James E Hartley

The Sacrament of Living

“Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the ‘program.’ This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.”

Laments like that are commonplace among contemporary observers of the church scene. What makes this quotation so noteworthy, poignant in fact, is that it was not written about the contemporary church. It was written in 1948. A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God.

Tozer wants to correct the omnipresent sterility in the church. How? By encouraging exactly what the title suggests: the pursuit of God. “The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire.” Or, from one of the prayers with which Tozer ends each of the chapters, he wants us all to say, “I am ashamed of my lack of desire, O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still.”

Right away, we begin to realize that Tozer wrote this book with a particular audience in mind. This is not the book for the person who does not have at least a nodding profession of Christianity. The pursuit of God in the title is not why a non-Christian should start pursuing God. Tozer spends a brief moment having a merry time at the expense of the “idealists” who dispute the reality of things external to the mind and the “relativists” who like to assert there are no fixed Truths.

These idealists and relativists are not mentally sick. They prove their soundness by living their lives according to the very notions of reality they in theory repudiate and by counting upon the very fixed points that they prove are not there. They could earn a lot more respect for their notions if they were willing to live by them; but this they are careful not to do. Their ideas are brain-deep, not life-deep.

Just so. But this book is also not intended for the subspecies of Christian who wants to delve into the deep waters of theology. There are, Tozer argues, the scribes (those who tell us what they have read) and the prophets (those who tell us what they have seen). People who review books, like this here reviewer, are mere scribes. Tozer is a prophet. Scribes, Tozer laments, have dominated the discussion in the modern church. Scribes do silly things like wonder about predestination and divine sovereignty. “Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.” We really do not need people who tell us what they have read in books.

So, if Tozer does not want a reader like me who is going to talk about what I learned in a book, whom does he want to read his book? Tozer is a prophet who wants to tell us what he has seen, not what he has read. He sees sterility. He sees Christians who say they believe, but have become stuck in a rut in which God is just some distant Being who may have done a good thing or two (like dying on a cross), but has no immediate relevance in deciding how we live on a Tuesday afternoon. One of the greatest problems, Tozer argues, is the tendency of Christians to divide life into secular and scared spaces. The Pursuit of God is ultimately collapsing those two spaces into one, to pursue God always, at all times and all places. Tozer wants to awaken you from your slumber, to spur you on. This book is a call to action for the somnolent Christian.

Tozer’s audience is thus clear. You don’t read this book to plumb theological mysteries or to get persuasive arguments for why Christianity is true. You read this book because your faith has become sterile and you want to make it fruitful. You read this book because you want a gentle yet firm author telling you what he has seen when he faced God directly.

It starts here: “Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image.” God is the fixed point; He created everything and He is present in everything. Chapter by chapter, Tozer wants to tell you how to lead your life pursing that fixed point and not your own desires.

The fundamental challenge: understand the need for a personal and intimate acquaintance with God. For many Christians, “God is not more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.” The chapter titles alone tell you what this sort of life it is that Tozer is arguing you should want to live. Apprehend God. Understand that God is universally present. Remove the veil separating you from God. Give up your possessions, your toys. Hear the voice of God. Gaze on the beauty of God. Remember you are a creature, not the Creator. Learn to be meek.

The ultimate call of this book is to practice the Sacrament of Living. All the admonitions point the same way: your life can be spent in the pursuit of God. If you want a patient and insistent guide to learning how to live a life like that, then this is a great book for you. It’s no surprise that the book is still in print; it is far crisper and more direct than most of the similar books being written today. For those who like this sort of thing, it is a book which will happily sit on your bedside table, always ready for another read.

(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)

Suicide Chic

“The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”

Thus ends The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s vastly overrated foray into the novel.

I tried to find some redeeming feature of this novel. I really did. I even waited to write this review until a clever former student of mine who likes this novel had the chance to convince me the novel was not atrocious. She failed. But, I don’t real blame her. This is a really bad book.

Start here: the story ends as Esther, our narrator, boldly and hopefully steps into the room. The future awaits! How did she get to this magical place? Well, seventy pages earlier, Esther killed herself. She buried herself in her basement and swallowed enough pills to end her painful life. The message of this book: If you want to find happiness and hope in your life, first you must commit suicide.

Now I know you are thinking we shouldn’t laugh about Esther committing suicide. You are right. It is awful that Esther killed herself, truly awful. Indeed it is so awful that one might think that a book which argues that suicide is the way to make your problems go away would be a mean, nasty bit of work that we probably might not want to be celebrating.

Esther didn’t die, obviously. And therein lies the biggest cheat in the whole story. Esther gets to boldly kill herself and then she also gets to live. In the story, this is a win-win. In the real world, of course, this is a loss. Esther just dies in the real world.

To be fair, it is not the suicide that my former student pointed to as the redeeming feature of the book. Instead, she pointed to the fig tree.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

As my former student noted, the fig tree captures much of the angst of every student who has ever sat in my office. This is true. To be in college and faced with a world of opportunities is indeed terrifying. It forces one to wonder about the Big Questions. Who are you? Why are you here? What is the source of happiness? The fact that college students are perpetually faced with these questions, that these questions are real and important, is one of the greatest joys of being a college professor. I always get to have yet another conversation about things which are truly important.

If The Bell Jar had been a story about the difficulties of making choices when you are young and at an elite liberal arts college and the world is before you, then maybe it would have been a novel worth reading.

But, Plath’s solution to this problem is: Kill Yourself. FOMO-induced suicide.

Anyone want to argue that the next time I have a student in my office with that fig tree problem, that crippling anxiety arising from uncertainty about what to do with her life, then I should merrily hand her a copy of The Bell Jar and say, “Here is a book which will help you solve the problems you are having”? Anyone?

If the novel had ended with Esther’s suicide then maybe the book would have been worth reading. We could have seen the tragedy that Esther killed herself; we could have felt the pain she must have endured because of being unwilling to make a choice. Probably still a lousy book, but at least an intellectually honest one.

But, when Esther survives suicide and the suicide becomes the pivot point of her whole life, then how can anyone take this book seriously? It trivializes both the problems Esther faced and the solution she finds. Let’s make it very clear: the main function of this novel is to glamorize suicide.

It is entirely possible to write a serious substantive book arguing for the virtues of suicide. Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism is an excellent example. The Romans also believed suicide had its place. Hume wrote an essay about it too. Goethe has a famous novel about it. But in all of these cases, suicide is treated as a serious matter. In Plath, it is all just glam, like a flashy advertising spread in a magazine.

Moreover, the publication history of this novel is well worth noting. The American publisher to whom she sent the manuscript passed, thinking (correctly) that the novel was not good at all. A British publisher agreed to publish it under a pseudonym. When it came out, the reviews were bad. It turns out that nobody liked this novel.

Then Plath committed suicide. Eight years after her death, a publisher discovered that the book was not covered by American copyright, and could thus be published by anyone in America. The reason that anyone could publish it was because nobody had bothered to publish the book in America when it came out in 1963, because it was, you see, such a lousy novel. In the early 1970s, coming out when Love Story was the tale du jour, The Bell Jar hit the bestseller list. What could be better in the early 1970s than a book glamorizing depression and suicide written by a young poet who had actually killed herself?

You want a sign of cultural degradation? I give you The Bell Jar.

Faith and Uncertainty

There is something about the human mind that does not like uncertainty; a mystery leaves a hole in the psyche that simply must be filled.

This is a rather good thing for the survival of the species. If you heard a strange growl behind you and you didn’t wonder what was causing it, you might not be around to generate offspring.

That doesn’t explain, though, why we like to know what happened in a bit of fiction. Consider Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.” The story is Henry James looking right at you and saying, “You don’t like uncertainty. It makes you anxious not to know what is going on. Well, here, let me turn the screw a little more and increase your anxiety.”

The plot in brief: a governess goes to a large country manor to watch a couple of wonderfully charming children, a boy and a girl. While there, she sees a male ghost, whom she finds out look just like a former servant on the estate. Shortly thereafter she sees a female ghost, who looks like the former governess. She keeps seeing the ghosts. Nobody else ever sees the ghosts. Her terror mounts. Then the ghost appears in the presence of one of the other servants and the young girl. Neither one sees the ghost as the governess shrieks in terror. Afraid of the governess and her crazy tales of seeing ghosts, the servant and the girl leave the estate. Soon thereafter, left alone with the young boy, the governess sees the male ghost coming into the room to attack her or the boy. In her terror, she murders the young boy. End of story.

The question: are the ghosts real or just a figment of the active imagination of the governess?

Oh, that wasn’t actually the plot of the Henry James story.

The plot in brief: a governess goes to a large country manor to watch a couple of what we will soon discover are terrifying children. She discovers to her horror that the ghosts of a pair of former servants are haunting the place. Even more terrifying, the children can see the ghosts, yet refuse to acknowledge that they are there. She begins to realize that the children have a connection with these ghosts. There are hints that she is afraid that before they died, the former servants may have had a relationship with these children, perhaps even a sexual relationship. The ghosts and the children may or may not be planning to all unite again in a sort of ghostly family. Eventually she catches the daughter running off with the female ghost, but when she exposes the matter, the daughter becomes furious and refuses to have anything more to do with the governess. The young girl leaves. Left alone with the governess, the young boy is in the room when the male ghost shows up. The governess sees the ghost first, and then the boy screams out, “You devil” and then mysteriously dies.

The question: was the young boy calling the governess a devil because she had exposed the existence of the ghosts or the ghost a devil because he was afraid of the ghost?

Now, Dear Reader, you have two plot outlines, both of which lead to a question. The answer to the question will color how you read the entire story. You can hunt for clues in the story to answer the question. Enjoy.

But, first, which one of those is the real plot of “The Turn of the Screw”?

Before you answer, there is also this important tidbit: the bulk of the story is a manuscript written by the governess herself. Is she a reliable narrator?

This is the brilliance of the Henry James story. If you just read it, having no idea what to expect, you might very well think you just read a rather conventional tale, without a lot of mystery. I read a story about governess who was slightly insane and just seeing things until her mind snapped and she murdered a young boy. Ho-hum, I thought. Then I Googled the book and discovered that everyone else also knows exactly what this story is about, but that there is zero agreement which story is the correct one. I then chatted with a couple of former students about the book, and discovered they also read a different book than I read.

That, of course sends everybody back to the text to see why everyone else is wrong. Going back, you discover something remarkable. James, ever the precise writer, has oh so carefully arranged every trace of evidence for your preferred theory in a way that it can actually be read in a completely different manner.

This is not the case of a book which just doesn’t make any sense. Thomas Pynchon writes books like that; when you hit the end there is absolutely no point in going back to try to figure out what just happened in the novel; the novel (take your pick which one—they are all the same—but if you want the best example, Gravity’s Rainbow) deliberately makes no sense—that is the point.

“The Turn of the Screw,” in contrast, makes perfect sense. There is a perfectly coherent story here, and there is a ton of evidence that the story is saying exactly what you thought it said. Moreover, there is not a single unexplainable part of the story. It all fits neatly in a little box.

That is true, no matter which of the above plots you think is the actual plot of the story.

The Big Question: how does this uncertainty about the plot of “The Turn of the Screw” make you feel? Is the answer simply that the story has no meaning? Can you read it and say, “The ghosts are like Schrodinger’s cat, neither there nor not there, but the box is one which it is impossible to open”?

What if I told you that “The Turn of the Screw” was a true story? It comes with an introduction where a narrator, who could very well be Henry James, is talking with someone who has the governess’ manuscript. Maybe the story isn’t fiction at all. (OK, you know it is fiction (how?), but pretend for a second that you don’t know.) If the story is true, are you still perfectly willing to accept that there is no correct version of the plot?

Life is like that. The history of theology and philosophy is full of explanations of the nature of life. You might think you could just sit down and reason out the world, but you will rapidly find that many have gone before you and reasoned about the world. What did they find? Not the same thing.

You cannot escape the fact that if you are going to understand the world, you have to start by believing one thing. Then you can work out the rest. You can test your theory of the world against the world to see if it collapses. Is it possible, for example, that in “The Turn of the Screw” the people you thought were real are the ghosts and the people you thought were ghosts are the real people? I haven’t tried to see if that works too—I didn’t see anyone propose it, so I have no idea if anyone has ever tried to see if that theory works. Maybe it works. Maybe there is some place in the narrative that it would break down and demonstrate it doesn’t fit the world. In that case, you’d toss the theory aside and begin anew.

That is how we live our lives. We start with faith. We must start with faith in something. And from there, we build up a world. People are confused about this fact all the time. People think it is faith that needs to be examined. People think that other people’s faith is silly or childish or something. But, the faith isn’t the only question worth discussing. Another interesting discussion is whether starting with wherever you place your faith, do the facts of the world fit? What does that story of the world look like? Are there wobbly parts or unexplained parts?

As Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy, if a man starts by believing he is Napoleon, there is no point in arguing with him about whether he is Napoleon. Far more interesting is to explore the world of this Napoleon. Ask, him “If you are Napoleon, then why is the world the way it is? Why don’t you fix this shabby little world if you are the Great Napoleon?” That conversation is really interesting. You might learn something about your own world in that conversation.

You say that there is a God. Then why did God create the world in this way instead of another way? You say there is no God. Then why do you follow a moral code? You say that the world is determined. Then why do you have faith in your own mental processes? You say you have free will. Then why do you decide to do so many things you wish you did not do?

“The Turn of the Screw” is a lesson in world building. What you start believing has consequences for how you interpret a great many details of this world. How certain are you that the facts of this world are not better explained by that person over there with a different starting place, a different faith?

Frontier Justice

“Gil and I crossed the eastern divide about two by the sun.”

We just left civilization behind. The Wild West is the protagonist in Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident.

The genre? It sure look like a novel, a Western with cowboys and all, but it really belongs in the political philosophy section of your library. Great Book.

The story: Gil and Our Narrator roll into town just in time to hear about some cattle rustling which resulted in the death of a cowboy. The sheriff is not around. A lynch mob forms and heads out to bring…what? Justice? Murder? That is the question.

As you sit in comfort in the heart of Civilized Society, it is easy to imagine that you are protected by that large impersonal force called The Law. You are unlikely to be murdered today by a stranger; everyone you meet is likely to respect your rights to keep your property. The Law is your friend.

But, that abstract entity called The Law cannot maintain itself. It is maintained by the fact that the people you meet have internalized it; they obey its dictates. Why? Why do people obey The Law? It’s either good character or fear of punishment. Truth be told, you don’t really which; you are just glad that they obey The Law.

You will most likely go your entire life never having to think more about The Law. It is mere background to your daily life. Sure every now and then you’ll run afoul of the minor manifestations of the law; jay-walking and exceeding posted limits on the speed with which you may drive your motor car are your most frequent infractions. But these are merely minor annoyances. They are not The Law.

Law is more than the words that put it on the books; law is more than any decisions that may be made from it; law is more than the particular code of it stated at any one time or in any one place or nation; more than any man, lawyer or judge, sheriff or jailer, who may represent it. True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has evolved with mankind. None of man’s temples, none of his religions, none of his weapons, his tools, his arts, his sciences, nothing else he has grown to, is so great a thing as his justice, his sense of justice. The true law is something in itself, it is the spirit of the moral nature of man; it is an existence apart, like God, and as worthy of worship as God. If we can touch God at all, where do we touch him save in the conscience? And what is the conscience of any man save his little fragment of the conscience of all men in all time?

That is part of the argument of Davies, who is desperately trying to stop the lynch mob from its extralegal activity.

If Davies is right, The Law is something above any one of us; a thing pure and worthy of veneration. If Davies is right, then it is indeed a test of character to abide by the dictates of The Law even when it seems expedient to do otherwise. If Davies is right, The Law trumps our preferences. If Davies is right, then it is better to let the murderers and cattle thieves escape than to go forth and hang them.

A man lies dead. His blood cries out. The Law has been broken. Justice is demanded. But, because there is no sheriff around, the killer goes free? Is that Justice? Davies again:

“If we go out and hang two or three men,” he finished, “without doing what the law says, forming a posse and bringing the men in for trial, then by the same law, we’re not officers of justice, but due to be hanged ourselves.”
“And who’ll hang us?” Winder wanted to know.
“Maybe nobody,” Davies admitted. “Then our crime’s worse than a murderer’s. His act puts him outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law.”

Them’s some fine words to be sure. But, who, one might ask Davies, gets to enforce The Law? Who gives the sheriff his authority if not the people of the town? And if the people of the town decide to grant that authority to the lynch mob they all just joined, who is to say that this was not a duly constituted legal arrangement? Winder is onto something there—you don’t hang the hangman. The hangman only has the right to hang someone because the society has given him that right.

In the East, in civilization, there are those trappings of government, the kings or the elected officials who bring a veneer of respectability to the appointing of the hangman. But, what happens when you cross that divide and enter the land where civilization is in its infancy? A wrong has been done. Is it your job to right the wrong by bringing justice to the wrongdoer or to stand aside and let the wrongdoer go free?

The problem is even worse. You think you are an individual, but how free are you to make your own decisions? You are, after all, part of the pack. As young Tetley explains:

“Why are we riding up here, twenty-eight of us,” he demanded, “when every one of us would rather be doing something else?…We’re doing it because we’re in the pack, because we’re afraid not to be in the pack. We don’t dare show our pack weakness; we don’t dare resist the pack.”

I hear you. You are thinking that this is a perfect explanation for why the lynch mob is a bad thing; everyone knows it is a bad thing but have joined it anyway because everyone else is joining it. But, your new advocate, young Tetley, is a coward and a weakling. He would be quite happy joining the pack if it would have decided to just stay home. He doesn’t want to be out of the pack; he just wants a weaker, more cowardly pack.

How sure are you that your instinct that the lynch mob is wrong is not simply your desire to avoid the responsibility of enforcing The Law? How sure are you that you aren’t afraid to join the lynch mob simply because you know all your friends are cowards too and you live in that cowardly pack in which nobody is brave enough to be the hangman?

The Ox-Bow Incident is a marvelous reflection on the creation of a society, the nature of justice, and the rule of law. It is also great story, well-written and gripping. So, why is it not more widely read? Westerns are out of favor these days; we no longer tell tales of cowboys. The Library of America just included this story in its new volume The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s & 50s. Let us hope this brings attention to a book well worth your time.

A Funeral Pyre for Books

“When people ask me what I do, I usually say I’m an essayist or a critic. More honorable terms, both, and they mostly fit. They almost conceal the fact that the greater part of what I do is read and write about books.”

In writing that, Sven Birkerts expanded his repertoire into writing about reading and writing about books.

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. A title like that tips the conclusion; Birkerts is not optimistic. This collection of essays circles around the image of Birkerts standing with a hand-written sign saying, “The End is Nigh.”

The book isn’t much of a Whodunit, though. What killed Reading? The internet with its insidious allure. Even more remarkable, the book was published in 1994, so this is before Netflix. Even back in those days, however, Birkerts described talking with his students about reading:

And what emerged was this: that they were not, with a few exceptions, readers—never had been; that they had always occupied themselves with music, TV, and videos; that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; that they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed “pretentious”; that they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and that they were put off by ironic tone because it flaunted superiority and made them feel that they were missing something. The list is partial.

Yeah, Birkerts despairs. (Interestingly, he later did a stint at Mount Holyoke; alas, I never met him.)

What is the problem? It is not that students are illiterate or not interested in learning things. With a student that enjoys talking, it really isn’t hard to find some set of topics for a mutually pleasurable conversation. Students have opinions, strong ones. They have a wide assortment of factoids at their disposal. And they carry around a pocket encyclopedia.

But, by and large, they don’t read books. Then again, many of my colleagues also don’t read books. Sure, they read journal articles and suchlike, but they are not what you would call Readers. Indeed, most of my acquaintances are not Readers, and I suspect I have an unusually high number of readers as acquaintances. Birkerts think we have collectively lost the habit of reading.

What is true of art is true of serious reading as well. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have the leisure or the inclination to undertake it. And true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitement of film.

And, note, we no longer need big screens for the excitement of film. Your tablet and wireless headphones are a portable surround sound movie theater.

At this level, Birkerts is joining the choir, often composed of people who write books complaining that other people don’t read books anymore. Of course some people still read books…just not that many books. Only a quarter of Americans report not reading any books in the last year. The median American reads about 4 books a year. About a third of Americans read at least a book a month. Around 5% read at least book a week. So, it is not the case that people never read books; they just don’t read enough books to make people like Birkerts happy.

However, the lack of a broad reading public has a couple of rather important effects. In a discussion of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—itself a collection of essays about reading books—Birkerts is intrigued by something other than Trilling’s remarks about books.

We may be surprised by the realization that he is writing not for his fellow academic but for the intelligent layman; that there was once a small but active and influential population of such readers, enough for publishers to count on, enough to support a literary culture outside the university radius. These readers were assumed to have a broad general acquaintance with literary classics—James, Austen, Dickens, Flaubert—as well as modern works by writers like Hemingway, Forster, Mann, and Sartre. They would have the rudiments of Freudian psychology, Marxist science, philosophy (certainly a smattering of Descartes, Kant, Bergson, and Nietzsche), classical history (Tacitus, Polybius, Thucydides), and so on. Not a great deal to ask, but how many readers like that are out there now? Some, of course. But do we ever think of them as forming a constituency, as representing a cultural power, as representing anything besides a quirky exception to the norm?

A fascinating observation, that. Of the Americans reading four books a year, how many of those books are Shakespeare’s plays? Even among the book a week or more types, is it Austen, Dickens and Hemingway, let alone Trilling? What happens when people stop reading Descartes and Thucydides for pleasure? What can a writer assume the audience has read? Is asking about whether people read Thucydides or Dickens an interesting question or a pretentious question?

Of course people read all those important books in school…or at least they read important sections from important books in school…or at the very least they read a summary of the important sections of the important books in school…or at a minimum they were supposed to read a summary of the important bits of the important books in school. This, though, leads to another aspect of the decline of reading. Who controls the syllabus of books which will be read in schools? In the last few decades, this has been an enormous battle ground. Why? Birkerts notes:

As Katha Pollitt argued so shrewdly in her much cited article in The Nation: if we were a nation of readers, there would be no issue. No one would be arguing about whether to put Toni Morrison on the syllabus because her work would be a staple of the reader’s regular diet anyway. These lists are suddenly so important because they represent, very often, the only serious works that the student is ever likely to be exposed to. Whoever controls the list comes out ahead in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the young.

For those of us who think the Great Books are important, this is a massive problem. If the average person is only going to read 4 books a year for the rest of their life, then the books assigned in school will make up a noticeable percentage of one’s reading material. It suddenly makes a big difference how many Shakespeare plays you read in high school because this will be for very many people the last time they ever read Shakespeare. If you don’t read Toni Morrison or Ernest Hemingway in high school, you may never see either one.

Does it really matter if people read books? That is a tricky question to answer. It is manifestly true that a person can lead a very meaningful life, full of purpose and love, and never read a book. People led productive and wonderful lives for thousands of years before Gutenberg came along. Even after the printing press, books were not cheap, so you would have to be enormously wealthy to have a moderately sized library of your own. Public libraries are remarkably recent historical inventions. A life without books used to be the norm.

So, if reading books is not crucial to leading a Good Life, why does it matter? After 220 pages of angst, Birkerts arrives here:

My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth—from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery—and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal, of wisdom these days?

Reading books promotes depth. Yes, you can get the facts from a breezy article on the web. Yes you can imagine yourself walking in another’s shoes in a 2 hour movie or a one hour TV show. But, the book forces you to slow down, to set your mind wandering in vaster plains, swimming in deeper waters, climbing greater heights than your daily life will offer. The book always moves at the pace of your mind, allowing the words to work their magic at exactly the tempo you desire. Books are neither necessary nor sufficient to a life well lived. But, books, Great Books, will make whatever life you are living even better.

The Power of Conversation

Cormac McCarthy is my answer to the question, “Which living novelist is most likely to be considered Great in 100 years?” He has a number of novels which are widely and justly celebrated. This isn’t about any of those novels. He also has one work which I rarely see mentioned anywhere, but is truly an amazing bit of art.

The Sunset Limited. The subtitle itself is curious. A Novel in Dramatic Form. If you glance at any page, it sure looks like a play, but calling it a play would almost certainly mislead a devotee of the theater. It simply doesn’t have the structure of what you would expect in a play. It is two people talking. That’s it. Just a long conversation. That does not mean a live production of The Sunset Limited would not be worth seeing. There is, in fact, a marvelous HBO production, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. That is what the industry would call an All-Star Treatment.

The plot, such as it is, is simple. There are two characters, identified only as “Black” and “White.” Black is an ex-con, working class man. White is a college professor. The conversation takes place in Black’s apartment in a run-down New York City tenement building.

Why, you ask, are these two men, unlikely to interact in any social setting you can imagine, sitting in Black’s apartment? Earlier that morning, Black was waiting at a subway station, when White dashed across the platform in an attempt to jump in front of The Sunset Limited as it raced through the station. He accidently leapt right into the arms of Black. Black brought White back to his apartment and the conversation ensues.

Black and White have little in common. Black is a rather devout Christian, who had a moment of conversion after a rather ugly fight in prison left him in the hospital. White is an atheist English Professor who has realized that there is literally nothing good in this world, no afterlife, and thus he welcomes the cold utter oblivion of death.

It is the idea of this conversation that makes this book so endlessly fascinating and rereadable. About 10 pages in, you realize this conversation is going nowhere, that neither man is ever going to be convinced by any argument the other one makes. These are two people with very firm beliefs. They know what they know. McCarthy plays scrupulously fair throughout; neither one ever gets the upper hand and dominates the conversation; neither one is set up as a straw man to be knocked down with the Author’s Message.

In other words, this is not a book to be admired because it proves that the beliefs of Black or White are correct. From the description above, you already feel an affinity for either Black or White, but at no point in this book will you feel like McCarthy has rigged the conversation so your side will obviously win or lose.

What does a book like this teach us? A great many small things and one very big thing. The small things are scattered throughout as the conversation meanders. The Big Thing: Conversation is Powerful.

The power of conversation is not that you might convince someone to agree with you. Sure, conversation can do that sometimes, but if the only goal of every conversation you have is an attempt to persuade the other person you are right, then you will never experience the real power of conversation.

The power of conversation is not that you will enjoy talking with other people who believe the same things that you do. Sure, conversation can be an echo chamber and it is nice to hear your own views echoed back. It can make you feel right and virtuous. But, if you only talk with like-minded people, then you will never experience the real power of conversation.

The real power of conversation comes when you talk with someone with whom you disagree and you know at the outset that nobody is going to be persuaded and you just let the conversation flow wherever it goes. You can’t win a conversation like that. The goal is simply to learn and to enjoy the process of learning. The goal is to experience a mind different than your own and to probe that mind while that mind is probing your mind. The conversation lays bare what you really believe by exposing all the things you thought you believed, but in articulating them to someone who disagrees, you realize that you don’t really believe that after all. The conversation fine tunes your beliefs and forces you to realize what are the non-negotiables in your own mind. The conversation teaches you things and ideas you had never encountered before and constantly shows that the world is a wider and richer place than you ever imagined.

I was about to write “that sort of conversation is dying, if not dead.” But, truth be told, now that I am having this conversation with you, Dear Reader, I realized I am not sure that sort of conversation was ever vibrantly alive. People probably have always tended to talk with people who are like them. The lack of actual conversation is just now more evident when the Echo Chambers have a very loud presence on the internet. Watching people standing in one echo chamber screaming about people living in different echo chambers is terribly dispiriting and depressing and dismal.

The Sunset Limited is this like the light on the front of the titular train. It shines a light into the dark places of the tunnel in which we all live. It gives us the choice to either stand in front of the train or get out of the way of the train. Does life have meaning? Is there a purpose to our acts? Why are you here?

Read The Sunset Limited for the same reason you should enjoy conversations with people with whom you disagree. You’ll enjoy it and you will learn something. I have no idea what you will learn; that is part of the joy of a good conversation and a book like The Sunset Limited.