics. Spinoza’s formal definition of “affects” as “affections [his term for what our bodies feel, recall] of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time ideas of these affections.” For Spinoza an “affection of the body” can be understood as an event that impacts that body. It may be as simple as drinking a glass of water or having a gust of wind blow against your face or as complex as receiving treatment for cancer. With that in mind, Spinoza appears to be saying that an affect is that change in our body’s power to act plus an idea of what it is that has changed. That much just sounds like a slightly more technical-sounding version of what I’ve already described. But what does he mean by “power to act” and, for that matter, by “body” and “idea”?

The phrase “power to act” here is a particularly loaded, complex, and exciting one in Spinoza. For just as the definition of affect depends upon it, so it in turn depends upon Spinoza’s understanding of the relation of particular, finite, or singular things (such Eva or myself) to what he calls, interchangeably, “Substance,” “God” or “Nature.” The power to act is like a lynch-pin, or hinge between Spinoza’s vision of how the universe hangs together and his vision of how our feelings work to nourish or harm our ability to live well in that universe.

For Spinoza, things like you, me, and the mulberry tree out the window are, in the words of Nadler, “a partial and limited expression of one and the same infinite power of God/Nature/substance, manifesting itself in the case of minds through the attribute of Thought and in the case of bodies through the attribute of Extension.” Nadler continues: “Every particular mind, then, is a finite expression of God or Nature’s infinite power through thinking; likewise, every particular body is a finite expression of God or nature’s infinite power in matter and motion. This finite quantum of that infinite power that constitutes each thing is what Spinoza calls conatus, a Latin word that can be variously translated as striving, tendency, or endeavor.” According to Antonio Damasio, we may translate conatus into contemporary terms as “the aggregate of dispositions laid down in brain circuitry that, once engaged by internal or environmental conditions, seeks both survival and well-being.”

The conatus then might be seen as a specific expression of our “power of acting” (or as Spinoza also refers to it “force of existing”). What an exciting concept! It tells us that we all carry within us a power to act that is a portion of Nature’s, or God’s if you prefer, much larger, in fact infinite– power to act.
It’s impossible for me to resist the temptation to say straight away that keeping a human being connected to his or her power to act is of the utmost ethical importance, and conversely, that I can think of no greater tragedy than to come between a human being and his or her power to act. But it’s really even better than this because the conatus constitutes the essence of each particular finite thing: “The striving [conatus] by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.” That is, the particular conatus that we have is what makes each of us,and every other singular thing, what it uniquely is and allows us to distinguish it from other things. In other words, our nature is Nature’s and that is infinite.

Our conatus, or power or striving to persevere in our being, “while always ‘on’ and steady,” as Nadler points out, “does not remain unmodified throughout a person’s lifetime, but is constantly subject to change. In particular, the power can enjoy an increase or strengthening or can suffer a decrease of diminution.” What Spinoza calls an “improvement” or “deterioration” in the condition of a particular thing includes the strength or weakness of conatus, this capacity of each thing to preserve itself and resist or elude those outside forces that would tend to destroy it.

And this is where our affects come in. An affect is neither the cause of such a change, nor the new state of that capacity. Affect refers to the transition to the new state of conatus, as well as to the idea (or, we might say mental experience) of that transition. For example, Joy, according to Spinoza is “a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection.” In other words, joy arises when our ability to act in accordance with our essential nature has been increased.

What is completely counterintuitive and even shocking in Spinoza is his definition of strength or power as the capacity of “being affected in a great many ways or capable of affecting external bodies in a great many ways.” We are in our culture used to defining strength as the ability to resist or to manipulate the outside world. But Spinoza here complicates this conventional definition. He makes strength or power into a relational term: a term of measure whose quantity depends entirely on the extent and force of the affective relations in play. The greater our capacity for affect and for affecting the greater the strength or power involved. It means, to put it very directly, that someone sobbing can be showing great strength.

Spinoza divides affects into two types: passions and actions. The most important difference between a passion and an action stems from the way we think about the cause of the affect in question. An affect is a “passion” when we view the cause as external to us. It is an “action” when we view the cause as lying within us, whether or not we “take action” in our everyday sense of the term. For Spinoza, action is freedom. So how do we change our thinking so as to transform passions into action?

We change our thinking by finding what we share with what we are passionate about. This process of finding what Spinoza called “common notions” is what I call reading to live. It is not just passionately enjoying a book as the external cause of a passively activated pleasure (an affect of passion in Spinoza’s terms). It means recognizing myself in the book and in the reading of it as being fundamentally powerful because I am moved and because the book, its author, and the world beyond are all part of, and moved by, the same power that moves me. To understand this is what Spinoza called “forming a clear and distinct idea” of our affect. As he said, “a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it. . . . The more an affect is known to us, then, the more it is in our power, and the less the mind is acted on by it.”

So it started to seem to me that the issue with Eva, and with me, is that we identified ourselves with our passions. As Batchelor observes of a passion, “By identifying with it (‘I really am pissed off!’), we fuel it.” Especially when the passion is positive we can become attached to it and fuel it further by clinging to our identification with it. Eva and I attributed an external cause to our pleasure, which prevented us from acting fully, in Spinoza’s sense of the word “acting,” and thus, from fully enjoying reading. Following Spinoza’s argument, understanding our pleasure and that its cause lies within us might enhance our enjoyment. Eva was attached to the reliable pleasure that it appeared to her came from passively reading a good book. She was reluctant to risk losing this passion in the attempt to extend the pleasure of reading that book beyond the immediate experience of reading and thereby to transmute her passion into action, her pleasure into joy arising from recognizing that she and the book were joined in ways that increased her ability to exercise her power to act

For Spinoza, every action arises as the result of the transformation of a passion, and that transformation always occurs as the result of the willingness to take the risk of extending our awareness beyond the immediate experience of the passion and its dictates. It feels like the risk we are taking is that of losing our love of reading. When Eva postponed doing her homework, when I procrastinated writing an article or veered between doing whatever I felt like doing or sullenly submitted to what I perceived as externally imposed demands, it was out of the fear that our actions would tarnish the attractiveness of the object of our passions, which we incorrectly believed was the cause of our joy.

I live best when I live joyfully and I live most joyfully when I seek to understand that web of cause and effects that is my existence embedded in a universe, my relations with which I only partly control. When I cultivate awareness of and grasp the productive operations of my own desire, as well as how the lure of my sad passions lead me away from that desire, I am in that instant ”taking action.”
In other words, the act of understanding itself, is active joy for Spinoza. It might not be the euphoric high or rush (“passive joy”) when fate appears to toss an external object across my path that enhances my power to act. But unlike that joy, active joy draws upon my awareness of the impacting event and the ensuing passive joy, and upon my capacity to understand that passive joy, in order to transmute passion into action. I don’t just know that certain things make me feel joy or sadness, but I know, or at least know more about, why and how they do, how they are composed and how I am composed such that they do. And from there, perhaps, I can come to cultivate those relations that increase my power to act and reduce those which decrease it. Which is to say to enhance my freedom and joy. (To be continued)

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Prelude: A Story of Reading to Live (Section 2 of 3)

(Continued from here. Here's the full Table of Contents.)

Now, if teaching were all there was to my job at the University of Michigan, I’d have been golden. Not true. If teaching were all there was to my job and the only thing I wanted to do, I’d have been golden. But not only was I expected to continue to publish scholarly work, I wanted to publish. I wanted to write and to share the ideas I’d developed since I’d gotten tenure; ideas about particular texts I’d been teaching as well as ideas about reading and about teaching literature. Here is where I came to feel lost again.

Since I’d written my first book and given up writing my second, my curiosity had led me to read, study and teach works of fiction and poetry well outside of my designated area of expertise in 20th century Latin American fiction, even as I deepened and altered my love for certain authors and texts within that tradition. The same curiosity had led me through an odyssey in philosophical study in which I had discovered and began to read carefully a pretty heterogeneous bunch: Spinoza and Deleuze, whom you’ve already met, 20th century American pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey, the 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. But also I began to dabble in the books of some scientists writing for a lay audience about chaos theory and about systems approaches to the life sciences. These and the familiar writers (Latin Americans like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Manuel Puig) or to me unfamiliar writers (Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka, Mary Oliver, Carson McCullers, among others) were the raw materials out of which the enormously enriching experience of teaching “Reading to Live” had been made and I wanted to share that in writing.

But as I set down to do so, I felt paralyzed. I felt once again the force of a bind between what seemed to me to be two mutually exclusive alternatives: write what I wanted to write the way that I wanted to write it or write what I was expected to write in the way that the conventions of academic literary scholarship expected me to write it. I wasn’t an expert in most of the academic fields to which the texts and ideas I’d been working with belonged. I knew that individuals spent lifetimes becoming experts in just any one or two of those fields and I didn’t have that much time. But, even more fundamentally, I didn’t want to become an expert in those fields. I felt that I shouldn’t have to become an expert in order to say what I had to say about them and to combine them in the way that I felt I uniquely could combine them.

I could understand and feel the practical value of reading what others had said when that was directly relevant to questions I was addressing, but the academic practice of surveying the conversations already existing in a field one wants to enter in order to legitimize one’s own contribution felt alien and forced. I resented this internalized expectation that I become an expert and the rejection of my ideas I anticipated on the grounds that I had not done so. And so once again I veered. This time, instead of veering in the direction of subordinating my desires to institutional, I availed myself of the relative security of tenure to ignore, not to say proudly flout, the expectations of my discipline in order to write what I pleased. I took Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki’s teaching – “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are a few” – as my motto (ignoring, at that time, the complexities of Suzuki’s teaching).

It wasn’t as easy to flout these expectations as I imagined, partly because I carried those expectations within me. But also because, questions of expertise aside, I simply didn’t know how to begin writing a book called Reading to Live. Whenever I started, I felt dissatisfied. The ideas that seemed so fresh and vital and compelling in lectures, moving to me and to others, felt stilted when I tried to organize them into a book outline or to set them down on the page. I tried taping my lectures, thinking that I could just transcribe them and that would be the book. But I discovered that what made the lectures work, for the most part, were all things that couldn’t be transcribed – pauses, cadences, increases and decreases in volumes, my own movement in the classroom. All I had left in transcription were the words and, well, they were okay, they certainly did their share in the overall setting of the lecture hall, but stripped of all the rest, they seemed lifeless and abstract, when not rambling and incoherent. Perhaps most decisively, and at so deep a level that it was hidden from me at the time, I doubted myself and felt presumptuous: Who was I to tell people how to read so as to live better lives? Especially when my own life was so messy and confusing.

I didn’t give up entirely, but I altered my approach. Instead of trying to convert the experience of the course into a book, I decided to simply try chronicling one of my own experiences of reading to live. I picked an author with whom I was very familiar, the Argentine novelist and short story writer Julio Cortázar. I’d included two chapters on Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch in my first book, so I felt that writing on him again would both satisfy the academy that I had credentials to write on Cortázar and give me with the opportunity to revisit a cherished author, who had been with me from the beginning, only this time from the vantage point of reading to live (rather than the various perspectives current within academic Latin American literary studies at the time). Even here there were several false starts and embarrassingly bad ideas, for example, a trip to Paris to Cortázar’s neighborhood and haunts, thinking that I might write my book about Cortázar as a novel. In fact, it was in Paris, when I discovered that I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to write a novel, while wandering the streets alone and bereft of direction in every sense of the word, that a possibility presented itself to me drawn from my brief experience studying Zen meditation. What if I approached writing on Cortázar as a Zen practice?

I was first drawn to Zen because some commentaries on Spinoza suggested affinities between the Dutch philosopher and Buddhist thought. At my first meditation class, the instructor told us that we should stop reading books about Zen during the five week course to allow ourselves to have our own direct experience of the practices. She was countering the tendency, especially in a college town like Ann Arbor, for beginning meditation students to protect themselves against the discomfort of the practice by addressing it primarily as an intellectual activity, a philosophy or a religion.
I discovered that, whatever Zen practice is, it is more and less than a religion, more and less than a philosophy and more and less than an intellectual experience. In that course, and in my subsequent practice with Zen, I was struck by how powerfully simply observing my physical, mental and especially, affective activity in the present moment exposed how much of my activity consisted in my over-developed intellect grasping to control the unfamiliar. Even as I found my intellect exposed and short-circuiting, I also found that the practice began to deliver an increased, and increasingly calm, awareness of my physical and affective states; of their arising, occupying my mind, and then moving on, without my doing anything but just observing them.

The Korean tradition in which I studied and continue to practice, emphasizes a variety of other contemplative practices alongside the seated meditation typically associated with Zen Buddhist practice. The practices build upon the basic rhythm of mindful breathing and cultivate the ability to release the grip of distracting, often stressful, thoughts and to unlock the complexity of one’s engagement with reality in the present moment. So I learned to drink tea with both hands, to eat an orange in silence, or to do walking meditation with my attention not on getting anywhere, but on the full experience of contact with the earth. I also learned that everyday physical activity such as preparing a meal, cleaning a toilet, or gardening can be made into a mindful practice. Even smoking a cigarette can be made into a mindfulness practice, as I learned one year when Haju Sunim, my teacher, “caught” a seminary student and me smoking a cigarette behind the Temple during a retreat (“when you smoke, know that you are smoking!”).

I initially felt the tempo of activities such as weeding a garden, clearing out and organizing a workshop, addressing and stamping envelopes, straightening a pile of lumber, conducted as practice, to be maddeningly slow and unproductive. My mind was anywhere but on my work. But over time, I gradually came to experience directly that the quality and efficiency of my work, my enjoyment of it, increased dramatically as I was able to give myself over fully to the task at hand. Certainly, approaching everyday activities as a Zen practice also has the effect of ordering priorities. If I am to drink my morning coffee with two hands, I must decide whether it is the coffee or the newspaper or the cigarette that is most important at that time. But I also regularly find that the overall quality of the experience and its results that comes from reducing the clutter of distracting thoughts irrelevant to the activity in which I am engaged, more than compensates for the perceived loss of a false sense of productivity.

Within the Chogye tradition reading, too, can be a form of Zen practice, though the kind of reading done only seems to underscore by contrast how far today’s academic reading is from a contemplative practice. For example, during one period of focused practice I was given a thirty page autobiographical text by a Korean Zen teacher and invited to read it one paragraph at a time, spending five days on each paragraph and recording each day, briefly and directly, my impressions of what I had read. On its face the text was not particularly remarkable in style or even in content. After the first or second day of reading through the same paragraph, I felt that I really had no more to say about it. So sometimes I read it again, but simply wrote that I felt I had nothing to say about it.

More often, when I simply observed my thoughts I noticed that they began by turning to the obvious or the “smart” things I’d already observed about the text, then they began a kind of restless turning in circles, eager to move on, but remarkably, when they finally came back, tethered to the text by the required re-reading, they found something else. At that point, I could no longer say whether my thoughts had found that something else in the text or in my self. I would say, instead, that I found that my thoughts were in a new space that was neither the text nor me, but the relation between text and me; and that that new space was in turn related to other things that had seemingly had nothing to do with text or me. In that new space my thoughts thrilled and played like a dog in a park, now chasing a squirrel, now sniffing a tree trunk, now rolling in dirt, now lying still at peace but alert and ready to move. It’s worth noting that the text was too long to finish reading at that pace during that practice period. This was my first direct experience of treating reading as a practice, the practice of an inexhaustible encounter without a predetermined goal and it remains a cornerstone of what I call reading to live.

Walking slowly through the streets of Paris, often literally lost and with no sense of where I wanted to go, and certainly lost with respect to my work, an idea came to me. What, if I imagined the whole of Cortázar’s literary production as earth – as field, forest, desert, beach – and imagined the process of reading him and writing about that reading as a kind of walking meditation or a three-foot hike? A three-foot hike is a meditative exercise in which one spends maybe 20 minutes “hiking” a three-foot patch of earth. One doesn’t cover a lot of ground, but one does discover a great deal that one might normally miss. I imagined that what I lost in a certain kind of productivity I would gain in awareness and enjoyment of my full engagement with a text. I hoped that such a form of reading would be a welcome corrective not only to particular orthodoxies that were in style among academic readers at the time, but to the broader academic imperatives toward productivity over exploration and discovery and toward specialization over broad relevance. Most of all, I realized that this sort of walking through the text was exactly the procedure I’d been unconsciously following in developing the readings I’d shared in my course.

I went out and bought four little brown notebooks, went back to my little hotel room, opened one of the Cortázar books that I had with me to a random page, read what was there and begin to write. It turned out, in terms of sheer volume, to be an extremely productive way of proceeding. Over the next four months I wrote some 350 pages, each day following the same method: take a book at random, choose a page, start to write, and just follow the writing and reading from there wherever it would take me, whether to other works by Cortázar, to memories or current events in my own life, to other works of fiction or of philosophy. I wrote informally and rapidly. I engaged with what other scholars had said about the texts in question when I found it relevant or interesting or both, which wasn’t very often. When I felt tired, or a particular vein felt tapped out, I’d put all the books back on the shelf and, if I felt like it, I’d start over with a new randomly chosen book and a new page. As time went on, I revised, sometimes combining sections, sometimes eliminating others. By the time I felt that I was finished, I had 99 sections, each chronicling a stroll through the field of Cortázar’s work. I called it Living Invention, or, The Way of Julio Cortázar.

I circulated it among some colleagues, some students, many friends and got very positive feedback about the book and how important and, some said, revolutionary it was. A few suggested some minor revisions, which I happily made. I felt very satisfied with myself, confident that I’d managed finally to get down on paper what had been so moving to me about reading to live. And then I sent it out to the editor who had published my first book. In a very friendly and respectful way, he replied that the press couldn’t really afford to publish monographic works (books on a single author). I sent it to another university press, and another. Each rejected the manuscript, complimenting me on the quality of my writing and the originality of my approach, but finally declining on the grounds that the work was too far outside the conventions of academic scholarship. One suggested I consider a trade press.
So I consulted with one of my friends, a published poet and short story writer who had read and liked the manuscript, and who, had a literary agent in New York. His agent also liked the book, but felt that its topic was too esoteric to market to a trade press. Finally, the owner of a local independent bookstore, who wanted to start a small press, read the manuscript and said that he wanted to publish it. It would be the second title published by the press. The press went under before it was even able to publish its first title.

Someone suggested that I’d find a more amenable publishing market and perhaps my ideal readers in Latin America After all, Cortázar was a Latin American writer and is to this day much more widely read there than in the United States. A former doctoral student of mine, fluent in Spanish and English and living in Argentina offered to translate the text into Spanish. He did so and I sent it around to a couple of Argentine novelist acquaintances of mine, both of whom complimented me on the work and put me in touch with publishers whom they knew personally, all of whom turned the manuscript down.

That book never got published. During the two years that it took to exhaust all those possibilities I kept telling myself and others that I didn’t care if it got published. I adopted a faux Zen attitude of detachment from results. With a false calm that at least convinced me, I accepted that the ultimate purpose of the whole experience might never be revealed to me. For all I knew, I said to myself and to others, the important thing had been the process of writing it and the joy it had brought to those who had seen it, and that was just fine with me. And it was. Until I realized that I did care, that I wanted to be recognized professionally for my ideas and that I was resentful and bitter towards what I called “the academy” for what I saw as its conservatism. Of course, looking back now, I think in some ways I had created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Worried that neither the academy nor the general public would accept my ideas about reading to live I wrote a book that neither the academy nor the general public would accept. But at the time, I didn’t see it that way. I just thought the academy didn’t get me and so, forget the academy. I would quit.

I informed my Department chair late in Spring 2003 that the following academic year would be my last. I would spend that year tying off loose ends and preparing to go off and live, as I’d often dreamed of doing, in a little town on the Oregon coast. In some ways, I thought to myself, I was back where I was when I went to graduate school. Only this time I’d have the courage to give up the perks of the academic life, make a living one way or another and, in the meantime, go on doing what I liked to do anyway, reading, thinking, writing, and talking with people. But I would do it, say, from behind the front desk of the little seaside hotel I imagined I’d be working at. Word got around, and during the academic year that followed I felt a rush of freedom and lightness, even a sense of superior cool when, as happened on occasion, some colleague or other would express his astonishment at the bravery of my decision.

But once again, the year didn’t pan out as I’d expected. I didn’t make any preparations for my new life and I didn’t tie off many loose ends. There was also significant insanity going in my personal life at the time relating to some of those unhealthy patterns I hadn’t noticed in the midst of my blinding clarity back in 1996. My ex-wife had moved to New York in 1998 and run out of money by 2001. She wanted to move back to Ann Arbor to be with the kids, and wanted to know if she could stay with us for a short time, just until she got on her feet. I said sure, secretly proud of my exceptional generosity and equanimity. But she was mentally ill and, given my longstanding need to suppress my own desires to attempt to make the bad feelings of others go away, the planned “short time” turned into four years. Which is to say, that as I contemplated this radical departure from the financial security of my university job I was not only supporting myself and my kids, but also my live-in ex-wife. I taught my courses, performed my administrative duties, and trembled at the thought of what would happen once I was off the academic dole.

Most significantly, and probably subconsiously to avoid thinking about the following year, I started painting. One day, my kids bored, I found a piece of plywood in the basement of our rented house and some house paints, and we just kind of threw paint around on the wood for a couple of hours. After they got tired of it and went off to do something else, I kept at it, applying layer after layer of paint, in patterns that pleased me. When I didn’t like something, I just painted over it, as many times as I felt like until I liked what I was looking at. How exhilarating!

This at last was what I was meant to do. I was tired of words, I told myself. I was a painter. And the evidence of it was the enthusiasm and tremendous productivity I displayed. Over the course of the year, I probably made about 150 paintings like this. Somehow someone got wind of this and I wound up even selling some of these paintings (though mostly to colleagues who, I think, bought the works out of a kind of curiosity). Not only was I getting to be creative, not only was I indulging my fetish of spontaneity and process, but I was getting some recognition and more money than I’d ever made off my writing.

But the other important thing that happened during that year was that I made friends with some new colleagues who, mostly by the example of their own enthusiasm and the warmth of their friendship, convinced me that there was a place for my kind of thinking in the academy. I just needed to rework some of the ideas into a form that would be intelligible to the editors of academic journals. Why didn’t I, they asked, write an essay for an academic journal on Cortázar and his concept and practice of invention? Another very close friend, who had applauded my decision to quit (having long harbored a similar fantasy) reminded me that all along the important thing in his mind was not whether I actually left the academy or not, but that simply by declaring my intention to do so, I had created the psychological space within me to make working as an academic a conscious choice, rather than a default result of decisions I’d made at a very young and impressionable age.

So I wrote the scholarly essay and, its publication encouraging me to conclude that I could communicate my ideas within the conventions of the literary academy, at the end of the year I un-quit. After all, I figured, I could paint just as easily in Ann Arbor as in Oregon (I even remember telling myself that with my eyes closed the sound of wind in the trees sounded like ocean waves breaking). Moreover, I could subsidize my painting with my academic job. This last consideration was especially important, as painting sales declined precipitously after the first few months. The same friends, in an effort to retain me, persuaded the dean of the university to give me a semester off the following year. I also had accrued a sabbatical semester so that all together I was looking forward to another sixteen months off, from May 2004 through August 2005.
Lots of time to paint and I imagined – why not? -- that I would develop another, more sober and academically plausible, version of my Cortázar book and that by the time I got back to regular teaching, I’d have that book in the right university press’s hands and my once promising career would be back on track. What happened instead (If I ever write a memoir Part One, at least, should be called “What Happened Instead”) is that the Cortázar book stubbornly resisted my efforts to recast it into acceptable academic terms.

What also happened was that in the process of preparing new courses to teach for the following year I began to develop a more complex and more intellectually grounded view of the kind of reading I’d done in the course of writing my unconventional Cortázar book. When I returned to work, over the following several years I taught some new courses. They included a series of graduate seminars on Pragmatism, Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, and Spinoza, some undergraduate courses on the short stories of various Latin American writers I’d really not studied carefully before and a new undergraduate course that explored the affinities between contemplative practices and careful reading by bringing both directly into the classroom.

The short story classes were important because the brevity of the form permitted, indeed forced, me and my students to read the texts slowly and carefully multiple times, much as I had had to do with the Zen practice reading a couple of years before. Likewise the course in reading and contemplation deepened my sense of the visceral levels at which the two activities were related. Into the graduate seminars I sometimes incorporated works by Zen-inspired thinkers like Mark Epstein and Stephen Batchelor who where themselves looking to integrate the insights of their own study of Zen with more conventional Western trends in thought like psychoanalysis, pragmatism, and existentialism. The seminars were valuable because they permitted or forced me and my students to painstakingly and deeply think through, at the side of the formidable authors we studied, some very basic questions about the ethics of intellectual activity alongside the other activities that make a life worth living. In short, and looking back, I think that these teaching experiences helped me to understand my passion for reading to live, whether Cortázar or anyone else. I began to assemble resources and reading experiences that helped me to articulate more cogently just what was going on in that process that I’d come to call reading to live.

Perhaps most important to this whole story, around this time I fell in love with and eventually became engaged to Claire. Loving and being loved bears profound and far-reaching implications on this work. For this experience of love, completely new to me, transformed and continues to transform me and my way of relating to everything in my life. It has shown me on a nearly daily basis how difficult and important it is to be in touch with and guided by desire; not as a craving for some external thing the possessio of which I thinkwould make me happy, but as the motivating force behind my full-on, creative engagement with my self and my world. As Samuel Beckett said, in Worstward Ho!, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

For all that I had studied as a scholar and that I learned as a Zen practitioner, for all that I thought I knew, nothing had prepared me for this thoroughgoing experience of sharing with another person and of wanting to share more, of desiring the vulnerability, intimacy and growth that this has brought me, even while fearing it. Through this love I have discovered dimensions of affect, desire and potential within myself that I had no inkling existed. I discovered in the woman I love, and through her in myself, an exquisitely precious combination of frailty, beauty, and breathtaking power. I’m no poet, not even a very good storyteller, and this experience of love is the sort of thing that artists communicate most effectively. But I think that my ideas about and practice of reading to live may, most of all, be practice for living a life of love. It may also be that an openness to the possibility of this sort of love, even if only subconsciously, is what we bring to reading to live. I’m certain that my own experience of and understanding of the nature and power of both reading and living has been deepened and intensified beyond words by loving and learning to be loved.

I developed the idea for a new book – A Book of Joys: Towards the Ethics of Immanent Close Reading. I published several of the draft chapters as essays or delivered them as papers at academic conferences, all of which bolstered my confidence and my sense that at last I’d come up with the right project. It was a book that honored the “extra-academic” lessons I’d learned by teaching “Reading to Live” and writing Living Invention, while at the same time conceding the value of scholarly conventions of specialization, complexity, thoroughness of research, and rigor. Over the course of the 2008-2009 academic year, while Claire and I were commuting between St. Louis, where she had taken a job, and Ann Arbor, where I was still doing mine, I shaped and all-but completed the work. I had one chapter to go, but I had a clear vision of that chapter and the rest of it felt solid, coherent, and complete.

I won a fellowship from Michigan allowing me a leave in order to complete the manuscript. My idea was that I could then present it as my long overdue second book as my part of my dossier for promotion to full professor. I was put directly in touch with an editor at a prestigious university press who, I was told, would be the right person to see the book through to publication. I sent him a proposal and he was indeed interested in seeing the manuscript. So in one week I sent off the manuscript, packed up my belongings, and moved with Claire to St. Louis. I was ready to enjoy the summer, figuring that the editor would get back to me sometime in August with the word that he wanted to publish the book and with suggestions for how to make it better.

What happened instead was a rejection (the fourth -- I'd already floated the idea for the book to three other academic presses). The book topic was interesting, I was brave and the book potentially sensational—but he could not publish it.

Once again, this time despite my best efforts to follow the conventions, the academy had rejected me, and not just the academy but an individual within it who I’d come to believe would understand and accept me. In fact, I think the individual did seem to get me and to point out in terms that were uncomfortably blunt that however interesting, brave, and potentially sensational my book might be, it could not be published by his university press. After getting over my considerable confusion and distress, I calmed down and called the editor to see if I couldn’t get a bit more detail about just what made the manuscript unpublishable. The editor explained that perhaps my mistake was in thinking of my primary audience as literature professors. The editor implied that perhaps they really didn’t want to hear what I had to say about how we as academics might read differently, but he also suggested that the sort of things I was saying about reading were being said by others outside the academy and that my words might resonate among that broader group of readers.

So I didn’t send out the proposal to another university press. Instead, I happened upon a couple of articles in the The New York Times about reading instruction in the public schools and, around the same time, heard an interview on the radio with a neuropsychologist who had recently published a book on the history and science of the reading brain. The articles lamented the shallowness of reading habits public school teachers were increasingly driven, by broader cultural, social, and economic forces beyond their control, to accept and even encourage in their students. Meanwhile, the neuropsychologist spoke about the importance of what she called “deep reading,” a skill not natural to human beings and so in grave danger of disappearing in the internet age if we didn’t urgently take steps to safeguard and cultivate it. A little research into the idea of deep reading led me to discover that ideas of deep reading and slow reading – very similar in their emphasis on attention and care – were circulating in the culture, particularly among people who were not professors of literature.

Reading these articles and listening to that interview, I suddenly had the feeling that the editor was right. I had been mistaken in trying to mold what was most interesting in my experience and ideas to fit the models of conversation and the topics of professional interest to literature professors, who in order to carry out their work exclude at the outset the kinds of questions and experiences I was bringing to the table. I suddenly became aware that I had spent years struggling to participate in a conversation taking place in a small room, while just outside the door a related, but different and broader conversation was taking place. Whether or not I’d be heard in that broader conversation was and remains an open question. What was not in question for me at that moment was that I was more interested in that conversation and that I wanted to participate in it. So with a lot of encouragement, I stepped out the door of that small room. I began to re-research, reread, revise and rewrite A Book of Joys: Towards an Ethics of Immanent Close Reading to turn it, into Reading to Live: An Experiment with Joy in Eight Readings, the book you hold in your hands. (to be continued)

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