Reading for Sheer Pleasure -- Remember That?
By JAMES W. EARL
When I was 10, I took a book from a bookcase in the living room and brought it outside to read. My mother said, "That one's not for you," but she didn't stop me. It was one of those turning points in my life -- one you don't realize is a turning point until long afterward. The book had a catchy title: Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing. It was a book of advice for parents, telling them that sometimes kids just want to lie on the grass watching the clouds -- so it's all right if you ask them, "What did you do?" and they answer vacantly, "Nothing."
Armed with that advice, I went outside, lay on the grass, and read the book. It gave me permission to do what I did best already -- though perhaps in making me self-conscious about it, the book spoiled my innocence a little, broke the bond of Wordsworthian immediacy between me and those clouds, me and that grass, and turned goofing off into a something of a pose.
Attitudes toward daydreaming are always conflicted, but we all know that in theory, it isn't really a waste of time. When we're children, it's one of the ways we learn to think. I remember learning important things from clouds -- for example, that things change slowly, without your noticing. Now, when I find myself at my desk staring out the window, I remember my Greek-philosophy professor in college, Dr. Fell. He'd stare out the window as we sat waiting for his answer to a question. I remember wondering if that, too, might be a pose. Perhaps he was playing Socrates, who stood on street corners staring at the sky.
The anthropologist Dan Sperber, in a book about the Dorze tribe of Ethiopia, tells a story I like. "A scene marked my childhood," he writes. "My father was seated in an armchair in the lounge, completely motionless, his hands empty, his eyes fixed on nothing. My mother whispered to me: 'Don't bother your father, he's working.' This worked on me. Later, I too became a scholar, I went to Ethiopia as an ethnographer, and I heard a Dorze mother whisper to her son: 'Don't bother your father, he's feeding the ancestors.'"
Like Sperber, I became a professor. Most of the clouds I stare at now -- the ancestors I feed -- are in books. I can sit quietly, alone, for hours, over a book. In our accelerated age, this aspect of reading -- its solitary quietness -- seems to me to have an important value all its own.
The oddity of reading, like cloud-watching, is that it's so solitary, and so slow. I know it's possible to read while working out on an exercise bike, or to listen to novels while jogging or driving, but I'm talk- ing about the old-fashioned, inefficient, time-consuming, antisocial, self-indulgent practice of doing nothing but reading. Alone. I'd like to write a book called Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? I Read! You Got a Problem With That? This book wouldn't be aimed at the public, though, which actually seems to find time to read, judging from the growth of bookstores. I have a more particular audience in mind: professors. It's an irony professors share among themselves daily that somehow we just don't get time any more to read books.
I dream of reading the way Machiavelli described it during the boom years of Italian humanism in the 16th century. He said:
"Evenings I return home and enter my study; and at its entrance I take off my everyday clothes, full of mud and dust, and don royal and courtly garments. Decorously reattired, I enter into the ancient sessions of ancient men. Received amicably by them, I partake of such food as is mine only, and for which I was born. There, without shame, I speak with them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they in their humanity respond to me."
I've known that feeling. Twenty-five years ago I spent my first sabbatical reading Plato, Kant, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, the Tao te ching, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, Leibniz, Bacon, Montaigne, Whitehead, Bergson, Cassirer, Freud, Shaw, Yeats, Auden, Heidegger, Heisenberg, Levi-Strauss -- and Dan Sperber. I read everything I hadn't gotten to in school. When I got up from my desk at night, often at 2 or 3 in the morning, I felt ... electric. I felt like Ezekiel, when God said, "'Mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this book; fill your stomach with it.' And I ate it, and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey."
I look back at the notes I took in those days -- yellow sheets crammed with dizzying profundities -- with amazed embarrassment. It seems I discovered the meaning of life, and the secrets of the universe! I don't read like that any more, but I don't regret having had the experience. And I wonder: How many of our students have known -- or will know -- that electricity, that egomaniacal passion for books?
I'm older now. Now I see that Machiavelli's account of his reading and my nightly wrestling matches with the angel were grossly egoistic. Machiavelli's so confident he can just chat with Plato, Livy, and Cicero as their equal. There's something about the act of reading that gives us this false impression that we're equal to the writers we understand -- like looking at a modern painting and thinking, "I could've done that!" But the fact is we didn't do it, and we couldn't have dreamed of it until that moment.
I tell my students, "The work of this course doesn't take place in the classroom; it takes place at home, or somewhere else where you can be alone, and quiet, undisturbed and undistracted -- perhaps the library, way back in a corner of the fourth floor, or some other spot you can make your own -- a place where you can read. For me, it's at home, late at night. There, when the rest of the house is dark and quiet at last, I sit with my book in a magic circle of light, just me and the book -- or me and the author of the book, with the book between us."
It's amazing how many students -- English majors, even -- will unashamedly confess, "I don't like to read." Of course: Reading's so damned slow. We complain that our computers are too slow if they take an extra second or two. Reading actually requires that we slow down to a stop, and just listen.
Nowadays, for me, reading has become mostly listening. In that same lecture I go on: "In that magic circle of light, you're not there to conquer the book, to tame the book, to criticize it, or even to analyze it. You're not there to like it or dislike it, or to prove that you're smarter than the author. You're there, first of all, just to listen, and to hear what he or she is trying to say."
That's a less egoistic approach than Machiavelli's. The person who taught me this more patient way of reading was Sigmund Freud. In his advice for new psychoanalysts on how to listen to patients, I found the connection between reading and cloud-watching -- the art of doing nothing. The correct method, he says, "consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same 'evenly suspended attention' in the face of all that one hears. For as soon as you deliberately concentrate your attention to a certain degree, you begin to select from the material before you. ... This, however, is precisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if you follow your expectations you are in danger of never finding anything but what you already know. ... The rule for the doctor may be expressed: ... 'You should simply listen.'"
It is hard to listen to people in this totally open fashion, instead of leaping to interpretations, drawing premature conclusions, and interrupting with advice. It's just as hard to learn how to listen to a book.
It's ironic that the art of doing nothing, which I've worked so hard to perfect since childhood, is not much appreciated at the universities. People there seem to have forgotten that so much of the work we do takes the form we smile at in Sperber's anecdote about his father. The main concerns these days seem to be funding and legislation, budgets and bottom lines, accountability and productivity, management and efficiency, market forces and competition, technology and change. Higher education is, after all, a business.
The green lawns of the campus evoke a pastoral tradition. The campus has been set aside from the hustle-bustle world of commerce and the demands of ordinary life, as a place where people can slow down, read, listen, and learn. But in the 30 years I've been a professor, there's been a gradual sea change in higher education -- another example of what the clouds taught me when I was a child, that things change slowly, without your noticing. Today we're told that history is accelerating, that society changes faster every day. If we rest for a moment, the future will zoom out of sight, and the university will be left behind. We have to be the University of the Future, the University of the Computer Age, the University of the 21st Century!
Do the people who run our universities really believe that? "Keeping up with the future" sounds like an advertising jingle. Indeed, universities have begun to market themselves. For some reason, they have decided that America wants them to be fast-paced, cutting-edge, technological, efficient, corporate institutions that will land their customers high-paying jobs in the computer age.
I think America knows better. What America wants is not faster and faster change; that's what the marketplace wants, to keep customers thirsty for new products. What America wants is colleges and universities that it can count on not to change every year with the fashions. I want a university that defines the future, not one that has to run to keep up with it. We certainly can't catch up with the future by sitting in magic circles of light, chatting with the ancients, just listening quietly, feeding the ancestors. No, now there's a new, magic rectangle of light; there's an information highway running right through the green campus, with an on-ramp on every desk where people used to sit and read.
The future may be in computers, but the past is in books. I try to teach my students how to read books, how to listen patiently to the voices of the ancestors. I tell them: "If we don't remember and respect the past, we have no reason to hope the future will respect us." For don't we all hope that future generations will remember the world we live in, the things we care about, the efforts we make, and the books we write?
James W. Earl is a professor of English at the University of Oregon.
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