ON READING (13)
"You are what you eat."
Part of what keeps me from becoming a 'complete philosopher', I admit, is my inveterate love of reading. For example, I just went to the library to get a book on Aristotle, and I found myself picking up four books--Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, a book on gratitude, another on philosophy and the good life, and a fourth on friendship. I want to read them all. Of course, I won't--taking all four is just an indication of my inability to restrain this desire-to-read appetite--but I'll read parts or all of several over the next few weeks, along with Straight Man by Richard Russo, which I'm getting into on a second attempt. I do that, every once in a while--just surrender my free time, which might more profitably be spent in serious scholarship and professional, publication-oriented writing, even preparing classes, to reading.
My reading tastes have changed quite a bit over the years, and probably will continue to change. I tend to mix the popular and scholarly indifferently, though I've found it more difficult in the last ten years to read avant garde novels, either because they are too long or too formally demanding. So in much of my pleasure reading I slid toward high quality detective novels, American (Hammett, Chandler, Ross McDonald, Michael Connelly, Valin, Mosely, Hamilton) and European (Durrenmatt, Simenot, Sjoewal & Wahlooe, Peter Robinson, Camilieri, Mankel), or non-fiction on golf (Merullo's Passion for Golf, Lee Eisenberg's Breaking Eighty), gardens (like the book by Robert Pogue Harrison I referenced in an earlier blog), or 'more serious' works of history, e.g. Carl Schorske's book on turn of century Vienna, biography (Safranski's Nietzsche and Heidegger, Grodin's Gadamer), classics (Fitzgerald's Odyssey, Arrowsmith's Hercules and Clouds) or poetry, e.g. Yeats, Whitman, Rilke, Heaney. One year I got into Austen. Another year, Thucydides. Another, Vonnegut--you see how casual my choices are. Every few years I return to Shakespeare. I just read them, fast or slow, as I wish, Epicurean style. (Last spring I read several of the comedies, viewed Branaugh's magical As You Like It, and re-read chunks of Bloom's Invention of the Human.) I read McEwen's Saturday, Ishiguro's Never Let Go, Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. I have tried to read Cormack McCarthy, but I find him horrific.
Part of my problem is "I give at work." I read and re-read serious, demanding literature for my philosophy classes. So I gradually found myself less inclined to read in my 'free time.' It is too bad, because what drew me into reading philosophy was not only the discovery that there was a fascinating world of literature to travel in, but that some authors created works that invited something like an "art" in reading, and that the application of that art was different from the methods used in conventional scholarship. Strauss's gnostic reading of Plato, Klein's treatment of the Meno, studies in the "middle way." Some authors' books can't be judged by their cover. They are more like mines or labyrinths you have to go down into, if you are to get to their core and find your way back home. But I got away from that more original form of reading as I began to publish in professional journals, and to that end reading can become simply an analytic task: you reconstruct the argument in broad and then more specific form, you analyse the steps, you weigh the merit and breadth of the examples, you consider alternative hypotheses. You look beyond the text toward the construction of an argument, from beauty as it were toward truth. Reading gives way in the service of writing, the original pleasure to a labor of mind. (I suspect this happens to many professors throughout the humanities.)
My desire to recapture my naive experience of reading as a way of discovery and imagination is partly why I am always drawn to re-reading Plato, and why in recent years I have also been attracted to Montaigne (and even Machiavelli, though sort of only when I have to). The structure of argument occurs within a narrative of actions involving characters and emotion as well as speech or thought. This gives his works an "open texture" which the reader is invited to reconstruct in full, so that rather than monologues (like, e.g. Aristotle or Kant) they imitate "dialogues" between the reader and Plato or Socrates. There is the aspect of puzzle to Plato's works, even the seemingly most didactic of them, and if this sometimes becomes so complex as to almost defeat you (e.g. the 'rational enterprise' of examining 'knowledge' in the Theaetetus), the reader is invited into the life and process of philosophy, not just its theoretical-systematic outcomes. I find this attraction also in the Essays, the challenge of discerning how the individual essay "tests" and "experiments" with its subject-matter(s), what is going on under as well as on the surface, how the piece fits into his time and manners, and what the conceptual opposites are that he is exploring in the work, and finally who this man Michel de Montaigne is. I'm toying now with the possibility of devoting my next semester's leave to the study of the Essays. Will I have something to contribute? Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Do I have anything better to read and study?
Reading is a solitary pleasure, but it connects you with another's mind. So there is a kind of friendship that can emerge in some reading--I feel it for Shakespeare at times, in some of the characters I love like Falstaff and Rosalind, for Nietzsche in a few works, here and there with other authors. Plato is too great; I'm overawed by him. (Shakespeare is too great, too, of course, but I don't feel the same challenge to think through the structure of ideas in the plays as I do in the Dialogues; often I read them too quickly, too lightly.) Aristotle turns into an intellectual exercise, often complex but somehow impersonal. But Montaigne seems almost just right. On the other hand, I don't have anyone to read Montaigne with; and reading is not complete unless it connects in a human way with friendship. And there is also the fact that Montaigne does annoy me a little. But Socrates does, too.
I know I must abandon my self-indulgent love of reading for its own sake for an art of reading that is creative, productive of speech or writing, that finds and carries home to me and others the truth and beauty of the works I take hold of and shape in my own way. The art of reading points beyond itself to real dialogue, read communication, and to an art of living in which it is a contributing part. We are meant to learn to read in order to re-discover together the "old truths," the verities that transport us beyond ourselves to that which we have in common and remakes us all. But to succeed in this, our great pedagogic goal, we have to learn to tarry along the way, to surrender our time and cares, to ruminate, chew over, think through and even muse on what we read, to let the books speak to us, before we consume them as resources for our art. We have to let them work on us, if we are to work on them. I am what I have done with what I have read, but perhaps even more what has read itself into me. In reading, I must be written on, before I can write of what I've read.
FOOTNOTE: Curiously I forgot to mention the Bible, which I read and studied for years, esp. the first two books of the OT and the first three Gospels, esp. Matthew. I also followed unconventional guides into these strange countries, Caputo and his moderating successor Sarna in relation to Genesis and Exodus, pomo approaches to the NT, e.g. Borg, Crosson. Then one day, after my children had grown up, I left organized religion, and simply stopped reading the Bible, to make my home in what to me was more natural and fertile country to the northwest. No doubt I was written on by these studies, but I am moved less by "transcendental humors" today than in the past, and have no particular desire to go back.
My reading tastes have changed quite a bit over the years, and probably will continue to change. I tend to mix the popular and scholarly indifferently, though I've found it more difficult in the last ten years to read avant garde novels, either because they are too long or too formally demanding. So in much of my pleasure reading I slid toward high quality detective novels, American (Hammett, Chandler, Ross McDonald, Michael Connelly, Valin, Mosely, Hamilton) and European (Durrenmatt, Simenot, Sjoewal & Wahlooe, Peter Robinson, Camilieri, Mankel), or non-fiction on golf (Merullo's Passion for Golf, Lee Eisenberg's Breaking Eighty), gardens (like the book by Robert Pogue Harrison I referenced in an earlier blog), or 'more serious' works of history, e.g. Carl Schorske's book on turn of century Vienna, biography (Safranski's Nietzsche and Heidegger, Grodin's Gadamer), classics (Fitzgerald's Odyssey, Arrowsmith's Hercules and Clouds) or poetry, e.g. Yeats, Whitman, Rilke, Heaney. One year I got into Austen. Another year, Thucydides. Another, Vonnegut--you see how casual my choices are. Every few years I return to Shakespeare. I just read them, fast or slow, as I wish, Epicurean style. (Last spring I read several of the comedies, viewed Branaugh's magical As You Like It, and re-read chunks of Bloom's Invention of the Human.) I read McEwen's Saturday, Ishiguro's Never Let Go, Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. I have tried to read Cormack McCarthy, but I find him horrific.
Part of my problem is "I give at work." I read and re-read serious, demanding literature for my philosophy classes. So I gradually found myself less inclined to read in my 'free time.' It is too bad, because what drew me into reading philosophy was not only the discovery that there was a fascinating world of literature to travel in, but that some authors created works that invited something like an "art" in reading, and that the application of that art was different from the methods used in conventional scholarship. Strauss's gnostic reading of Plato, Klein's treatment of the Meno, studies in the "middle way." Some authors' books can't be judged by their cover. They are more like mines or labyrinths you have to go down into, if you are to get to their core and find your way back home. But I got away from that more original form of reading as I began to publish in professional journals, and to that end reading can become simply an analytic task: you reconstruct the argument in broad and then more specific form, you analyse the steps, you weigh the merit and breadth of the examples, you consider alternative hypotheses. You look beyond the text toward the construction of an argument, from beauty as it were toward truth. Reading gives way in the service of writing, the original pleasure to a labor of mind. (I suspect this happens to many professors throughout the humanities.)
My desire to recapture my naive experience of reading as a way of discovery and imagination is partly why I am always drawn to re-reading Plato, and why in recent years I have also been attracted to Montaigne (and even Machiavelli, though sort of only when I have to). The structure of argument occurs within a narrative of actions involving characters and emotion as well as speech or thought. This gives his works an "open texture" which the reader is invited to reconstruct in full, so that rather than monologues (like, e.g. Aristotle or Kant) they imitate "dialogues" between the reader and Plato or Socrates. There is the aspect of puzzle to Plato's works, even the seemingly most didactic of them, and if this sometimes becomes so complex as to almost defeat you (e.g. the 'rational enterprise' of examining 'knowledge' in the Theaetetus), the reader is invited into the life and process of philosophy, not just its theoretical-systematic outcomes. I find this attraction also in the Essays, the challenge of discerning how the individual essay "tests" and "experiments" with its subject-matter(s), what is going on under as well as on the surface, how the piece fits into his time and manners, and what the conceptual opposites are that he is exploring in the work, and finally who this man Michel de Montaigne is. I'm toying now with the possibility of devoting my next semester's leave to the study of the Essays. Will I have something to contribute? Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Do I have anything better to read and study?
Reading is a solitary pleasure, but it connects you with another's mind. So there is a kind of friendship that can emerge in some reading--I feel it for Shakespeare at times, in some of the characters I love like Falstaff and Rosalind, for Nietzsche in a few works, here and there with other authors. Plato is too great; I'm overawed by him. (Shakespeare is too great, too, of course, but I don't feel the same challenge to think through the structure of ideas in the plays as I do in the Dialogues; often I read them too quickly, too lightly.) Aristotle turns into an intellectual exercise, often complex but somehow impersonal. But Montaigne seems almost just right. On the other hand, I don't have anyone to read Montaigne with; and reading is not complete unless it connects in a human way with friendship. And there is also the fact that Montaigne does annoy me a little. But Socrates does, too.
I know I must abandon my self-indulgent love of reading for its own sake for an art of reading that is creative, productive of speech or writing, that finds and carries home to me and others the truth and beauty of the works I take hold of and shape in my own way. The art of reading points beyond itself to real dialogue, read communication, and to an art of living in which it is a contributing part. We are meant to learn to read in order to re-discover together the "old truths," the verities that transport us beyond ourselves to that which we have in common and remakes us all. But to succeed in this, our great pedagogic goal, we have to learn to tarry along the way, to surrender our time and cares, to ruminate, chew over, think through and even muse on what we read, to let the books speak to us, before we consume them as resources for our art. We have to let them work on us, if we are to work on them. I am what I have done with what I have read, but perhaps even more what has read itself into me. In reading, I must be written on, before I can write of what I've read.
FOOTNOTE: Curiously I forgot to mention the Bible, which I read and studied for years, esp. the first two books of the OT and the first three Gospels, esp. Matthew. I also followed unconventional guides into these strange countries, Caputo and his moderating successor Sarna in relation to Genesis and Exodus, pomo approaches to the NT, e.g. Borg, Crosson. Then one day, after my children had grown up, I left organized religion, and simply stopped reading the Bible, to make my home in what to me was more natural and fertile country to the northwest. No doubt I was written on by these studies, but I am moved less by "transcendental humors" today than in the past, and have no particular desire to go back.
This is, to me, your most interesting post to date. But that's probably the English scholar in me, similarly obsessed with reading: not in the sense that you are (I go without supplemental reading more often than I should admit), but in the significance of reading. Should we look at the ways that reading is utile? Should we look at what it says about the reading subject congnitively and psychologically? Should we study, or merely appreciate, the aesthetic joys we derive from it? Should we bemoan reading's reconstruction from traditional formats into smaller, shorter, multimedia texts, or welcome it? The very fact that humans can create, reproduce, and odder still, enjoy pictograms that correspond with spoken utterances that are themselves symbolic makes us, of course, an odd duck of a species. The scientific reductionist explanation would say that we were "reading" long before we were reading: that our ability to do this stems from an ability to look at mushrooms colored a certain way and see food or death; that we learned through natural selection to encode the world and transliterate it into other systems.
ReplyDeleteAnd so we must ask, then, is reading a fundamental expression of a need to interpret that is essential for survival, or is it an incidental bi-product of the same? And if it is neither of these, then what else could it possibly be?