Prelude: A Story of Reading to Live (Section 1 of 3)

(Continued from here.)

I wasn’t always a professor of literature. I started out as a pretty normal person, a kid growing up in a suburban neighborhood in the Midwestern university town of Madison, Wisconsin, the youngest by far of four children born to a Spanish-born couple that had come to Madison via Cali, Colombia and Portland, Oregon. My father was a professor of biochemistry and my mother a housewife. Our family room, where we spent most of our evenings, had built-in bookcases lined with books in different languages and from a range of different disciplines: encyclopedias, novels, works of philosophy, scientific textbooks, biographies and autobiographies.

There was much unhappiness and tension in our household when I was growing up, many arguments in that family room. I did not seriously explore the books on those shelves until college, but already as a child I drew comfort from staring at them in an unfocused way. Perhaps it was the combination of order and disorder in the shelves themselves: the neat parallel lines of the firm wood shelves themselves spiced by the great variety of sizes, colors, textures, and languages of the books. I see myself lying on the thick carpeting in front of the fieldstone fireplace where my dad usually had a good fire going in winter. I lay there and whatever else might be going on, whatever tense silence or explosive argument might be in the air, the very sight of the dark wood of the shelves peppered with books drew me in and away from my worries and comforted me.

From an early age my mother and my siblings read to me and, once I knew how, I was encouraged to read for myself and I took to it with great relish. I was not a very discriminating reader at that time, nor a precocious one. I wasn’t one of those future academics who at an oddly early age were reading Moby Dick; more like Inky: The Seeing Eye Dog. I especially liked sports books, biographies of famous athletes and novels about basketball players. (My other great escape from the tension in the household was listening to Milwaukee Bucks basketball games broadcast on a little red and white, dice-like transistor radio I kept by my pillow). But really, I would read or at least try pretty much anything. I had older siblings who also enjoyed reading and so sometimes they would read to me or lend me the simpler books that they were reading for high school classes or for their own enjoyment.

This lasted until around the time I hit puberty. At that point I discovered girls and competitive team sports. I was too shy to act on my discovery of girls. But I threw myself wholeheartedly into sports, especially basketball and soccer. Yet even in high school, when I devoted most of my energy and attention to sports, I never fully abandoned books and writing. It was, as you might imagine given the way cliques fall out in high schools, a not entirely comfortable combination of interests. I had my sports friends with whom I shared my enjoyment of athletics, while keeping my bookish self under wraps and I had my bookish friends in front of whom I played down my love of sports. Only very, very rarely did I experience the opportunity to share with others the whole range of what brought me joy in my life and feel that they accepted it. Now that I think about it, it was neither the sports nor the books, nor the collision of disparate interests and groups of friends that felt difficult. It was my passion for them, it was the unwieldy feeling of my desire. No doubt most teenagers suffer their desire as unwieldy. Maybe in my case the social divergence of the paths my desires took exacerbated my sense that they were too much.

When I got to college, I maintained my love of sports, but my competitive career had ended. On the other hand, the wider and more diverse intellectual and social world of the university—in my case the University of Wisconsin at Madison (as compared to my small Catholic high school) -- provided ample social rewards for returning and deepening my love of books and writing. In fact, by my second year in college, reading had become the most enjoyable activity in my life and the core of my self-image. So much so, in fact, that I switched into Comparative Literature as a major, just so that I could spend more of my time reading (and because, at that time, the Comp Lit majors seemed cooler and more attractive to me than the Poli Sci majors).

It’s true, with that switch I had to write papers about what I’d read. But that didn’t seem like too high a price to pay. Besides, it offered the compensating pleasure of being told by my professors that I was smart and good at it. Beyond this, I rediscovered a hidden pleasure, forgotten since childhood, in creative writing, mostly poems and some stories. I just loved that I could make something out of words, could make words do things to people like feel happy or sad or think differently about something, or even make them do something they wouldn’t normally do.

Already in this way of describing my love of writing, I can see how blurry the boundary was between what I loved for its own sake and what I loved because of its effect on others. This struggle to feel and to become more comfortable expressing my desire (including the desire – rather than the compulsive need – to help others) remains present in my life. In fact, most of the readings that follow, the literature and the philosophy that have inspired those readings, speak in painful and inspiring ways to that tension between self and world of which mine is just a subspecies.

But in any event, books and creative writing were in fact what I did. In the very cool autobiographical movie I would run in my head at the time, walking the leafy autumn pathways along the lakeshore in Madison, I was becoming a poet. Of course, few poets can make a living just by writing poems. The lore of poetic history is populated with stories of writers starving, working odd jobs, making do in steadfast pursuit of their creativity. I certainly wasn’t brave enough to just strike out on my own as a poet upon graduation, washing dishes or landscaping or whatever it might take or traveling or living abroad teaching English in a foreign land. Meanwhile, as I said, my professors were telling me I was good at the study of literature and should go to graduate school.

So I got myself into a graduate school thinking, naively as it turned out, that I’d take the fellowship that was offered and read more books for a couple of years, move from my Midwestern hometown, away from my family, to Durham, North Carolina (even this choice was partly made because of my love of the college basketball teams – Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State -- on what is called “Tobacco Road”) and write more poems. When the fellowship was up, I figured, I’d drop out. I imagined that by that time I’d be brave enough to support myself with some kind of job that would give me time to read as well as give me what I idealized as the kind of “real life experience” that I could mill into poems and stories of my own.

But if, or when, the time came, I didn’t recognize it and, in any event, I sure didn’t drop out. I enrolled in Duke University’s Graduate Program in Literature in the fall of 1987. At that time Duke was a very high-powered place in academic literary studies. The very first week I was there, a conference was being held called “Theories of Narrative and Narratives of Theory,” featuring speakers like Terry Eagleton, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson (the head of my new program), Jonathan Culler, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Stanley Fish – most of the biggest names in the world of literary studies.

During orientation week, a fellow first-year student asked me if I was a Marxist. I replied “what’s that?” I really didn’t know, or maybe I was really nervous and couldn’t come up with an answer. It certainly seems to me now a shocking expression of ignorance– what college graduate doesn’t know what Marxism is?! But then something odd and, eventually, telling, happened. Rather than laugh at me or mock my ignorance, he looked at me with a kind of self-castigating admiration and said, “Oh, yeah, of course, I see what you mean.” I had no idea what had just happened in that exchange and was to shy to press for clarification. But after a few weeks of classes, I was able to understand that he had invoked a category of identity – “Marxist” – as though its meaning were self evident and then asked me whether the category applied to me or not. By asking him “what’s that?” I had inadvertently questioned the definition of the category that he was taking for granted. I had unwittingly stumbled into critical thinking. But I didn’t know I was doing that, I thought I was just asking a simple question.

It turns out it was nearly impossible to ask a simple question at Duke and have it received as such; just as it was nearly impossible to express a simple, like or dislike for some piece of literature without an elaborate intellectual rationalization to justify it. On the contrary, it felt to me as though the very idea of taking joy in reading – if it merited any attention at all -- was to be analyzed and theorized until the feeling shriveled up and shrank away in shame into some dark corner. I learned to say that something was “really interesting” when I meant I really liked it or really didn’t like it. And the joy I felt when I read– if I accidentally confessed it –was to be diagnosed as a symptom of my addiction to the dangerously deceptive palliative of aesthetic enjoyment and interpreted and treated accordingly. In place of the joy of reading, I developed the more muted pleasure of producing acute ideological critiques of works of literature. I learned to show how books simultaneously protested the oppressive social conditions in which they were produced and unwittingly betrayed their complicity with them.. Openly enjoying the surface of the text gave way to suspiciously interrogating it: “C’mon, we know you’re holding back buddy, cough it up, talk! We have ways of making you cooperate.”

Of course, that’s an overly dramatic, one-sided, not-very-nice and by itself not very helpful way of telling the story. It’s not that the people in my program were doing anything wrong or that it wasn’t satisfying in its own way or that there isn’t value in that sort of reading of texts. On the contrary, I think it’s perfectly reasonable, even desirable, that intellectuals tend to the connections between their particular interests and their society. I learned then and still today believe that there’s much more enjoyment to be found in reading when we go beyond just “loving” or “hating” a book and take the time to scrutinize with care the hidden assumptions that attend a text and shape our experience of it.

It might be truer and more helpful to cast my experience as a parable of a young man interacting with an institution. In other words, as a kind of coming of age story, just as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials or Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy, which I will discuss in later chapters are coming of age stories; just as, in fact, Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect could be read as a kind of coming of age story. As a young man, perhaps like others, I had a fragile sense of my own desires and as an institution, Duke’s Graduate Program in Literature, like other institutions, had a rather strong sense of its desires, or perhaps “purposes” would be a more accurate word.

Even or especially beyond my academic, intellectual, and professional life, I experienced this difference in strength of purpose as an unbearable tension between a compulsion to do whatever I felt like doing and a compulsion to fulfill what I understand to be the purposes or expectations of someone or thing outside myself whose approval I craved. In general, I responded to this tension by veering spastically between the heartless indulgence of pleasures and the equally heartless fulfillment of obligations. In either case, though, the point I want to stress is that I was numb and unaware of the role that my own affirmative, creative desires, whether with respect to myself or others, played in motivating my actions. It seems to me now that an awareness of desire can be sufficient to guide me in acting to fulfill my own needs and to contribute in a reasonable way to fulfilling the needs of others. But at that time, I had no practice in identifying desire and so I swerved back and forth between internally and externally directed compulsions, without ever wondering about, let alone identifying, what I really wanted or how I wanted to be.

Looking at it that way, when I arrived at Duke, I veered in the direction of fulfilling the expectations of others. This may not have been a bad thing in and of itself. Perhaps it is just a description of one kind of education: one exercises one’s sense of one’s own desires by testing them against the stronger or more solidly fixed desires of a teacher or institution (think of the pupil in “The Karate Kid” impatiently waxing the implacable old master’s car). And it could be that, at least for me, veering in the direction of fulfilling intellectual obligations was a necessary corrective to a native fear and mistrust of the intellect.

Growing up with a stern, intellectual father and a warm, emotional mother, I opposed intellect to emotion and associated intellect with a repressive, authoritarian sternness. Perhaps veering toward meeting and exceeding intellectual requirements was a part of trying to come to terms with my intellectual capacity, to see if I could deploy those faculties without becoming violent, or repressive. I am certain that I became addicted to the approval I received for meeting outside expectations. It was addictive because at one stroke it both entailed losing touch with any desires I might have that ran contrary to those expectations and compensated for that loss.

In any event, regardless of the possibly dys-functional or semi-functional dynamics that led me to and through graduate school, I did gain tools, abilities, and even habits of mind that continue to serve me well, even as the uses to which I put them and the interests I seek to serve with them have shifted. Back then, the compensation for becoming an adept at the intellectual and institutional game of academic literary studies was that I finished my doctorate four years later, in 1991. I was able to land an excellent tenure-track job, first at UCLA and then, in the Fall of 1992, at the University of Michigan. At that time, I still loved to read. But writing about what I read had become a chore to be carried out with mechanical efficiency, occasionally with some intellectual flair detached from the beauty of the book, but never, ever with joy. I read, often literally with a pen and paper in hand, mostly with the aim of writing some article or conference paper the appearance of which on my curriculum vitae would garner me more praise and thus help keep the demons of self-doubt at bay for another round.

Despite the absence of joy, and probably because of the security, I didn’t really pause to question this arrangement. My academic career had gotten off to a very promising start with a book already published by a hot university press to mostly favorable reviews, and with lots of requests to give talks and write articles and with the promised land of tenure just around the corner. What’s more, I’d received two prestigious external fellowships that, taken together, afforded me a year off to write a second book, substantial portions of which I’d already completed, and which was a variation on the formula that had gotten me success in my first book. So there I was: in May 1995, not yet thirty years old, turning in a very promising body of scholarship to be evaluated for tenure and looking forward to sixteen months of time to write another book, uninterrupted by teaching or administrative obligations of any kind.

And that’s when the first crisis erupted, not from outside, but from within me. Why exactly that happened in that moment and in that way will probably forever be too complex for me to fully understand, let alone explain. But the way I remember it is that I finished watching a movie (I still remember it was Boys on the Side) and it made me cry. That a movie would move me to tears was neither unprecedented nor remarkable. But what happened next was both. I walked from the living room sofa to the dining table, where I had neatly piled a stack of manila folders containing copies of all the publications and works in progress that I had recently submitted to the chair of my tenure committee. I looked at that stack, the material embodiment of eight years of work and life, counting graduate school, and thought to myself: “none of this has ever moved me to tears, not what I have read and not what I have written.” I recently watched Boys on the Side for the first time since that night and found myself relatively unaffected by it, bringing home the point that I hadn’t cried that day because of the movie. I think I was crying, mourning really, for the lost desiring, the lost feeling inside me.

If my life really were a movie, what would probably follow that instant would be a montage in which, spurred by this epiphany, I transformed my life – late spring would give way to summer, summer to fall and then to the long gray Michigan winter, and then, as bright green leaves began to bud on the trees of Ann Arbor, as crocuses and snowdrops and tulips shot forth from the still cold ground, we’d see a new me: physically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually fulfilled in my work and in my life. But my life is not a movie and that’s not what happened.

What happened instead during those sixteen months from May 1995 to September 1996 is: 1) I got tenure 2) my wife of six years and I separated and reconciled twice and then split-up for good (we had two children, a girl and a boy, 5 and 4 years old at the time); 3) I stopped working on my second book and started reading whatever I felt like reading – novels from outside my field that I’d long wondered about, works of philosophy that I’d long felt like a fraud for referencing as though I’d read them when I’d only read about them, biographies of and articles about sports figures, especially Dennis Rodman; and 4) near the end of my leave, I started preparing to return to my teaching and administrative responsibilities. I struggled to prepare a course my department had asked me to teach for the Fall of 1996, “Comparative Literature 240: Introduction to Comparative Literature.” The course was a requirement for majors but also designed to draw in non-majors looking to satisfy their humanities requirements and thus boost our enrollments.

I struggled to prepare the course because I felt once again the familiar tension between my desire and external expectations. After what I’d felt and experienced throughout the preceding year, how in the world could I stand before a group of students and provide an introduction to my discipline that would simultaneously entertain the non-majors, not disillusion the majors, and boost the enrollments and visibility of Comparative Literature at the university? What could I tell them? That Comparative Literature was a discipline where books and the love of them go to die? Or that I had no idea what really distinguished Comparative Literature as an area of study and that, even if I did, I didn’t really believe in the value of such distinctions, at least not when weighed against their cost in the form of hyper-specialization and the detachment of advanced scholarship from desire, feeling, and the mess of daily life outside the academy?

Enter Spinoza and the words I quoted in my Introduction. When I read them, I’m somewhat embarrassed to confess, the first image that came to my mind was of the sort of encounter I’d already had many times with colleagues at work or at academic conferences in which someone asked you or you asked someone “what are you working on?” The answer was always something very specialized, often couched in a technical vocabulary: “Oh, you know, I’m working on the intersection of Spivak and Bhabha’s theories of postcoloniality and 19th century Latin American political writing.” I imagined Spinoza responding, “Well, you know, I’m working on finding out whether there’s something which, once found and acquired, will continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity.”

Put into a contemporary academic context, Spinoza’s answer seems naive if not ridiculous. It is at once lofty and non-specialized and directly aimed at daily life. I certainly didn’t have the chutzpah to say so, but secretly, it’s what I decided I did want to devote my work and life to. And, in this wider context that I’m entering now with this book, I don’t think it seems pretentious or ridiculous at all. Who wouldn’t want to find more joy in their life, let alone a continuously flowing fountain of joy? The question I set to myself at that moment and that, in one way or another, via a very tortuous and erratic path, I have been courting since that time is: what role can reading play in Spinoza’s search for a stable source of joy? More succinctly how can we read to live?

Spinoza had already helped me in another way, indirectly. I found my way to Spinoza by reading a book about Spinoza by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. On pages 22 and 23 of his book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze paraphrases Spinoza:

That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad, or servile, or weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For, by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? How can one keep from destroying oneself through guilt, and others through resentment, spreading one’s own sickness, indigestions, and poisons? In the end, one is unable even to encounter oneself.

More than anything that I read or that friends and family said to me around the time that my marriage was in its final throes, it was this passage that cleared my head and heart and permitted me to see that the marriage had to end. It was, precisely, a “bad encounter” and I was becoming “bad, or servile, or weak, or foolish” by staying in it: “destroying myself through guilt, and others through resentment.” It’s not that others hadn’t said this to me, or that I hadn’t thought this myself. But somehow, through a process that I am still trying to understand, Spinoza’s words were the ones that opened my eyes to this dynamic in my own life.

Of course, for me these moments of clarity seem frustratingly impermanent. That passage gave me the clarity necessary to make a move, to try something different. But in the midst of the clarity that permitted some movement, I also remained unaware of many other sources of suffering and obstacles to joy, and so remained paralyzed and stuck in many other patterns. Some of these would become clear to me on later occasions and more changes would ensue. I am sure that yet others still remain for me to discover, to painfully acknowledge, and to clumsily attempt to address. But none of this clouds the shining clarity of direction and practical impetus that reading provided in that moment, nor does it diminish the importance and value of actions it enabled me to begin to take to change my life and make it more joyful.

I thought about this as I muddled, dazed, through a mire of insecurities and uncertainties in the face of the course I was to teach. I thought more deeply about my experience of reading over the course of the previous year. I recalled the rich banquet of affect those novels had offered me, the shatteringly lucid and practical insights I was surprised to find written by philosophers who, after all, were – like me -- just human beings trying to figure out a confusing existence; I recalled even the fun of reading and writing something intelligent about a sport I loved.

I also thought about the personal pain and difficulty of the year and about how I didn’t know how I’d have made it through, such as I did, without reading. I wondered if this could be my introduction to comparative literature, a course centered on narratives of crisis and how reading such narratives can provide us, in the words of the American philosopher and critic Kenneth Burke, “equipment for living.” I thought about Spinoza’s project: Why couldn’t I say that I had been and was lost and that I used books to comfort me, to challenge me, to help me understand how I’d lost my way and how I might find it again? I certainly couldn’t come up with anything else to say at the time so that’s what I went with.

As it turned out, such thoughts on the basic value of reading for life were a good match for a lecture hall full of eighteen to twenty-two year old college students, most of whom were not literature majors. For them the answers to fundamental questions of value -- “Why read?” “What is this good for?” -- were by no means obvious. These became the guiding questions for the course that, over the next seven fall semesters, would evolve into “Reading to Live.” It was as if I had turned Harold Bloom’s title, How To Read and Why into a question and responded with an emphatic: “Read to live!”

Over the course of those seven semesters, I kept some texts the same because they spoke to me anew each summer as I prepared for the upcoming semester. But others I changed because the particular ways in which I felt lost and the kinds of books that I turned to changed. I tinkered with other aspects of the syllabus, the kinds of written work I’d ask of the students and even the methods of evaluation. No matter what texts I taught and whether or not I repeated them, my lectures were different every fall, in part because my life was different every fall, but in part because I was discovering different thinkers who were shaping and altering the way I thought about even my most cherished texts.

The course grew in size and popularity and the evaluations, for the most part, tended to be enthusiastic. Most of the Comparative Literature majors seemed to appreciate the opportunity to come back to examine afresh their own motivations for majoring in Comparative Literature in the wake of several years of studying literature, criticism, and theory. The non-majors, who made up the vast majority of the enrollments, seemed energized by the invitation to read literary works in relation to their other, more primary, interests in life. I think everyone, myself included, felt braced by the challenges of acknowledging uncertainty in life; inspired by the prospect of reading not so much to resolve that uncertainty (let alone to learn how to classify, judge, or critique literature), but just to go more deeply and openly into that uncertainty and so make it less paralyzing and even, at times, the ground for trying something different. I’m not sure how much any of us really learned about Kafka, or Marx, or Nietzsche, or Puig or any of the authors and texts we studied. But I feel fairly confident that most of us felt transformed by our contact with these texts and, aware of those transformations and inspired to carry them out of the classroom and into our daily lives. “Reading to Live” remains easily the most challenging and satisfying teaching experience I’ve had in my nearly two decades as a university literature professor. (to be continued)

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

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

Let me say a word about this broader conversation about reading and what I believe I have to add to it that hasn’t been said already. The conversation as it stands might be summed up in this way: 1) reading books is happening less and less in our culture, especially among younger generations who have been raised with other media, particularly the internet, that draw more of their attention, energy, and time (sometimes, there is a also subcurrent of worry that when reading does happen it is less and less often books cherished by scholars for bearing the core values of the Western tradition); and 2) reading should happen more and more because a) it is a pleasure; or b) it is an important means of intellectual self-discovery; or c) it is an important source for knowing the things an informed member of our society ought to know to function intelligently.

What I have to say is that yes, certainly, reading should happen more and more carefully, and yes, reading can do all these things, but most of all reading can be more than a pleasure or an intellectual responsibility we owe to ourselves or our society. In fact, in reading we can practice breaking down such dichotomies as pleasure and task, freedom and responsibility, emotion and intellect, self and other or self and world. Reading can be a joy and, as such, can be practice for a joyful life. Or, to state it another way, what I want to add to the conversation is, first, the importance of reading slowly and carefully with a mind and heart open to unforeseen discoveries and transformations; second, the role that affect and emotion play in making reading the pleasure and the source of intellectual self-discovery it can be; and third, that the beneficial effects of reading in this way can be far more profound and far-reaching than merely making us functional citizens. Reading in this way can help us to become more fully functional human beings filled with desire and intimately connected with our power to act creatively.

I believe that the best way to convey what I mean by the value of reading to live is simply by doing it. So most of the rest of this book will consist of eight readings of texts that I have loved that both demonstrate and illustrate the practice of reading to live in several of its many different aspects. It might be helpful if I first offer an overview of the basic features of what I mean by reading to live. I don’t mean this overview to be taken as a formula to be applied. As my own readings will show, reading to live is above all a relational encounter with the words of someone else and entails a willingness to let that encounter shatter formulas and disrupt preconceptions and agendas. It would be more accurate to think of this overview as one of a number of possible ways to distill into a few points what I think the readings I will share have in common with each other.

Reading to live is slow, like a three-foot hike. It is reading that loves words and so it takes its time with them and gets close to them. In so doing, reading to live is mindful and attentive to the myriad sensations and possibilities of meaning offered by the words on the page. Reading to live is likely to entail, at least on occasion, rereading, sometimes many times, sometimes at intervals of only an instant and at other times intervals of years or even decades. At different points in this book I will use adjectives like slow, mindful, attentive, deep, close, and intensive interchangeably to evoke different facets of the pace and quality of attention entailed in reading to live.

I want to emphasize that the call to read closely says nothing about the length of what is read or the length or exhaustiveness of our report to others, if one even emerges, of the reading experience. One can read closely three words of a text or a 600 page work, and the result of that close reading may be a sentence or an entire volume, or even just a passing and unspoken thought. But for the moment, I mean to suggest a reading that is like a kind of stroll. Whether that stroll takes place in a crowded city or an isolated park, in the countryside or through the woods, reading to live is a stroll through a text in which we allow time for noticing, for pausing, for retracing our steps, for following curiosity down what may turn out to be an unfulfilling path, for being moved.

We can drive from St. Louis to Chicago on Interstate 55 and get there in no more than four or five hours. Along the way we’ll see open fields, dotted with trees and, every ten miles or so, an interchange dense with gas stations, mini-marts, and McDonald’s. Or we can drive from St. Louis to Chicago on old US Route 66, which runs more or less alongside Interstate 55. It will take us double the time and along the way we’ll see houses, churches, stalks of corn rising just a few yards from our car window, old dilapidated diners and shiny new ones, sharp curves that we have to slow down to negotiate and small towns that we have to slow down to pass through. At times the road will seem simply to end and we’ll have to pause to figure out how to keep going. Sometimes we’ll go so slow that we notice a sign “Pie $1.99” and that will draw us in and we’ll stop and sit at a counter and have a conversation with a stranger. We branch out.

Similarly, among the effects of the slowness of reading to live is the discovery of complexity and ambiguity at ever more minute scales. The slow pace of reading to live delivers to us, when we are willing, an awareness of the rich complexity and ambiguity of the book, story, language, and words we are reading. And this tremendously enriched experience has a very important effect. By complicating it suspends, our sense of certainty.

Think of the drive to know, with certainty, as that drive to get to Chicago as fast as possible with no detours or distractions. But in the slow time of reading to live it is no longer clear what there is to be certain about, what there is to know, or what knowing would even mean anyway. In reading to live, the imperative to read for knowledge and information gradually yields to the desire to read to sense and learn and feel and think and discover and create. Awareness of sensations and affect flood the space created when we suspend our drive to get to the truth that we might have imagined is held, like water in a pitcher, in the meaningless container of language. We may gradually stop thinking of language as a clear container for truths that are themselves just accurate pictures corresponding to the way things actually are in the world. Gradually, we start to experience words, sensations, feelings, thoughts, and world as all parts or aspects of a single fabric that is being in the world.

In these ways, reading to live is open. By that I mean open to nonsense, paradox, ambiguity, and difficulty, to doubt and uncertainty, to what may sometimes be uncomfortable feelings of pain or sadness or anger, though also, of course, to feelings of love, sympathy, excitement and joy, open to connection with others and the world and open to a tender awareness of the vulnerability that comes with that connection. This openness is facilitated by the slow pace of reading to live, but that slowness is not in itself sufficient to provoke it. Even in a stroll or meandering drive we may find ourselves trying to close our hearts and minds to what we encounter. Therefore reading as openness entails an active effort to recognize those impulses to close ourselves off when they arise and to allow them to pass, even though we may not know what might occur when we do so. As we read with openness we find that the hard boundary between our reading self and the author other begins to slip and blur and perhaps to dissolve entirely. We transform the text and the text transforms us, much as happens when we love.

As we suspend the drive to treat what we read as the repository of a single meaning or as a mere source of information and follow instead the paths of desire, feeling, doubt and curiosity, we may find ourselves led well beyond the text we are reading. We may be led to personal associations such as memories of past experiences, of reading or otherwise. We may be led to think of other texts, by the same author or by authors we know influenced him or her, by critics or scholars writing about the text we are reading, or even texts at first glance seemingly unrelated to the one we are reading. We may be led out of the textual world entirely, into feelings and thoughts about the world we live in, about its natural or social dimensions, about the people in it, strangers or loved ones, about the problems, challenges, and joys of living in this world. Reading to live entails affirming the value of following these paths connecting the text to what is outside the text and making permeable the boundary between the text and our reading of it and the world and our living in it.

In this way, finally, reading to live is a fundamentally inventive, creative activity, in which we take the given materials of text, self, and world and treat them slowly, openly, associatively, so as to at once passively and actively generate new relations within and among them, forging in the process new possible ways of being for all three. This creative dimension of reading I consider to be pragmatic. I mean pragmatic in the widest sense of what may be practical. I do not mean that we read narrowly and hurriedly to find solutions to problems presented within or outside the text. Rather, I mean that in the course of reading we widen the field of our possible practical engagements with ourselves in the world; which is to say, we augment our freedom and our joy.

Let me conclude, finally, with a brief description of the organization of the book. In the remaining readings of this book I hope to develop the account I have already offered of these basic issues and of the role that a certain kind of reading that is also a certain way of living can play in responding to those issues. I’ve divided the book into two parts, with four readings in each. These readings are like lessons in the sense that they are occasions in which, in reading, I have learned something about what reading to live can be. They are, in other words, lessons for me, which I want to share with you.

In Part One, I provide a series of four readings of cherished texts that serve three purposes. First, they are examples of reading to live. Second, they elaborate different dimensions of reading to live. Third, they offer an understanding, from the perspective of reading to live, of the texts themselves. I’ve chosen the texts I will be reading primarily because I love them, because they have called me back for rereadings, and because they have equipped me for living at different points in my life. Of course, the list of texts that have worked this way on me is much longer than what you will find in this book. I’ve narrowed that much longer list to these texts because they are a mix of genres, periods, and traditions, from British adolescent fantasy epic to Latin American short story, from 20th century American to 14th century Korean poetry, and because I find that they provide especially rich material for learning to read to live.

The four readings comprising Part Two put the practice of reading to live to the test, in response to one of the most basic facts of our existence: death. Stephen Batchelor encourages his readers to consider the question: “Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” Such an emphasis on death may seem to run counter to what we usually think of as conducive to the cultivation of joy, not to mention to Spinoza’s own assertion that “a free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.”

But the point of such a meditation is not to encourage a morbid and paralyzing preoccupation with our own mortality of the sort Spinoza cautioned against. It is, first of all, to clear space for an appropriately vital placement of death within our mental life. The presupposition behind Batchelor’s injunction to consider this question is that, our refusal to acknowledge the fact of death, affectively and intellectually, makes of our lives a kind of continuous, unconscious flight from death. We become driven by the urge to flee from death, which plunges us erratically into behaviors designed to do little more than keep the thought of death out of our awareness.

Considering death in the way that Batchelor encourages is intended to permit us to transform our relationship to death in order to free us to live our lives affirmatively, from the point of view of productive desire (rather than reactive fear). It offers a path, consistent in my opinion with Spinoza’s, for learning how to let go of death and to cultivate freedom and wisdom. But it is important to emphasize this does not mean that Batchelor believes we can come up with an answer to the question. The point is to awaken a felt-sense of what it means to live a life that will stop. I might say that Part Two of Reading to Live offers a series of examples of reading to live a life that will stop.

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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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Workshopping my book manuscript

Some of my readers here know that I've been working hard for a long time to find the best way to say what I want to say about reading and to find someone who wants to hear it (and publish it). This very blog is in part an expression of that. So is my book manuscript, Reading to Live: An Experiment with Joy in Eight Readings. This book has undergone a variety of changes over the past decade. Most recently, I've been trying to move it in the direction of something that would be accessible to an educated audience interested in serious discussions of books. However, I'm told that my current version still falls between two chairs: not rigorous enough to satisfy an academic audience and, at times at least, too rough a going for non-academics.

So I'd like to use this space, on occasion, to workshop the manuscript. A couple of weeks ago I posted the "Introduction". My thought is that I can trot the thing out in readable bits, in order of appearance, and -- hopefully -- get readers to give me feedback. I'd really like to know what works and what doesn't and why. To that end, a little later today is I'll post what follows the "Introduction." It is called "Prelude: A Story of Reading to Live". It is in three parts, so this will be just the first of those three.

I'm always grateful and excited to receive comments on my posts, but I'll be particularly thankful for feedback on the book manuscript as I post parts of it.

For easy reference: here is the table of contents for the book as it now stands:

Introduction

Prelude: A Story of Reading to Live

Part One: Learning Reading to Live
Reading One: Enjoying (On William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow")
Reading Two: Storytelling (On Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials)
Reading Three: Reading (On Felisberto Hernández' "Except Julia")
Reading Four: Inventing (On Julio Cortázar's Image of John Keats and Hopscotch)

Interlude

Part Two: Reading to Live With Death
Reading Five: Fearing (On Yi Saek's "The White Snow")
Reading Six: Despairing (On Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph")

STILL TO COME:
Reading Seven: Dying (on Three Stories of Death by Horacio Quiroga)
Reading Eight: Living (on Roberto Arlt’s Mad Toy)

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Welcome to the Blogosphere, Yago Colás!

Sheesh, I feel a little naive. It turns out that there are many, many people trying to do with their blogs what I am trying to do with this one. I had no idea that there is such a dense and varied province of the blogosphere devoted to literary culture. This morning I randomly visited one such site Changing Lives Through Literature, and discovered a list of other reading and literature blogs. A quick hop through this little thicket of links took me to two different top ten literary blog lists (here and here)! I haven't looked at any of these closely yet, but I feel at once abashed and inspired simply by their (in some cases longstanding) existence. I'm eager to explore them to see what they're about, to identify affinities and differences, and, if necessary, to steal ideas. In all, I'm encouraged that there does indeed seem to be a thriving culture of reading, thinking, and writing shared by people mostly (as far as I can tell) working outside the conventions and venues of the American academy. (Now, does anybody read this stuff?)

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Reading in the World (On Edward Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism)

Edward Said initially wrote the first three chapters of this book as lectures sponsored by Columbia University and the Columbia University press on aspects of American culture. In October and November, 2002, Said expanded these three lectures, altered their emphasis, and added a fourth lecture, all of which he delivered to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University. In revising the lectures for publication as a book, Said subsequently added a fifth chapter, also originally a lecture, entitled “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” These five chapters – “Humanism’s Sphere,” “The Changing Bases of Humanistic Study and Practice,” “The Return to Philology,” “Introduction to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,” and “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals” – comprised the book Humanism and Democratic Criticism, which was published by Columbia University Press on May 15, 2004. Said died on September 25, 2003 and so did not live to see the publication of the last work he completed.

In the past couple of weeks I've been looking for some guideposts among the work of various literary critics, past and present. In part I've been looking for something like an image of what it is exactly that I do. In part I've been looking for some inspiring models whose examples I could adapt to my own idiosyncrasies and purposes. The other day, at the Webster University library, I picked up a copy of an earlier work by Said (from 1983) called The World, The Text, The Critic and this reminded me that I had his more recent work sitting on our bookshelf. So with the somewhat attention deprived frame of mind that has seized me of late, I picked up Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Surprisingly, given this frame of mind, it held my attention and I finished it over the course of a few sittings.

Indeed, the first thing to say is that it is a testament to the relevance of Said's reflections and to his engaging, accessible style of writing that the book so absorbed me. I don't want to offer a lengthy summary of the entire work, so much as use a passage that struck me as particularly intelligent and moving as an occasion to summarize Said's description of reading (offered in Chapter Three: "The Return to Philology"). Suffice it, by way of summary of the whole, to say that Said offers an impassioned argument, firmly set in the realities of globalization and the post 9/11 war on terror, for the urgent importance of humanism and, within that, of a particular kind of humanist work centered on the act of reading. He left me with a tentative sense that perhaps this is what I do, if insufficient in certain respects by comparison with Said's model and example, and want to do more of: humanism and democratic criticism.

My book is all dog eared and marked up because there was so much in it that I agreed with. But here is a passage, for starters, that more than any other spoke to my current feeling of predicament. Said riffs off David Harlan's The Degradation of American History, citing with approval that author's "diagnosis of the currently depressed state of academic writing":

"the influence of antifoundationalism, discourse analysis, automatized and tokenized relativism, and professionalism, among other orthodoxies, has denatured and defanged the historian's mission. Much the same applies, I believe, in humanistic literary practice, where a new dogmatism has separated some literary professionals not only from the public sphere but from other professionals who don't use the same jargon."

And here is the passage that described so well my own current feelings:

"The alternatives seem now to be quite impoverishing: either become a technocratic deconstructionist, discourse analyst, new historicist, and so on, or retreat into a nostalgic celebration of some past state of glory associated with what is sentimentally evoked as humanism. What is missing altogether is some intellectual, as opposed to a merely technical, component to humanistic practice that might restore it to a place of relevance in our time. This is what I am trying to do here, that is, to escape the impoverishing dichotomy." (p. 70)

Said's proposed response to this dichotomy is reading. But of course, he has a very specific, if venerable in several traditions, idea of just what reading means. Said introduces this dichotomy and his idea of reading in the chapter called "The Return to Philology." In his preliminary remarks, he offers a quick sketch of the history of philology in both the Western and Arabic-Islamic traditions that, along the way, quickly touches on Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744), a work that, "launches an interpretive revolution based upon a kind of philological heroism whose results are to reveal, as [19th century German philologist and philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche was to put it a century and a half later, that the truth concerning human history is 'a mobile army of metaphors and metonyms' whose meaning is to be unceasingly decoded by acts of reading and interpretation grounded in the shapes of words as bearers of reality, a reality hidden, misleading, resistant, and difficult. The science of reading, in other words, is paramount for humanistic knowledge." (p. 58) He continues then, drawing upon 19th century American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of language as "fossil poetry", to assert that

"A true philological reading is active; it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are instead, an integral formative part of the reality itself." (p. 59)

Having established these historical underpinnings of the practice of philology, Said goes on to elaborate his own definition of that practice, given the state of the world, and of the humanities, today. Reading, Said says, meaning philology, "involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial motions that I shall call reception and resistance." What does he mean by these two terms?

Reception

Said's first definition of "reception" is

"submitting oneself knowledgeably to texts and treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects (since this is how they are initially encountered); moving then, by dint of expanding and elucidating the often obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formulations of their context." (p. 61)

Said glosses this further by saying that

"the act of reading is the act therefore of first putting oneself in the position of the author, for whom writing is a series of decisions and choices expressed in words. It need hardly be said that no author is completely sovereign or above the time, place, and circumstances of his or her life, so that these too, must be understood if one is to put oneself in the author's position sympathetically." (p. 62)

I really love this and feel that it puts words to a practice I have been trying to carry out without exactly knowing it or calling it that. In part, this is because I've been trying to write in my recent criticism about works that I have loved and this love perhaps naturally entails at the very least a sympathy, if not love, for the author. With this invocation of sympathy (and the remarks that follow, see just below) Said insists on the importance of affect in rigorous reading, a dimension that seems largely overlooked, if not implicitly or even explicitly prohibited by the conventions of contemporary academic criticism. This emphasis on affect, too, coincides with an animating drive of my recent work. I'm reminded of the emphasis that one of Said's own graduate instructors, the critic R. P. Blackmur (who had no more than a high school degree), placed on affect when he wrote that criticism is an act of love and so the properly the province of the amateur (a word derived from the Latin word for love).

The method for doing so entails, in the first place, reading and rereading. Here Said quotes from the Austrian philologist, linguist, and literary critic Leo Spitzer (1887-1960): "work from the surface to the 'inward life-center' of the work of art: first observing details about the superficial appearance of the particular work (and the 'ideas' expressed by a poet are, also, only one of the superficial traits in a work of art); then, grouping these details and seeking to integrate them into a creative principle which may have been present in the soul of the artist; and, finally, making the return trip to all the other groups of observations in order to find whether the 'inward form' one has tentatively constructed gives an account of the whole. The scholar will surely be able to state, after three or four of these 'fro voyages,' whether he has found the life-giving center, the sun of the solar system." (pp. 64-65, quoted from Spitzer's essay "Linguistics and Literary History," in the collection Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), p. 19. The experience of having found this "life-giving center" occurs "when, in the act of reading, one is 'struck by a detail, followed by a conviction that this detail is connected basically with the work of art'" (p. 65).

Said is quick to point out that there is no guarantee of rightness, no proof that the method has worked, but "only a deep subjective sense for which no substitute, no guidebook or authoritative source is possible. One must make the decision oneself and take responsibility for it." (65). For, Said continues to riff off Spitzer's description, "the process of reading begins and ends in the reader, and what enables the reading is an irreducibly personal act of commitment to reading and interpreting, the gesture of reception that includes opening oneself to the text and, just as importantly, being willing to make informed statements about its meaning and what that meaning might attach itself to." (p. 66) (I want to just note here that Said sees "the avoidance of this process of taking final comradely responsibility for one's reading" as a "crippling limitation in those varieties of deconstructive Derridean readings that end [as they began] in undecidability and uncertainty. To reveal the wavering and vacillation in all writing is useful up to a point, just as it may here and there be useful to show, with Foucault, that knowledge in the end serves power. But both alternatives defer for too long a declaration that the actuality of reading is, fundamentally, an act of perhaps modest human emancipation and enlightenment that changes and enhances one's knowledge for purposes other than reductiveness, cynicism, or fruitless standing aside." [p. 66])

Now, even with so rigorous and attentive a process as Said describes, the reception part of reading may appear to be not only highly subjective, but exclusively so. Here Said observes that, admittedly "ideally," "what keeps the humanist honest is" a "sense of common enterprise shared with others, an undertaking with its own built-in constraints and disciplines." (p. 68) After describing in moderate detail how this works in the Islamic philological tradition, Said asserts that Spitzer, no less than Emerson, understood and accepted the importance of "something like conventions, semantic frameworks, and social or even political communities operating as partial constraints on what would otherwise be an out-of-control subjective frenzy . . ." (p. 69)

With this account of reading as reception, and the emergence of a horizon of community, Said comes to the "impoverishing" dichotomies (which I quoted above) limiting the formation of such a humanistic community and the practice of reading as reception in the American literary academy. Having set forward his aim to escape this dichotomy, Said introduces the second facet of reading: resistance.

Before getting into that section, I want to confess that I felt wary on encountering this term, resistance, at this particular point in the text. My wariness stems from two sources, as far as I can tell. First, my own critical work has shifted its emphasis from what I (but perhaps not Said) would call a "resistant" mode through the mid 1990s to a "receptive" mode since that time. I'm oversimplifying, but in the main I shifted emphases because the style of resistant criticism I was practicing struck me as esoteric and so wildly implausible, utterly incapable of supporting the claims that it made for its own (or literature's) efficacy in the world. I think, now, and in view of Said's account of resistance below, that the problem was not with the concerns that work intended to address, but with the narrow and limiting argumentative and stylstic conventions through which it sought to address those concerns. Second, I don't like the way in which resistance comes to define itself, negatively, by what it opposes, implying, among other things, that if what it opposes were to vanish so would whatever drove the human activities of resistance. So, to the degree that I've concerned myself with resistance, it has been to try to assert the importance of exploring resistance as a sometimes inevitable by-product of affirmation; affirmation of one's own desire, one's own connections to the world and visions of what the world could be, and one's own capacity to act. But upon reading Said's section on resistance, it seems to me that his idea of the practice can easily accommodate a kind of "preface" that strongly asserts the affirmations in the name and service of which one has been driven to resist. Indeed, such affirmations may be found all over the place in Said's book.

Resistance

Said insists that reading cannot stop with reception ("close reading, hermeneutic induction," "troping the general language further in one's own critical language with a full recognition that the work of art in question remains at a necessary final remove, unreconciled and in a state of integral wholeness that one has tried to comprehend or impose" [p. 71]. Rather the humanist should also "offer alternatives now silenced or unavailable through the channels of communication controlled by a tiny number of news organizations" in the face of "an assault on thought itself, to say nothing of democracy, equality, and the environment, by the dehumanizing forces of globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed (euphemistically called the free market), as well as imperialist ambition" (p. 71).

Said argues that working as a reader also entails responsibility for one's own writing. Specifically, a responsibility to "overturn and dismantle" "alienating," "prepackaged and reified representations of the world that usurp consciousness and preempt democratic critique" (p. 71). He stresses the importance of time to this process, noting the ways in which "deadlines, the obligations to an importunate and exigent employers, and the pressures to produce on a regular basis" may conspire to abet these alienating representations. So he's thankful for the space a university job has given him to pursue his reading in good time. I can't help but wish that Said had said something here about how this very position is under attack today on a variety of fronts: whether it is the excessive demands placed on faculty (especially untenured faculty) to administer a larely aimless institutional bureaucracy or the subcontracting of various university missions to overworked, underpaid adjunct faculty desperate to do something remotely related to the interests they have spent so many years cultivating in graduate school. He is certainly right that the University is the last place in America that affords time for thought, but the very spirit of democratic criticism he calls for inspires me to want to point out the very (and increasingly) limited nature of that place.

Said then turns to language, the language in which we might cast the report we formulate of our reading. He nicely dispenses with the specious argument that justifies esoteric jargon on the grounds that it, in and of itself, somehow resists or eludes the ideological underpinnings of the prepackaged style of "plain speech." Moreover, he points out, the "risks of specialized jargons for the humanities . . . are obvious: they simply substitute one prepackaged idiom for another" (p. 72). "There are," he argues, "too many available models of intelligible language all around us whose basic graspability and efficiency goes the whole range from difficult to comparatively simple" so that he sees

"no need to employ preposterously outré and repellent idioms as a way of showing independence and originality. Humanism should be a form of disclosure, not of secrecy or religious illumination. Expertise as a distancing device has gotten out of control, especially in some academic forms of expression, to the extent that they have become antidemocratic and even anti-intellectual" (pp. 72-3)

He's wary of the "short, telegraphic forms" of thought and communication that predominate in the mediasphere and maintains that "humanistic resistance . . . needs to occur in longer forms, longer essays, longer periods of reflection" (p. 73).

Here again, I agree with some reservations. In the first place, it seems possible to me that humanistic resistance can take shorter forms (the aphorism as practiced, say, by Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia, by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, or by Walter Benjamin in various works, come to mind). Of course, we aren't all Adorno, Nietzsche, or Benjamin. But I see no reason to equate vapidity with brevity, or, for that matter, rich humanist criticsm with length. My second reservation has to do with access to media. The opportunities to publish the sort of thing Said seems to have in mind have been narrowing in American society for some time now (except perhaps for people like Said). The commercial publishing market has little interest in the sort of humanist criticism, especially in the literary field, he describes (if it's output is to be taken as an indicator) and the academic publishing market has been economically restricted in a drastic fashion and, where it does publish, seems mostly to publish the sort of thing that Said decries. I don't want to overstate this: trade presses have certainly published serious humanist criticism in recent years and literary critics like myself might pay heed to what those critics who are getting published are doing differently than we are. Lastly, I wonder, as I've stated here already in a different entry, whether blogging can provide a democratizing access to an audience for a humanistic critical practice of the sort Said advocates. Though even as I assert that wonder, that hope, I'm aware that I fear this entry is too long for a blog. (In this vein, I'm still trying to get my hands on an article by one Gerard Goggin, on Said and blogging!)

Moving on from language and form, Said goes on to describe how the resistant facet of reading entails the elaboration of ever widening frameworks: of the writer in his or her time and place, likewise of the text, and finally of the reader's situation in a complex, overlapping network of institutional and social locations and historical processes. This necessarily entails the humanist migrating in his or her writing across such spheres of human

endeavor as literature, philosophy, history, economics, policy and current events. "This," he says, "is what resistance is: the ability to differentiate between what is directly given and what may be withheld, whether because one's own circumstances as a humanistic specialist may confine one to a limited space beyond which one can't venture or because one is indoctrinated to recognize only what one has been educated to see or because only policy experts are presumed to be entitled to speak about the economy, health services, or foreign and military policies, issues of urgent concern to the humanist as a citizen. Does one accept the prevailing horizons and confinements, or does one try as a humanist to challenge them" (pp. 75-6)

Said describes this movement as the source of relevance for the humanities in America today. To learn and to teach others to read well is, Said argues, an

"estimable task in itself, of course, but one that by its own inventive energies also necessarily takes one further and further from even the most highly cherished inward reception. Yes, we need to keep coming back to the words and structures in the books we read, but, just as these words were themselves taken by the poet from the world andevoked from out of silence in the forceful ways without which no creation is possible, readers must also extend tehir readings out into the various worlds each of us resides in" (p. 76).

Carrying this work out, finally, requires of every humanist critic a willingness to "be both insider and outsider to the circulating ideas and values that are at issue in our society or someone else's society or the society of each other." He cites as exemplary, in this regard, the lives and works of certain great Jewish thinkers described in Isaac Deutscher's The Non-Jewish Jew; thinkers (Spinoza, Freud, Heine, and Deutscher himself -- and there are probably countless other, often anonymous, examples right up through the present day) who "were in, and at the same time renounced, their tradition, preserving the original tie by submitting it to the corrosive questioning that took them well beyond it, sometimes banishing them from community in the process." We can see in their example "the crystallized role of the American humanist, the non-humanist humanist as it were" (pp. 76-7).

He concludes the essay with this inspiring passage:

"Humanism . . . is a technique of trouble . . . [its] task is constitutively an unending one, and it should not aspire to conclusion of the sort that has the corollary and, in my estimate deleterious, effect of securing one an identity to be fought over, defended, and argued. . . . In the post-Cold War world, the politics of identity and partition . . . have brought more trouble and suffering than they are worth, nowhere more than when they ar associated with precisely those things, such as the humanities, traditions, arts, and values, that identity allegedly defends and safeguards, constituting in the process territories and selves that seem to require killing rather than living" (p. 78).

I can't resist concluding this summary reflection on the book with a little anecdote that serves to draw attention to a fine, if tiny, example of the sort of work Said wants us to practice.

I first heard of the work when a visiting lecturer made reference to the third chapter of the book, "The Return to Philology," in particular to Said's reference there to the parameters of reading and humanistic study in the Islamic tradition. Among the elements required of a scholar in this tradition, according to Said, is "a component of personal commitment and extraordinary efforts, called "ijtihad" in Arabic." Said goes on to explain, parenthetically, that ijtihad derives from the same root as jihad, and notes that the latter "does not mainly mean holy war but rather a primarily spiritual exercise on behalf of the truth." (68-69) I'd never heard that before, but it made great sense to me and stayed with me.

But I realize now that already in that little passage, parenthetical no less, Said was providing a highly compressed, but no less effective for its brevity, example of the kind of reading, the kind of philology, the kind of democratic criticism, the kind of humanism that he was advocating throughout the book: attending to the specificity of words, with all the historical sediment they bear, and sharply asserting an informed, complicating interpretation of those words that directly confronts the ignorant understandings, which, harnessed to economic and military power, cause so much suffering in our world today.

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