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

(Continued from here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Dewey (1859-1952)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Prelude: A Story of Reading to Live (Section 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)

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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)

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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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