"When I read a good book … I wish that life were three thousand years long." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we have such feelings I ask, why do we wish this? Ralph Waldo Ellison also wrote, "What one reads becomes a part of what one sees and feels." How does this happen? How does what we read become a lens for our subsequent vision? And Terence, perhaps slyly commenting on the limitations of his Roman betters, wrote, "The fate of books depends on the capacity of the reader." Well, yes: it does. Books actually build capacity.
In early notes for my course on Popular Materials, I wrote this in a journal:
We read this literature of crime and sex and fantasy in order to imagine ourselves able, through a private world of our own, to approach and live briefly within the forbidden - on alien, lawless, cold frontiers, or in the warm intimacies of others. We read to experience deep taboos and extraordinary passions; to overcome wrenching sorrows and desperations; to engage virtually in or simply to observe relations of lust and murder; to address injustice with courageous sacrifice and risk. We read this literature in order to encounter within ourselves the imagined edges of our own sexual expressions, the frontiers and failures of civilization and order, and also the mysteries of conscience, guilt, betrayal, and fear latent in living experiences. There is learning for us in these entrances to these imagined worlds.
We select our means of entrance to these experiences of mystery and danger on what basis? On our hope to transcend our lives? On our disappointment that we can live in only one time and space and not another, even though our senses and passions are beckoning from a different world? We want to go into that other world where we are meant to be, a place where our conflicts, hopes and strengths are clearer, and universally acknowledged, and where we are given a new chance to fulfill or resolve them. Every life is an imagined life. Reading asks: How will you choose to imagine yours?
Later notes, I added, more wisely:
Or maybe not. Perhaps we read popular materials just because they are fun and make us happy.
This is what I want my students to know. To read is often wildly exhilarating and deeply interesting. We come to live silently alongside people who never existed, except that we know they do, within us. We come to admire and care for them, like Proust weeping as his reading of a novel ends, though they may be strangers barely seen through a dusty window. We feel things as if we were there, or even as if we were the center of it all. "As if" — the reader's way to explain the feelings of reading. We are, of course beyond logic, and often bereft when these unreal lives depart, leaving us alone in this different world.
We meet them and, in their ascending lives, they help us dream a bit; and often they allow us to accept the descent of lives as well, sometimes including our own. We appreciate their conflicts; we too are conflicted. Or they give us brief opportunities to imagine the wild dimensions of possibility that only fiction can extend. How else can we grasp the wildness of other lives, except by their voices? When they speak, somehow our lives have a voice. When we are given such gifts, I think we must be grateful.
As a grateful librarian I have to remind myself: It is a part of everyone's way to make reading choices for any, and every, reason I can imagine, and for many I cannot. And whether I understand these motives or not means nothing to the reader. What I am certain of is that there is no end to reading, no end to the possibilities of reading, nor is there an end to its pleasures for as long as we are sentient page-turners. I want my students to ask, how shall I make this happen best for others? How shall I make this happen best for myself?
I have given my wonderful learners five guiding questions.
- What is the value of popular reading to the reader?
- What is the importance of literacy and its practices to the culture?
- What is the value of speaking among other readers about what we have read? (This question is founded on Toni Morrison's idea that a book has a "talking life" as well as a "reading life.")
- What is the purpose of librarianship in service to the reader? (The only question I ask about practice.)
- What will life be like if people stop reading? This last question I have taken from Caleb Crain's essay, "Twilight of the Books," in The New Yorker (December 24-31, 2007).
What will it be like? It will barely be life at all. I think it will be a far less exuberant experience for everyone, based on what I know of people who do not read, who will not read anything, dulled by lives without the voices of imagined others. I want my students to understand the kind of exuberance that once caused yet another great thinker, the incomparable Jimmy Durante, to sing, "Gee, dat day ah read a book - someday ah'm gonna do it again!"
David Carr
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CB#3360 - 100 Manning Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360
carr@ils.unc.edu