Reading Life

 Eyesight and the Reading Life

About a year ago, during a routine eye exam, I learned that I have cataracts--my doctor showed the specks to me in full color; they looked like slender boats moored erratically in some foreign port--and explained why my world was suddenly out of focus. It was evident that something was up with my vision. I had shifted to reading the Times on-line and, try as I might, I could no longer make out the print in my beloved Penguin classics even with reading glasses. How odd the feeling is of losing our body to age, the gradual slipping of the senses a prelude to what will doubtless be more serious losses. While I can still remember specific lines in novels I read decades ago, and still recite sonnets of Milton that I was made to memorize in high school ("How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth"), I have a harder time with my students' names and find myself saying "excuse me?" more often than I'd like to admit. On the other hand, the pleasure I take in reading and in music has only increased with the years, so that now I yearn to revisit the books I loved when I first became a reader. Many people are readers; some are serious readers--many people don't read at all. But other people, perhaps out of shyness or a propensity toward introspection, perhaps out of vanity and neurosis, create a reading life separate from their "real" and public life.  It's a world full of characters who become more vivid and interesting than the people one meets in ordinary life. The universe of words. And each day, as I read of the latest outrages in the Times--the President tossing rolls of paper towels to the desperate citizens of Puerto Rico--the quiet, inner world becomes more attractive, the one where Maxim Rysanov plays Schubert's A minor sonata (D. 821) while Richard Ford describes his parents in Between Them. I suppose it must always come to this: as we age we yearn to recover what we've lost. Perhaps a political space in which decency still had a chance, or those hours of quiet introspection where, with the help of books, we plotted out the course of the life that we increasingly begin to think of in the past tense.

So....with my eyesight getting worse and my yearning for books increasing, I purchased a Kindle. Never did I imagine myself reading books on a small screen, giving up the heft and pleasure of the paperback book, the tactile thrill of heavy bond paper and the aroma of printers ink. How sterile is the electronic book, how homogeneous the volumes that, in paper form, would be distinctive in weight and measure! I felt like a classic pianist might feel having given up his Steinway for an electronic keyboard. I felt like a traitor. But I could see the fonts, make them as large as I wished, back light the pages (letting my wife sleep in peace).

Best of all, I was able, in a few frantic days of shopping, to load up my Paperwhite with sixty books, including dozens of those I had committed myself to rereading: The Education of Henry Adams (certainly among the finest of American books of any kind), all of Shakespeare's plays (free!), the mawkish novels of D.H. Lawrence (far worse than I remembered, but reading Geoffrey Dyer's odd bio of Lawrence made me curious enough to try Women in Love again), Thomas Hardy and Conrad (Nostromo), late Joyce and early Woolf. Proust for a pittance. St. Augustine's Confessions in the Sarah Ruden translation. And new books as well: Anthony Marra's extraordinary A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Pankaj Mishra's essential From the Ruins of Empire, Charles Rosen's Piano Notes, Jan Swafford's biography of Beethoven, a couple of books on the election of 2016, and much more. No matter where I am, there is a book for the occasion, so long as I remember to plug the thing in each night. It's supposed to hold two thousand books. I won't find out, but the notion of fitting all the books I'll read for the rest of my life on one hand-held device has a certain elegiac appeal.

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I wanted, in a handful of reports, to recommend a few books, fiction and nonfiction, that have occupied my time of late.  I hope you too, dear reader, can find something of interest in these volumes. I also hope to write short essays on some of my rereading as autumn slips into winter and there's a bit more time to look backwards.

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Arlie Russell Hochschild's award-winning Strangers in Their Own Land recounts Hochschild's travels among the Louisiana Tea Party, a book that kept reminding me of Gulliver's Travels, especially Book IV of that unforgettable misanthropic classic. It would be uncharitable to tar the nice, down-home folks Arlie sips coffee with as Yahoos, but, my goodness, what is any reasonably intelligent person to make of his fellow Americans when they sit on top of life-threatening benzene leaks, sinkholes caused by fracking, and inhale toxic air laced with arsenic and then blame not the polluters for the ruination of their sportsman's paradise but the EPA and Barack Obama? Hochschild has been praised for her open-mindedness, but I grew impatient with the author's tolerance of the hateful views of liberals, African-Americans, journalists, government workers, and the poor that tumbled from the mouths of ministers, housewives, oil workers, politicians, and businessmen. The willful refusal to acknowledge any social connection outside a narrow circle of racial, ethnic, and religious identity (and these right-wingers have the nerve to bellyache about liberals' fixation on "identity politics"!) negates any possibility of civil life, of true identity as a nation, or of human empathy. One character reported to Hochschild her anger at being "manipulated" into feeling sorry for starving African children by a reporter on public television--which, the woman explained, was why she watches Fox News and listens to Rush Limbaugh--those cesspits of rancor. I get the whole it's-an-objective-science-thing about sociology, but how Hochschild restrained herself from going insane is beyond me. She must be a wonderful woman, a model of self-restraint--not a liberal among conservatives but a vegetarian among cannibals. I'm pretty sure I was supposed to come away either having understood my fellow Americans who admire the likes of Bobby Jindal and Donald Trump or at least with a heightened tolerance of a point of view that is different from my own. Unfortunately this isn't what happened. We hear a lot about "understanding" the far-right these days, but any such efforts would make about as much sense as abolitionists trying to understand slave owners in the 1850's.

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Upon the news of her death, I reread (most of) Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. A few sections of the book seemed dated, but the core of it--the second chapter in particular--felt timely. Millet, writing late in the 1960's, managed to bring a wide range of historical, biological, social, and economic ideas to bear on the question of patriarchy. I remember how Camille Paglia trashed Millet (and Susan Sontag) in her Sexual Personae; I think Paglia, an intellectual exhibitionist at heart, might have used the word "whiny" to describe the founders of the Second Wave. But this slur was unfair when Paglia wrote in 1990 and even more unfair now. We no more live in a post-patriarchal age then in a post-racial age, and Millet has much to teach us still. Immediately after Millet I read Rebecca Solnit's broadside--Men Explain Things to Me. In view of Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, and our absurd President, Solnit was just the thing. The ugliest of our impulses merely disguise themselves as something else--overt racism became the "birther" movement; overt misogyny has become....well, overt misogyny.

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Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War is dry but essential reading for anyone who would make sense of what has happened to American worker's wages and life chances in the past fifty years. Gordon is a meticulous scholar, and once you get past the statistics, the details of the story of how American material life changed over the past century and a half are fascinating. What did Americans eat in 1870? What were the comparative advantages of rural life in 1900? What was the progress of electrification and sanitation in urban America in the 1910's? How many pairs of pants did a farmer own? How often did he bathe (not often)? Gordon handles the minutiae of ordinary life with the verve of Jacques Le Goff, my favorite of the annalists school of historians. Gordon's is a big book, and you come away feeling as if you've doubled your knowledge of almost every subject related to American life--marriage, working conditions, diet, furniture, waste disposal--you name it and Gordon explains it. And, most importantly, he demonstrates not only that American workers are worse off now than they were thirty years ago, but why.

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Jonathan Allen's and Amie Parnes's Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign shows how completely out of touch with ordinary Americans the Washington politcal establishment has become. As the title suggests, the Clinton campaign, despite the polling of Nate Cohen and the apologetics posted on the editorial pages of the Times and Post, never had a chance (the absurd Electoral College helped of course).  For example, despite employing twenty or so speechwriters, PR people, aides, and loyalists to draft her Democratic convention acceptance speech, the words themselves failed to deliver a convincing rationale for Mrs. Clinton's candidacy--infighting, arrogance, and myopia made it impossible for Clintonworld (as the authors call Clinton's hermetically- sealed bubble) to figure out what American voters wanted (and not merely what they wanted to hear). It's a sad book, not quite Euripides, but a tragic tale nonetheless. It has all the elements of tragedy: hubris of course, also fate, villainy, hamartiae, guilelessness, but also, like all tragedies, an outcome that sets the world out of joint. Tragedy, if it were merely personal, would  be akin to melodrama. Instead, the hero's fall is a sign of a social diminishing, of our own fall.

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[to be continue]


George Ovitt (10/15/17)