More on Reading, and Writing, and Walking

Sunrise Over the Atlantic

In reverse order: my favorite thing about walking is the time that it provides me to mull over the events of my life, plans, ideas, memories, whatever.  Sometimes it provides a space in which to just "be" -- today's photo, from our last morning in Florida, is an example of that.  This morning, here in the humid and sticky and hazy midwest, is something of an example of the opposite.  When I stand at the edge of the ocean watching the sunrise, I am in awe and want to embrace the moment for as long as possible.  When I stand on the edge of a small suburban lake that even the birds have abandoned for cooler locales, I just want to go home and lie down.

One of my favorite things about writing is the opportunity it provides for clarifying my thoughts.  I've been thinking since last night about what I had to say yesterday about reading.  Had I experienced a moment of temporary insanity? I wondered.  A blackout?  What was I thinking?  Does it really not bother me that people don't read for pleasure?  I would be devastated if my children didn't love to read.  I am aggravated that my students choose video games over reading.  OK, so I just lost it for awhile, right?

I've decided that I really can't decide.  As I said, I have lots of friends who aren't big readers.  One of them used to ask me, when our kids were little, how I ever found the time to read so many books to mine.  (At least an hour's worth a day; two or three if it were raining or snowing.)  Well, all you had to do was look at the difference between her housekeeping and mine to figure that one out.  But I love her dearly, and if she doesn't like to read -- well, then she doesn't.

But the unvarnished truth is that conversation among people who read is exciting and stimulating.  Multilayered conversations and, therefore, understandings, are more likely to occur when the participants have a wide-ranging repetoire on which to draw.  If I tell you that Judas, Brutus and Cassius are in the Ninth Circle, we can talk about the relative merits of sexual misdemeanors and treachery as sin, but the conversation will be a lot more meaningful if we've both read the Gospels, Julius Caesar, and The Inferno.

Years ago, E.D. Hirsch wrote a little book entitled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.  A lot of teachers hated that book, insisting that the list of references that took up the second half of the book amounted to little more than a springboard for multiple choice tests on obscure facts connected to the history of western civilization.  But I found his argument legitimate and, in fact, moving.  The tidbit that I remember best had to do with the Civil Rights Movement. Hirsch argues that the claims made by African-Americans for their right to full participation in American life resonated so strongly across the country because both blacks and whites were steeped in the American Revolution's language of "equality for all".  Without that "cultural literacy," developed among all Americans by reading, it would have been much harder for black leaders to communicate their case.

So, now that I've had a chance to give it some more thought, I guess I'd say that, while it doesn't particularly bother me that many people chose other forms of recreation over reading, it does bother me that a lot of people don't attempt even the basic literacy of our culture.  And lest I sound too much like an utterly obnoxious intellectual snob, let me hasten to add that I am dismayed daily by my own scientific illiteracy, which is just as important as the literary kind.  There's no way that I could explain, or understand someone else's technical explanation of, that sunrise at the top of the page, and I think that's pathetic.

So what I am reading these days?  The local paper and The New York Times every day.  Newsweek every week, unless I like the cover of Time better.  Tons of stuff online, endlessly.  And this week: The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman (but I have to read that for work), Constantine's Sword by James Carroll,  Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (just finished), The Outermost House by Henry Beston, and the Fiske Guide to Colleges.  No fiction this week, unless you count Presidential campaign ads.

Walked: 3 miles.