Over the past few weeks, I have been reading Edith Wharton’s
novels at night, and have marveled at the modernity of the protagonists, from
Lily Bart to Undine Spragg, and at Wharton’s ability to keep the story moving,
the characters evolving, and the reader surprised. I like to learn from good novelists, and I am learning from
Wharton.
I have timed my reading to finish whenever a Yankee game is
on the Yes Network, and if no game is at hand, then at least Storage Wars or American Pickers. That’s
it. That’s about the only TV I
watch, or I feel is worth watching.
My kids rarely watch TV, and my wife only watches the news, if
that. They do see episodes of The
Office, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report on their computers, which prompts me to consider
whether I should cut cable TV once and for all. But I don’t.
Not yet. I want to, but I
don’t.
Since Aaron and Isaac were toddlers, my wife and I read to
them. Every night. Thirty minutes for Laura. Thirty minutes for me. This was our religion through their
grade school years. Not
surprisingly Aaron and Isaac as high-school students are enthusiastic readers
for pleasure. After school, they
are as likely to guffaw at Stephen Colbert on their MacBooks as they are to
read their novels in bed. But this
family culture of reading, if you can call it that, took years to foment, took
attention and care to implement and nurture, and took active dismissal of what
I would call the normal American culture of not reading.
I am often asked how I became a reader, in part because many
know that I grew up poor along the Mexican-American border of El Paso,
Texas. My parents did not read to
me. They could read and did read
in Spanish, but most of my reading was in English. My parents did hand me two or three dollars for paperback books I ordered at South Loop School from Scholastic Books every other Friday. But more importantly, they
left me alone. They left me alone
with my massive collection of paperbacks, and they never disparaged my love of
reading. The opportunity to read
and the space to read are as important as having your parents read to you. I still remember the lime-green
bookshelves my handy father built in my room. These bookshelves housed my treasures. I have never forgotten how he took the
time to do what mattered to me.
So I don’t know if you are made a reader, or if you are born
a reader. What I do know is that
reading widely —reading beyond your time and culture, reading different genres,
reading in different languages— changes your perspective profoundly. Television becomes a bore, and what is
said and done on television is amusing.
But it’s rarely important.
The crisis of the day or the outrage of the day becomes just more inane
shouting to get your attention. On
the Internet, online status updates are interesting little notes about your
life, but never more than that.
It’s not really who you are, and well, a serious reader would know
that. But you worry about the
others. Those who don’t read.
Those who take television as the truth.
Those who sell stocks at the clarion call of another ‘crisis,’ or buy
gold as they anticipate a Mayan apocalypse, or attack an ‘other’ because
‘they’ are after us, aren’t they?
Yes, I worry about our American culture and how it is
shaping us. It’s short-term-ism,
if you can call it that, its obsession with fluff and images, its endless talk
about who stunned in what dress.
Are any of us ever going to look like Victoria Secret models? Will any of us ever get a chance to date
them?
We are not ‘censored’ in the traditional way in the United
States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no
Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and
thought. But in this culture of
images, we are censoring ourselves.
That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and
extol superficiality. We ignore
reading, and lavish time on images.
To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing
the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and
prejudices? What have you become
when the most expected of you is simply to press a ‘Like’ button? What kind of gulag is it when its
inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?
Because I live in a different milieu of my own creation, and
also because I’m rather humorless unless the joke is really quick and clever
and insightful, I’d rather be reading and catch a Yankee game afterwards. For me, that’s the perfect night. I can kiss my wife goodnight, and kiss
my boys goodnight too (yes, remarkably, they still let me), and know that I am
happy to do things the simple way, the slow way. I focus on how I find meaning in my life over the
long-term. That is how I work to be
free.
