Peggy Noonan is my favorite chef journaliste. Through thick and thin she always will be. Somehow she can dish up contentious issues, even conservative crabs, in a ladylike, almost poetic way, easy on the hot sauce, spreading aromatic oil on troubled waters, emulsifying crustaceans and brine into heavy hollandaise sauce, altogether satiating, sometimes exciting. She goes down my fragile octogenarian gullet smoothly. A whiplashing Ann Coulter she is not.
The title of a recent column of hers, (link) “Politics of The Shallows,” seemed to offer food for thought.
Into the pot, a commodious pot, she had stirred the familiar fixins -- our malnourished and stunted citizenry, rendered thus by pigging out on the multi-media’s vitamin-free toxic froth now served up almost exclusively on screens, shallower and shallower screens, approaching, as led by Apple, paper-thinness. To that familiar broth she added the seasonal catch, i.e., the two current presidential candidates, of opposite species but equally fishy.
For this column she was assisted by a guest chef, Nicholas Carr, author of the book The Shallows, from which she took the title, and flavor, of her column. His is but the latest to flay all the non-book media starting with the camera obscura, I’ll bet. His harpoon is aimed at the web. Easy haul, for it's naught but shallows. Carr’s carping about the web reminds me of Minnow’s (serendipitous seafood trope there) lament as FCC chairman in 1961 that TV had become naught but a vast wasteland.
Sensing that her soupe du jour is just too watery and needs something to thicken it, Peggy tosses into her pot a wad of those dear old good-for-whatever-ails you metaphoric greens, or spinach when I was a kid, kale now, I suppose, -- those proverbial exhortations to read! Read newspapers? What about the Wall Street Journal, Peggy's own venue and sustentation? No, Peggy says, Read BOOKS! Books-books-books! Read many, many books! Read many, many books deeply. Read more books…many…deeply.
Familiar slivers of canned bleached curly kale, those exhortations to READ books. Is that all there is? Where's the beef! But seriously, my dear chef Peggy, such slim pickings call for a curmudgeonly feedback, herein presented. A quick comment along with the 715 others published with her column would do. But I’d rather serve up my own dish and play with my food, so to speak. If it turns into a foodfight, -- pie-in-the-face would be more fun than a kale poultice on the nose. Please indulge an old man in his second childhood messing with his literary food and getting it all over his face and highchair. I apologize in advance.
I'm not demeaning books. I love books, of course. I've always been hungry for books, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and between meals. You have to crave books if you go to medical school, as I did.
As evidence for the power of books, they are powerful studio props that lend an intellectual ambiance. Behold that familiar Fox News set with the Kincaid reproductions on the wall, floor lamp with old-time lampshade, and – here it comes! -- the single Ikea bookcase with five plain but serviceable turquoise buckram-bound probably blank-page volumes taking up half of one shelf, always those same volumes, never touched or moved, serving as the backdrop for today's guest’s in-depth soliloquy. Without the volumes carefully positioned just behind him or her the profundity and authority of the speaker is forfeited. Might as well have an animated UFO cycling in the background.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, there in the scholar's cloister or the family farm, a book was not just a prop but everyday heavy duty food, as fundamental to existence as an iPhone now. Abraham Lincoln as an impoverished boy split rails to earn money for, of all things, a book (nowadays, comic books), and walked miles just to get his hands on one, he glutted on books, and the Gettysburg Address came from it. And owning a whole library was the strongest sign of accomplishment, noblesse, and intellectuality, not just posturing. Thomas Jefferson famously prized his, fondled and read and probably reread every volume, had his slaves dust them, and the Declaration of Independence came from it. Better, not just token book case but a whole library of books. A Victorian 2-story walnut-paneled library, every varnished mahogany shelf crammed with identically-sized and identically-bound elegantly hand-tooled heavy volumes, dusty, never touched.
Ah-h-h-h... The lovely smell of good paper and the tactile delight of fine bindings, the sniffing and fingering of which evokes a beatific smile upon the face of a book-lover akin to the mystic smile of a mother gazing upon her newborn, distinguishing a true intellectual, gentleperson, and scholar.
May I timidly submit that one odorless and hardly palpable iPad uploaded with a couple of hundred eBooks replaces a whole sprawling library and its smells? Yours truly, truly old and in search of the least exhausting ways to live, has pitched his lifetime accumulation of several thousand paper and hardbacks for eBooks. If it ever comes to moving to an Assisted Care Unit, in that one dreary room I shall have in my hand the equivalent of Thomas Jefferson's famously massive library.
OK, we both revere books, Peggy. But, Peggy, -- I trust you won’t think this a niggling question -- what books should we read?
Peggy's answer is to read the BOOK, don’t just watch the movie. Oh, that book, the novel the movie was taken from, the scanning of which imparts a deeper understanding of the human condition than hearing the same printed dialog actually spoken by expertly directed, repeatedly rehearsed award-winning human actors, that book?
Sorry, that’s all Noonan’s net netted. If she doesn’t list any books, the New York Times famously does – the NYT best-seller list, top-ten shallow list, I’d say. It’s what everybody is reading in anticipation of the movie. Or just check William O'Reilly's Killing list, which eventually will kill just about everybody of any consequence. With lists that shallow, maybe yours truly needs to compile one. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, I refer you back to the mother of all such lists, recognized as the automatic admission to the literati. That's the the University of Chicago’s once glorious "One Hundred Greatest Books of Western Civilization." Created in 1929 (year of my birth) by Morton Adler, a celebrity philosopher, and Robert Hutchins, the precocious celebrity president of the U. Chicago, the archetypal liberal arts university whence was to come a President Obama, that list was the crown and culmination of the bookish “movement” at US Universities that started at Harvard in 1909, and to this day at least 100 obscure wannabe Harvards are still spawning such lists. Just check Google.
And I remember the phonies of the 1930s in “Popular Mechanics” ads (I had a subscription). Every month, after skipping the article on the latest airplane-car chimera, I'd head for the ads. Right next to the Charles Atlas ad ("I was a 95# weakling"), there it was, the ad for the lavishly gilded volumes of great books. You could buy one a month forever, $1.50 each. I yearned for one at least, just to fondle, and dust. Maybe Santa will bring me 4 or 5! Sigh, Santa brought me a pony instead.
I look back at the titles included in any of the hundreds of "The Hundred Greatest Books of Western Civilization" lists. A substantial majority are Novels: always Mark Twain, a couple of Russians, Faulkner and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. For most of the lists Updike hadn’t been born yet. Plus the mandatory dose of Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, et al, and Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (the latter a favorite of Adler, who was Jewish), sometimes Voltaire and Whitman, throw in Thoreau. As a theorist more than a scientist, Darwin is allotted a class all his own. Other scientists, even Einstein (who, if the compilers had bothered to sit down and read him, is quite witty and wise), aren’t considered as foundational of civilization as novelists or Darwin, apparently.
I’ve noted that Gilgamesh and Genesis, as examples of equally credible allegories, have sometimes made it, also Matthew as the record of the beatitudes, token maxims from the mouth of a memorable teacher, but never the book of John, where Christ proclaims His divinity unequivocally. Moses? Didn't make the list. Marx? Not included. Now that's incredible. But remember, if you can, that the list was compiled long ago, when Marx was out of favor in this nation of capitalists, even in academia. I’ve also looked closely for Paul (St. Paul), to me and not a few theologians surely one of history's greatest thinkers. Not there.
What constitutes a Great book is as moot as what constitutes kitsch. More sensitive (to me more kitschy) updated lists such as those favored by spiritually oriented ladies book clubs, include Buddha, Confucius, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Patanjali (Yoga), Muhammad and the Koran, and, say, The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami. Moses, Paul, or Hemingway no way. In Hemingway's case, even a Nobel Prize for literature didn't save him from the bookburning. If who makes it to "Greatest Books" is moot even when a list is current, the honor is fleeting and subject to instant revision.
Likewise the market for such lists. In it's heyday the mother of all lists of "Great books" achieved effulgent critical but shallow financial success even in academia. So Adler and company moved on to the Encyclopedia Britannica, in those days a big door-to-door seller, along with Fuller Brushes. In the 1930s and 40s that's where the money and the consumer wives were. In the 1960s wives, among them mine, were at supermarkets standing in checkout lines snatching up the National Enquirer, as well as all 11 volumes of Will Durant's the whole of Story of Civilization at a buck or two each. Having of course glanced at the Enquirer, my wife would grab a cheaply bound 3"-thick volume of Civilization and pitched it into her shopping cart along with the milk and cantaloupe, soon accumulating all 11. We both read every word of every page of every volume. Too bad Abe Lincoln lived before door-to-door or checkout lines.
But the Greatest Books lists, Adler's lists and Durant's volumes, all of them, have quietly receded into deep past and away from front doors and checkout stands, and are forgotten by all but octogenarians and nostalgia freaks and obscure universities that silently grant them their due while loudly touting gender studies. Only Google remembers them. Through Google we have greater and quicker access to the lists of "Great Books" than housewives did answering the doorbell. Google, the one resource Noonan decries as the fount, yea the fire hose, of all shallowness. I’m older, but maybe less inflexible, than Peggy, and I see Google as Silicon Valley's genie and magic lantern and instant cornucopia of books, any books, lists of books. I couldn’t write my deep stuff, like this response to Peggy, without Google, in one second filling my screen with what I couldn’t find at a library in a month of research. I'm sure Abe would have clicked Google unrelentingly, on his iPhone. I’ll bet Peggy sneaks a Google search now and then. Ironically, alas, "great books" are at the bottom of Google's list of top clicks.
I've been a studious reader for 70 or 80 years, and found it a cornucopia of stuff I came to see as not worth my time. Who makes it to my personal list of Great books is as moot as who makes it to Adler's list, if not Craig's list. As a youth I went through a phase of reading fiction, of course. I liked Hemingway, maybe because it was redolent of the KJV biblical cadence (naturally he was later expunged from sensitive reading lists). I liked Updike (I also liked his essays, but learned about them later in life). I confess I even read -- this will date me -- Jung's Fear of Flying, and was amused by the wit but disconcerted by the bad taste it left in my mouth. Didn't care for Faulkner (too shallow, even as fiction). Upon moving from our house in Ohio and my floor-to-ceiling shelves lining 3 walls of my 1.5 story library, I consigned the lot, plus all 11 Durant volumes, to 1-800-Got-Junk?'s dumpsters, slimming my library and swelling landfills and threatening the planet. And bought an eBook. Fingerprints on the screen, not dust, is the problem.
A little older, I read or scanned my share of philosophers, Plato most heavily if not deeply, accepting him as indeed the foundation of Western civilization, certainly contemporary Western culture, liberal arts colleges, Great Books, best sellers, checkout stand tabloids, eBooks and all. Speaking of a great philosophical-whimsical Plato read, you should check my own (link:) philosophizing on Plato, in the form of a park bench dialog, formatted thus in homage to Plato’s dialogs. But seriously, folks, if philosophy is your thing I’d recommend Peanuts (by Charles Schulz) over Plato.
A lot older, and having dutifully pursued that hoary old prescript to go read and read, read greedily and recklessly, I am left besotted, light-headed and dyspeptic, and wiser, so wise I am empowered, yea obligated, to dish out my own dose of physic. Yes, Peggy, do read, read a lot, and read deeply, -- but not randomly, not just any book. Be careful, very careful, what you read. It isn’t how much you read, it’s what you read, not just to keep from going shallow but to keep from falling into the pit. Nowadays everybody knows that everything is toxic -- everything but what we read. I contend reading can be as toxic as asbestos gaskets. Using a screen metaphor, I contend that reading the wrong book -- watch out Fear of Flying, only a child's book of filth compared to the new tsunami of f-ng new stuff that would have been banned in Sodom -- is like clicking the wrong thing on the screen and being taken over by malware, worse yet, ransomware. Or dipping into a bouillabaisse laced with cilantro.
So now, as I promised at the beginning, for my own reading list. I call it "The Careful Old Adventist’s Great Book List." It includes, according to the Great Books list that prevailed centuries before Adler, the One Greatest Book Ever Written, the Bible (especially the New Testament, especially John, and I definitely would include Paul and Isaiah and his hills clapping their hands. Also included would be White, E. G. (prime pick, Steps to Christ), the books and essays of C.S. Lewis (skip the sci-pious-fiction), and throw in columns by Peggy Noonan. And Peanuts.
So I've taken over the job of exhortation from Peggy. Let me add to Peggy's plea to just go read a book: Go write a book! If passive watching can't rev up your brain as much as active reading does, isn't actively writing an even stronger brain boost? Noonan the great column writer obviously thinks so. Read...read....WRITE!
But I'm as concerned as much with your just sitting by the hour as with which books are keeping you chair bound. As an old doc I must warn you that sitting too long, whether reading the right stuff or writing it, is bad for you. Drop that book, or keyboard – I’m talking to Peggy and myself as well as you, -- and go exercise, any kind of exercise. Just exercise. Exercise deeply. It’s better for your spine and eyes and for keeping blood clots out of your leg veins, maybe better against Alzheimer’s, the truly dreaded shallows. You'll be in better shape to read whatever.
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
