Can your mind, which has been conditioned by society, the culture in which you have lived, be transformed through education so that you will never under any circumstances enter the stream of society? Is it possible to educate you differently? `Educate’ in the real sense of that word; not to transmit from the teachers to the students some information about mathematics or history or geography, but in the very instruction of these subjects to bring about a change in your mind. Which means that you have to be extraordinarily critical. You have to learn never to accept anything which you yourself do not see clearly, never to repeat what another has said.
Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Make love.
Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice. Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same. Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love. Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick. Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived. Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness. Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you. Charles Warnke It's not for the reasons I recite to my students.
Reading will increase your vocabulary, I tell them, without you even realizing it. Reading will make you more informed and more aware of the world around you. Reading builds neurons and synapses and actually increases your brain power. Reading will enhance your knowledge and your understanding of the world, and will give you something to talk about at parties. This, in turn, will make you sound more intelligent and less egocentric and will help you get laid. Reading will make you a better writer. And being a good writer, I tell them, will help you get better grades in all of your subjects. Later, reading will make you stand out from the hundreds of others applying for the same job you want, and will increase your likelihood of getting that job. Reading, I tell them, by virtue of making you more intelligent and more aware and informed, and a better writer and communicator, will help you, after you get that job you want, to be promoted faster and to climb the ladder of success more quickly than your nonreading colleagues. Being a reader, I tell them, will help you make more money. The person who can read but doesn't, I tell them, quoting Mark Twain—because Twain might be the only writer they have all heard of, even if they haven't read anything of his since grammar school—has no advantage over the person who can't read. In other words, I tell them, if you can read but don't, you might as well be illiterate. That's something they can chew on for a while. I don't bother to tell them that reading will sensitize them to the human condition, because they haven't lived long enough to know what is meant by the human condition. Plus, they all believe that they are plenty sensitive already, and that in their whopping 19 or 20 years, they have already amassed an entire universe of sensitivity. Each of them believes he or she may be the most sensitive person alive. There are other things I don't tell them because, if I did, they would sit there at their desks and stare up at me bewildered, or they would look at each other and roll their eyes, or they would just gaze into the middle distance and tune me out. I don't tell them, for example, that reading a good novel, like watching a good movie, takes me to places I have never been and might never go. Although watching a movie—say, The English Patient—does allow me to experience the harsh beauty of the North African desert or the hushed tragedy of the Villa San Girolamo hospital room, it does so in only two dimensions, and so keeps me outside of those places, a spectator looking at a flat picture that moves. Reading Michael Ondaatje's novel, on the other hand, puts me into that world, allows me to feel the desert's desiccating heat, the sand fleas and gritty sand in my socks; sucks the moisture from my tongue and nostrils, stings my eyeballs, and sears the soles of my feet. Reading drops me down into the hospital room where Almásy lies bandaged, grotesquely burned. Reading fills my nose and mouth with the putrefying scent of decaying flesh. It puts me so close to beautiful Hana's tears that I can very nearly reach out and wipe them from her cheek. Reading, I do not tell my students, will startle their senses alive again by throwing open the world when their small, cluttered rooms have grown tight and stale. Reading will lay a hand on their shoulders when they are homesick, or when their hearts have been broken, or when that C-minus seems like the greatest tragedy in the world. Reading, I do not tell them, because they would not believe me, can keep you from cutting yourself, can keep you from suffocating in the quicksand of your self-absorbed despair. Reading, I do not tell them, can turn on the lights in your darkness, can help you see yourself more clearly, can help you find yourself when you are lost. Reading, I do not tell them, because this is something that cannot be taught but must be learned, can make you feel like not one lone cell stranded in the desolation of the world, but one of eight billion cells conjoined by the world, all hearts echoing the others in the song of one enormous heart. I do not tell them that being a human is a lonely, lonely business and that only a couple of things can assuage that loneliness. Loving someone is the best remedy, I do not tell them. Making music is good medicine too. And so is reading, another form of love—an act of faith and trust and desire, an act of reaching out and of coming together. My job is not to ease their loneliness. My job is to give them the skills to help them land a job. So I tell them what I know will keep them from staring at me in bewilderment, will keep them from rolling their eyes or gazing at the wall. Being a reader can help you get laid, I tell them. Being a reader can help you make more money. Some of them will listen. A few will take heed. And every once in a while, one of them will come striding toward me, with a light in her eyes that has never shone before, and a look on her face of inexpressible surprise, to tell me, "Professor! I read the most fantastic book last night!" And I will know that she, this one out of many, is on her way now to learning all of the rest. |
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