Texts and Attitudes, Part 7

 The Pleasures and Wisdom of Reading

On an Australian quiz show recently, a young man in his late twenties was asked to name the title written by Cervantes out of four choices: Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote and Gone With The Wind.  The contestant hesitated, obviously unfamiliar with the author or any of the titles.  He then guessed: Paradise Lost.  Well, he lost.  No big deal.  However, have we bred a generation of intelligent young people who have no idea of their own cultural heritage?  It’s not people who don’t know about obscure musical groups, baseball teams, the location of sporting facilities in a given city, or the winners of movie Oscars thirty or forty years ago?  Most of the questions asked on such programmes, as in newspaper quizzes, are trivial, requiring random knowledge, or at best some familiarity with popular and ephemeral culture.  But not to recognize Cervantes as the author of Don Quixote or to confound him with John Milton, or Dante, that is something else indeed.

There is one way to know which books to read, since everyone starts off as a beginner, naïve and with a tabula rasa.  If you don’t have parents to guide you and educated teachers to present you with a graduated syllabus of titles to take you grade by grade into the circle of civilized literacy, then you have to become sensitive to what you see and hear around you.  Listen for the clues: the allusions couched in explicit analogies (“They were howling like Macbeth’s witches around the cauldron of mystery”), the implicit references (“Don’t go jousting with windmills, buddy” or “Get thee to a nunnery, sweety pie”), or even more embedded names and expressions.  Notice when two or more authors you enjoy start to quote the same passages in other novels, plays, poems or essays, or mention the names of writers they keep coming back to for inspiration.  When you go back to those sources, see if you can recognize how they (a) remind you of more recent books, (b) seem to comment on ancient or archaic types of people and events, and (c) signal their pre-texts and under-texts in the titles they give to the piece or chapters, the lines they cite as mottoes or epilogues, the contrasts they make to ideas, images and codes they wish to be seen and heard set against.

As you work your way through the vast piles of literature created and easily available—that is, even before you start to seek out the rare and the obscure, the out-of-print and the censored titles—you will become aware of which authors and books are constantly in touch with one another and which have quickly slipped into the silence of obscurity.  Some, that is, keep in mutual contact, keep echoing back and forth through time and place, so that more recent authors keep the long-dead books alive and vibrating with relevance, and the more ancient poems, stories and speculations provide depth and allusive expansion to the newer texts.  Others, however, by lacking these connections, drop out of sight and out of hearing as soon as their immediate purposes are gone.  Many best-sellers—not all, by any means—become popular because they use the language, concepts and discourses of the moment, help many people focus, articulate and make decisions about things in their lives that otherwise seem to vague and complicated; but they lack resonance, and in a very years, if you dare to read them, you find they sound hollow and rickety, for whatever grounding they once seemed to have in reality is now eroded and washed away in the tide of history.

It is not only that reading in this way so as to have flashing lights and reverberating echoes enhancing the books you read, one’s mind making associations, following clues and enjoying the symphony of experiences, but that each new book you read—or re-read because one takes great pleasure both in going back to the primary sources and discovering new authors and titles who are engaged in the same process of mutual enlightenment—helps you understand yourself and your place in the world.

This knowledge goes way beyond random guesses in a quiz show.  This knowledge is what wisdom is based on.  Where knowledge consists of the identifications, recognitions and creative connectivities we keep making as we read, recollect and discuss our readings, wisdom comes to the fore as we learn to understand the patterns created, to make judgments and decisions in everything we do, and to put aside or at least into perspective everything else that does not form a part of the world of intellect and imagination we have discovered.