On the Merits of Reading
Does great literature make you a good person?
The kid is picking the onions off of my sandwich, shamefully. I feel bad. He's a pimply-faced Subway sandwich maker, and I've just snapped at him because I didn't want onions. I lean toward him and say, "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."
He looks up at me. And then quickly backs down.
"Mayonnaise and mustard?" he asks.
"Mayonnaise. It's James Joyce, the writer, you know? From Ulysses: 'A man of genius makes no mistakes. His mistakes are volitional and are the ports for discovery," I misquote. "Wait—'A man of genius makes no mistakes—'"
"I didn't see it," he says. It wasn't a movie. Or maybe it was. I don't know.
And that's it. That's how great literature has affected us, me and the Subway boy here in Las Vegas. A great line (give or take a stammered word) from a great classic has just made no difference in our lives whatsoever.
Granted, Joyce might not best be absorbed in one-liners, out of its thick, gooey, thinky context. And maybe the mere existence of Ulysses has chipped in on creating the culture that now allows us to stand here virtually illiterate in a sandwich shop, somewhat happy in spite of ourselves. But I had set out to find more specific examples of the impact of reading the classics. I had set out to see the tangible difference literature makes—the where, or when, or how exactly it changes a person's life. Because, after all, we're so sure it does.
We equate reading books with goodness, no questions asked. It's better, wiser, than watching TV. It's more virtuous than shaking our asses on the dance floor. It's somehow more constructive than bullshitting with friends. We admonish our children for failing to read. We pour money into reading programs, Great Books, book mobiles, book fairs. We're loath to admit we haven't read Chaucer. The Queen of Virtue, Oprah, now urges us to read Faulkner. We brag about our own reading conquests: "I just finished The Corrections," we lie, when we could lie about something else—I'm rich, I slept with Drew Barrymore, I have fantastic abs. But instead: I just read a big fat critically lauded book.
Does reading really make you a better person? Directly after finishing Moby Dick, are you twice the human you were before? And, more importantly, can anybody tell? Are you nicer, or more inclined to help the homeless, or more likely to cure cancer? While it is tantalizing to imagine finding the precise moment to say "Call me Ishmael" at a cocktail party (and watching scads of bright, beautiful people turn pink with awe), the Peggy Lee question arises: Is that all there is? For this you trudged through the whale story? For the chance to be thought "well-read" by distant acquaintances, you spent hours reading "Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water ..."
Recently, New York Times books columnist Laura Miller pondered the question of reading's worth and concluded, "Would that it were so, but I can't say I've seen much evidence to support the notion that reading is good for us. Some of the most voracious readers I know are also some of the most rigid thinkers. An individual can be remarkably insensitive to the feelings of others despite having studied stacks of great novels. As in the case of Emma Bovary, reading can even spoil your appetite for real life. There's not much indication, either, that reading substantially improves anyone's character—in fact, it often seems to have the opposite influence. Nor does it sweeten the disposition. … Solitary pleasure is finally the only real reason for reading, which makes it sound more like a vice than a virtue."
Upon finishing Miller's column, I decided to stop reading the New York Times and tally up my (other) vices. But that was immediately painful, so I stopped. I changed course and decided to tally up the reasons reading is good. The list started out less than compelling:
• Reading doesn't cause a hangover, takes very little physical energy and affords few opportunities for public embarrassment.
• By the hour, books are way cheaper than psychotherapy. When I'm bitter and alienated, I can turn to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and find solace in kindred suffering: "I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts." It's a rollicking good tale about self-imposed agony.
Similarly, there's Whitman for joy and Neruda for love, or the more contemporary—Lorrie Moore for wit and ... wait—am I describing books as friends? As words that embody empathy and shared ideas? And is that pathetic or wonderful? As the stuffy scholar Harold Bloom notes in How to Read and Why, "We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life."
Well, blech. I don't want to agree with a guy like Bloom, who elsewhere asserts that having a working familiarity with the Western canon is a matter of moral pedigree. And I certainly don't want to relate to his, or to Miller's, books-for-the-lonely thesis.
Reading is after all not an entirely solitary experience. Somewhere along the line after Gutenberg, the culture of books, in addition to the content of books, became a language of its own. No sooner had everybody freaked about the notion that the Internet would lead to the extinction of books than we fueled an explosion in mega-book-coffee stores and started the ubiquitous book-club scene. One could argue that community is born from books—that they prompt us to discuss the Great Ideas, and that on some highbrow level that translates into social progress. That despite the solitary undertaking of reading, books ultimately bring us together, not further apart. At the Flamingo Library one night last week, the parking lot was 100 percent full—the checkout line snaked out to the door, the activities rooms were jammed with meetings ranging from English As a Second Language classes to a Stop DUI program, all under one roof and the auspices of book culture.
Of course, one could also argue that community is blossoming with books merely as a backdrop. That the library has turned into a community center, that the books are increasingly serving as adornment like the art in the halls. That people who are there for a DUI class, or even an ESL class, aren't there to stretch their heads and hearts around Proust, and likely never will be. I sat next to an unkempt man who laid his head on the library table and snored louder and sounder than I imagined he had in days, and try as I might to see the house of books as responsible for his reprieve, I think it's clear that this clean, well-lighted place was accidental.
So I have to ask myself more honestly why I love books. And I realize that for me it is vice-like as Miller suggested, and whether it actually broadens the mind is irrelevant, because I read addictively for the thrill of language and ideas and sentiment and even the feel and smell of the book itself. And like Bloom said, I have to admit it is primarily a pleasure of solitude. The sight of black words on white paper, page after page, is comfort food. It's escapism. I read for the rich trip through somebody else's brain, laid out with more candor and art than conversation typically allows.
That said, whenever anyone mentions reading the classics, or purports to understand The Iliad, or otherwise espouses the theory that there is unquestionable virtue in being well-read, I have a knee-jerk memory of high school.
Kids in my 12th-grade English class were forced to memorize and recite Hamlet's soliloquy in order to earn a passing mark. Each morning for the longest spring of my life, a different student had to stand up and nervously hold forth: "To be, or not to be …" I still remember the entire soliloquy pretty much verbatim.
I don't think it made me a better person; in fact, if any thing, wandering through life hearing an endless internal reel of "for who would bear the whips and scorns of time ... when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin" can be a touch harrowing. I wonder now if my teacher was chronically depressed and was plodding through his midlife to the tune of 90 stage-frightened 12th-graders waxing poetic about suicide. I don't know; I graduated, I went on to read a few other great works of literature—not many, really, but a few—and I didn't turn into anything more or less than those who've read more or less.
But I do hate public speaking.