Wednesday, April 20, 2016

On Finding Yourself Through Reading

The Problem Addressed:

Finding myself through reading has been a constant in my life and, recently, this contemplative practice has taken some interesting turns that I want to share.  For me, reading has always been a personal obsession, something I enjoy but also something that I feel driven to do as well.  The question for me has often been a balance between what do I want to read and what do I need or feel obligated to read.  The idea of needing to read something may seem odd to some of you, but for me it is about feeling prepared professionally and being the kind of model of the intellectual and contemplative--and informed--life that I what to exhibit to students, readers, and others.

Sometimes, this quest has led me down some strange alleys.  I have discovered over the years, for instance, that I sometimes read books because I feel I need to know them to continue to pursue a life as a responsible citizen.  Reading Dark Money: This Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right and Black Flags: The Rise of Isis have fallen into this category; both are excellent and highly-informative, but honestly not as necessary for me to read to inform my opinions as I originally felt they were.  I read them more for ammunition to support the positions I already knew I had and had thought long and hard to get.  A slight caveat to this observation was reading One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, in that this book darkened my views of American capitalism even more (I am a professed socialist) and its insidious impact and corrupting of American Christianity.  I must admit, I even lost a lot of respect for Billy Graham as a result for much of his early engagement with corporate America and overturning of much of the connection between Christianity and social justice modeled by that wonderful president FDR.  Sad, sad, sad...

Today, I realized in discussion that I have the tendency to read what others think I should read, perhaps far too often--this is a bad habit for a reader.  Many of the suppositions of what others think I should read are more my own inner voices than anyone's actual suggestion (I love discussing books and getting recommendations from friends I trust), but still carrying this burden which makes me always feel not caught up, not knowledgeable enough, is insidious.  For instance, a good friend of mine chided me once years ago for being a southerner who hates southern literature, and this friend is accurate.  In part, there are two reasons for this: one is that I am a West Virginian, which is not southern in the sense that we are a state that seceded from the secession, so we are really northern in that odd way.  Secondly, and more importantly, much Gothic southern literature (especially Flannery O'Connor) reminds me too much of growing up in rural Appalachia surrounded by lots of poverty, unemployment, and ignorance.  It seems a little too close to home; and being where I am (or was) is not really at the heart of why I read.  (I am not quite sure what is, however, but I know that this is not.)

I also tend to read about other areas of mild interest to me such as the American Civil War, in part because of my father's wonderful habit of taking me to historical sights when we traveled.  This was great for me growing up, as not only did it open me to a profound and abiding interest in history (my other major as an undergrad), but Dad also always treated me to a book that I could read about the place we had visited when I got home.  I still have many of those books, and remember the trips and sights as a result.  Because of the part of the country where we lived in as well as the areas we visited, the American Civil War was a presence, so I have spent a major portion of my reading on this sabbatical semester working my way through Shelby Foote's massive three-volume history of the American Civil War.  It is a wonderful book, by the way, and I admire his clarity, but I do sometimes think this is a holdover for me from feelings of inadequacy from arguments online about the American Civil War, slavery, and the confederate flag when I know full-well how I view these issues.  Frankly, at heart, America and American history just don't interest me that much, except when it was still part of the British empire.

I sometimes think too that as a scholar of British literature and culture living in America, I carry the burden of feeling out-of-touch when I do not read the literature of this country; I sometimes wonder if my colleagues in American literature feel the same guilt if they do not read the British literature that seems pressing at the moment.

The Tentative Solution (Clearing the Deck):

So my new goal is to stop the guilt, quit the pile-up, and clear the decks.  I am asking myself: What do I really want to read?  What will make me more insightful in my research and teaching?  What burdens from others (real or imaginary) do I carry and how can I cast them out?  I need to divest--divest of the doubt, the clutter, the game-playing.  At a literal level, this means clearing some of the stacks around my house where I pile books I feel I need to read (even if I do not really want to read them at heart).

Part of these feelings of inadequacy go back to the wonderful and heady days of graduate school, where there was always something new and interesting to read in your area of specialization.  Yet this had a darker side as well.  One lingering effect of writing my dissertation "Pious Readers, Polemical Fiction" under a director who had his own ideas about what I should be writing, is the "game" he played of "find the book."  In conference on the project, he would offer a critique of a portion of the dissertation that then turned out to be from a book he was reading or had read; I could not address the topic fully until I had found that book and absorbed its arguments.  More frustratingly, he would never tell me what book he was referencing; he would just say "think about it" (yet my thought was never graded adequate until I found and cited the book on his mind).  This game of his has created a sense of there always being something missing when I am writing academically;  In fact, when my research has been reviewed for publication, in both positive and negative reviews, I have seldom received the message that there was a key article or book that I had missed which I needed to consult to improve or finish the piece under consideration.  That is the message I need carry forward, and not the "find the book" game of yesteryear.

So, as of today, I am clearing the decks.  I have several things I want to read, and several things I know will help my research on the book I am writing on Susan Sontag, which has been progressing quite well.  I am going to quit feeling guilty for not getting to everything; I am going to re-energize myself by reading in my favorite period of literature and staying focused on the connections between the Enlightenment and Modernism in Britain and Europe.

One final anecdote that is helping me along: Jimmy Carter in the 1940s applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, a high honour, as he relates in his book A Full Life (I am listening to him read this book on CD in the car--excellent!).  It came down to an interview between him and one other candidate.  He was passed over for the scholarship because the other scholar told the Rhodes Scholars Board that he was really not interested in anything beyond the date of 1603, the death of Queen Elizabeth I! I understand why this man got the scholarship, as does Carter.  This is a model anecdote for me as I go forward with clearing and considering, moving confidently ahead as a reader, writer, and contemplative.

Cheers, readers, and much peace to all of you.