Dirty Boots: A Joyous and Inexplicably Necessary Thing
For an avid reader with eclectic taste, working in a college library is a gift beyond measure. Having access to thousands of books whose publication dates span recent centuries as well as to magazines like Commonweal, Harper’s, The American Scholar, The Atlantic, and Boston Review makes it possible to enjoy a variety of texts and topics. In the last six months or so, I have checked out and read a large-format hardback of artist Joseph Heller’s Papermaking, philosopher Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy, a collection of writings by and about the Japanese poet Ryōkan called The Great Fool, and two single-author collections of shorter works: novelist Alice Walker’s We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For and Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. And then there are the databases! The New York Times and JSTOR— the latter was where I came across the two articles on collective memory that I referenced in a recent Dirty Boots column.
Reading, to me, is a joyous and inexplicably necessary thing. Though it can’t substitute for lived experience, reading is an intellectual exercise that augments and improves lived experience. Reading about sex is no substitute for having it, nor will reading about a drunken fistfight make the same impression as being in one. But reading DH Lawrence or Charles Bukowski can offer one a different perspective on those things. Pablo Neruda wrote in his “Ode to the Book” that “my poems / have not eaten poems”— but poetry was the medium through which he expressed this. Looking at it another way, Mark Twain is quoted famously as saying, “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” Reading might not be real life exactly, but I will never understand how or why people would deny themselves the wonderful gifts that can be found by reading. The ideas contained in great works of literature, religious texts, time-tested works of philosophy, the best journalism, well-researched academic articles, thoughtful science writing . . . those ideas cannot be obtained or procured through an everyday life of mundane tasks, interactions, and conversations that are seasoned mildly with personality conflicts, mass media, spectator sports, alcohol consumption, and periodic tourism.
Having been a longtime English Language Arts teacher, I can also share that psychologists and educators agree that reading is one of the best activities for cognitive development. It is like jogging or swimming, but for the mind. Reading involves a complex group of mental functions that include recognizing and interpretating symbols (letters and words), utilizing systems (grammar and page layout), translating verbal messages into mental images, and paying attention in a sustained way. Anyone who has ever seen children learn to read has witnessed the first two in the rawest form. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a novel, a short story, or even the lyrics to a song has probably done the third. Yet, that fourth one is not so easy. That one involves discipline and self-control, something that can only be attained through practice— but it is so worth it. People have asked me how I can read in a roomful of loud students or at one of my children’s soccer practices. Because I have been reading so intently for so long that I can give my full attention to words on a page in almost any environment. That ability to focus my attention and evade distractions has served me well in an era when meaningless distractions are everywhere.
Like an old friend, too, reading has carried me through difficult times in my life. As a boy whose asthma kept me indoors, I loved first the Golden Books and later The Hobbit. As a teenager who hadn’t found my place, I was captivated by The Stranger and Ballad of the Sad Café. For a span of months in the mid-1990s, after I had transferred to a commuter college with scant campus life, the college’s library tower and Montgomery’s downtown library became my regular haunts. They were open seven days a week, the books were free to access, and interruptions were rare. During that lonely time, I spent hours and hours scanning the spines in the 850s – the literature and literary criticism – to pull books that looked interesting, to read randomly. No assignments for class, no papers to write, no pressure to continue if I lost interest. Books gave me what the people around me couldn’t— or wouldn’t. Reading was no substitute for life, but it strengthened me for what life is.
So it makes me sad to see reading devalued and in decline. Since the 1983 Nation at Risk report, more than forty years ago, scholars and educators have been noting deficiencies and declines in everyday Americans’ practice of reading literature. One of the points that this report had as going in our favor was: “the natural abilities of the young that cry out to be developed and the undiminished concern of parents for the well-being of their children.” I agree about these, even today. Furthermore, the study’s authors wrote, “People are steadfast in their belief that education is the major foundation for the future strength of this country.” Again, agreed. But there is no way to become educated without reading, and beyond that, there is no way to become well-educated without reading well. That factor is what has been lost. Twenty years later, the National Endowment for the Arts did a similar study and titled it Reading At Risk. One of their findings in 2002 was: “Literature now competes with an enormous array of electronic media. While no single activity is responsible for the decline of reading, the cumulative presence and availability of these alternatives have increasingly drawn Americans away from reading.” Another finding was this:
In 1990, book buying constituted 5.7 percent of total recreation spending, while spending on audio, video, computers, and software was 6 percent. By 2002, electronic spending had soared to 24 percent, while spending on books declined slightly to 5.6 percent.
I turned sixteen in 1990, when Americans’ spending on books was almost equal to spending on electronics, videos, and music combined. By the time I was approaching thirty, spending on electronics alone had it over books by a margin of four-to-one. Mine might have been the last generation – Generation X – to regard reading print books as one of the best and most viable ways to understand life, people, and the world.
Personally, I don’t see any way to turn this around. The two generations younger than mine do not believe, generally speaking, that black letters on a white page can be as exciting as the features of the digitized media that they want, purchase, and consume. The difference, though, is not in the object, the format, or even the medium itself. The difference is this: books allow readers to use their own imagination to conjure up the scenes as they will, while screen media makes many of the creative and intellectual choices in advance. To make this clear, it is the difference between engaging in fully absorbed ideation versus being provided with visual and auditory stimuli. I love movies as much or more than most people, and I still have to say it: the depth of experience involved in reading yields so much more.
Here, at the beginning of May, we have just left the vigorous hyper-defensiveness of National Poetry Month, and are thus approaching the end of another school year, when a handful of extraordinarily diligent moms will already be trying to coax their exhausted children into choosing which books to order from those dreaded summer reading lists. Both are necessary in this modern world, because reading is on the decline. Yet, why do these programs fall short of their goals, to instill a love of reading and literature in the wider community? Because they employ one of the worst persuasion tactics known to mankind: if we force it on them, they’ll realize that it’s actually good. (Behaviorist psychology has its limits.) I feel fortunate to have been raised in a world before digital media had taken, when books and reading were more important. This situation only reinforces my insistence that, just because things are changing, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re improving.
