Tyger Tyger Burning Bright

The Risk of Reading

August 1, 2004
By MARK EDMUNDSON
nytimes.com

Now American culture can get singularly weird when it's
time to say a good word for reading. Think of the
television public-service ad that depicts Shaquille O'Neal
goofily chasing down the last page of a novel (Shaq reads?
Sure.) or the one depicting a circle of kids being read to
by Keith Van Horn, then with the New Jersey Nets, decked
out in a ''Cat in the Hat'' stovepipe. Devising footage
that makes reading look more ridiculous wouldn't be all
that easy to do.

Now, in the wake of a National Endowment for the Arts
report that says -- to no one's surprise -- that interest
in literature is falling drastically, reading is getting
some more thoughtful defense. But the terms of the defense
still leave me wondering. I feel a little as if I'm sitting
around with a bunch of boxing aficionados praising Muhammad
Ali: one goes on about his jump-roping ability; another,
about how well he does his road work; a third gets
rhapsodic about his dietary discipline. O.K., O.K., I get
it. But all that doesn't quite go to the heart of the
matter, does it?

So it is with reading. Reading, you hear, is necessary to
maintain democracy. It can produce informed citizens.
Right, but couldn't public radio do the same thing? We hear
that reading conveys knowledge; it delivers the bounty of
the past to the present. Again, good, but in terms of pure
rote knowledge, couldn't film and verbal delivery work
nearly as well?

Reading is indeed nearly boundless in its promise. It can
effect changes for the greatest good. But it is worth
bearing in mind that reading's promise is tied up with some
danger, too.

To me, the best way to think about reading is as life's
grand second chance. All of us grow up once: we pass
through a process of socialization. We learn about right
and wrong and good and bad from our parents, then from our
teachers or religious guides. Gradually, we are instilled
with the common sense that conservative writers like Edmund
Burke and Samuel Johnson thought of as a great collective
work. To them, common sense is infused with all that has
been learned over time through trial and error, human
frustration, sorrow and joy. In fact, a well-socialized
being is something like a work of art.

Yet for many people, the process of socialization doesn't
quite work. The values they acquire from all the
well-meaning authorities don't fit them. And it is these
people who often become obsessed readers. They don't read
for information, and they don't read for beautiful escape.
No, they read to remake themselves. They read to be
socialized again, not into the ways of their city or
village this time but into another world with different
values. Such people want to revise, or even to displace,
the influence their parents have had on them. They want to
adopt values they perceive to be higher or perhaps just
better suited to their natures.

When Walt Whitman picked up the work of his older
contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was a carpenter,
framing two- and three-room houses in Brooklyn. He had been
a journalist; he had written some mediocre fiction -- he
looked to be someone who would never amount to much. After
reading the great essays, Whitman purportedly said: ''I was
simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a
boil.''

Whitman had been reared to be modest and self-effacing. But
Emerson offered him a new image of authority. He was, for a
while, Whitman's second father. Obviously it takes more
than reading a book to create a Walt Whitman. But the act
of reading Emerson was still at the center of what is
probably the most marvelous transformation in the history
of literature.

Similar things happen in the lives of everyday individuals
all the time. I remember very well what it was like when,
at 17, I read ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X.'' Malcolm
had spent time in Boston, not far from where I lived, and
he had something to say about our common territory. He gave
me a sense of how bitter and brutal it could be to be a
black man right there in Massachusetts. There was a low-key
race war on between white and black at my high school, and
because of Malcolm, I began to try seeing it from the black
point of view. I got into trouble, which was sometimes more
than just verbal trouble, with my white buddies. And not
every black kid in the school was pleased to see a white
guy with his nose in Malcolm X.

Words are potent. Ten years after the fact, people often
can't remember a grievous pain: ''Was it the right leg or
the left that I broke?'' But a decade on, they'll remember
every word and tonal twist of a painful insult. (Robert
Frost once suggested that poems should have the force and
intensity of rich insults.)

There is no doubt that the force of reading, the power of
words, is not always a force for good. The abominable
Marquis de Sade influenced many consequential writers in
the 19th and 20th centuries. Often, you can only imagine,
he made what was cruel in their hearts yet crueler.

Overall, though, the effects of reading major authors are
almost always good ones. It is virtually impossible to be a
consequential literary artist without infusing your work
with sympathy. This understanding dates at least as far
back as Homer, who makes it a point to depict the Trojans
nearly as humanely as he does his fellow Greeks. One of the
most moving scenes in ''The Iliad,'' drastically edited in
the recent film, ''Troy,'' comes when Hector, fully
armored, reaches to embrace his baby son before going into
battle. The boy is terrified of the bronzed giant in front
of him and cries out. With the greatest tenderness, Hector
removes his helmet with its vast horsehair plume. Then he
takes hold of his son to say goodbye.


Mark Edmundson is the Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching
Professor at the University of Virginia. His new book,
''Why Read?,'' will be published next month.