"There's too much music everywhere. It's horrible stuff, the most noise conveying the least information. Kids today are violent because they have no inner life; they have no inner life because they have no thoughts; they have no thoughts because they know no words; they know no words because they never speak; and they never speak because the music's too loud."
Quentin Crisp
Summer of 1998: My Goal
" Illi mors gravis incubat, qui notus nimis omnibus, ignotus moritur sibi."*
Seneca*Death lies heavily on the man who, too well known to others, dies a stranger to himself.
My life as a writer and thinker never much coincided with my life as a student. It is not that I did not learn many important skills and lessons in the classroom because I did. It is just that rarely did what was most important to me intersect with what we were studying in school. Let me be more specific. My high school English teacher urged me to take the rigorous AP English class when I was in my junior year. A serious athlete with workouts before and after school, I went with the easier class so as to cut down on my homework load. A UCLA professor once urged me to enter a paper into an undergraduate writing contest. More interested in seducing the pretty coed in the front row of the lecture hall, I let the opportunity pass me by. I never was much for letting school get in the way of my education. Almost all my formal schooling was in history, political science, and international relations - next to none of it in literature; and I passed easily my English teacher qualification tests due only to a kind father who read Yeats' poetry to us at the dinner table and would buy me any book I wanted, no questions asked - an arrangement which resulted in many book purchases over the years.
I did learn grammar and spelling in elementary school, and was pushed greatly in high school by certain stern old lady who taught English literature and would flunk me if I did not give her my absolute best effort. How I enjoyed the contest of writing her essays! But I am a Protestant at heart when it comes to reading, preferring no priestly intermediaries between me and the Word. Such it was in the beginning, so it is today. As writers, we all need mentors and cheerleaders. But teachers of writing? As someone who has pretended to that title, I have been humbled. The terror of sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper with pen in hand is not something that can be made easier by someone else. Writing is not a group activity, and I strongly suspect it is no more possible to teach someone how to write than it is to teach them how to think. Nobody ever "taught" me how to write, but there is a little of every author I ever enjoyed in my prose.
My experience in "teaching" writing so far has been less than satisfactory. I have always been a voracious reader, and it still nonpluses me to hear a student tell me they don't like to read. You announce a period of time in class for free reading, and the students moan as if it were a punishment. Despite hours of teaching topic sentences, paragraph organization, and countless hours of editing drafts of student essay, the writing is not close to what it could be; and I am tired of the science or religion or the math teacher complaining about the poor writing of students! It is eminently demoralizing! I wonder if the momentum we have built up in the last two and half centuries of progress in the written word is at risk of being destroyed by the deafening, omnipresent roar of the "white noise" of television and a mass media more concerned with the titillation of images than the search for truth or meaning. Aristotle began his Metaphysics by claiming that "all men by nature desire to know"; television is threatening to replace that noble maxim with "all men desire to be entertained." We become conditioned to sit back passively and be entertained by stimulating images, loud music, skeptical story-lines, and adrenaline-pumping violent action.
School? Books? The written word? I wonder if we English teachers today in America are not the most forsaken of creatures; the path of least resistance to me would seem to move full-time to teaching History, supposedly the least favorite of academic subjects to students today. What should I do? Not only are students often nearly illiterate, but even many of my fellow "teachers" find it difficult to pass basic instructor qualification tests! I could do some other job.
Am I an American? Can I be a serious reader, in the private sense, and yet still be fully an American? Without a doubt 99.9% of what I see in the popular American culture of sports, movies, and rock music interests me not at all. I sometimes pause to scratch my head and scour my brain to see if I have not missed something basic when I reflect how much money, attention, and fame revolves around puffed-up actors, models, sports figures, and television "personalities" in the cult of Hollywood celebrity where it is more important to cut a fine figure than to achieve anything of lasting value. "You're not anybody in America if you're not on TV," goes a particularly mordant line in a recent movie said by a vapid television newswoman. "What's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching?" As if you don't see it in the media, it didn't happen and/or lacks importance! What rubbish! It seems to be just the opposite with me: I threw my television out the window in a fit of frustration many years ago and have lived without a TV ever since. The older I get, the fewer are the brawls in practical politics which actively engage my imagination. I read more and more of the newspapers and weeklies every year and it takes me less and less time. I read two or three books at a time, but rarely anything written less than 50 years ago. Does this leave me "disengaged"? Am I still a full-fledged American? Am I not disqualified to teach contemporary American teenagers, growing up as they are in the digital age of images and technology? What should I do?
I write maybe a few hundred words every day and have done so for the last seven or eight years. That for me is a writer: someone who writes every day, an individual who processes experience through the medium of words and records it as such. It matters to me not at all if a person writes well or not, been published or not. They write every day and they are a writer. Period. But I have never gotten on well with the community of writers in my own country: I would rather swallow my teeth than go to a poetry reading; I would rather kiss a gorilla than join a book reading club. I look at the various gladiator bloodletting among rival cliques in the literary community and wonder if the savagery of their infighting is made only more vicious because it means nothing to anybody outside of the chattering classes of literary New York and San Francisco! I read the latest university English journal and marvel at the barbarous prose of trendy academic jargon, so divorced from real life and the central concerns of the human heart. It is as if we were back in the Medieval Age of Scholasticism, with a few anointed priests writing to and for a handful of other cloistered clerics over minor issues of abstruse theological disputation which only they understand! They "deconstruct text" rather than read books, and then they insult their readers by playing clever literary games rather than telling stories which are worth anybody's precious time to read. It frankly astounds me that persons aspiring to the honorable title of "author" would disrespect their readers so!
I apologize if I begin to sound like something I am not: a curmudgeon. But I mention all this to underline the fact that my life as a reader and writer is and has always been irreducibly solitary. My brothers line the walls of my library, and the evening when I relax with an old friend in the form of a musty leather-bound book is by far the time of day when I am most vibrant and alive. I nearly gasped when I first read the following advice from William Penn to his children about how to read:
"Have but few Books, but let them be well chosen and well read, whether of Religious or Civil Subjects... reading many Books is but a taking off the Mind too much from Meditation. Reading your selves and Nature, in the Dealings and Conduct of Men, is the truest human wisdom. The Spirit of a Man knows the Things of Man, and more true Knowledge comes by Meditation and just Reflection than by Reading; for much Reading is an Oppression of the Mind, and extinguishes the natural Candle; which is the Reason of so many senseless Scholars in the World."Penn's advice is now posted on the wall above my desk, and in the future I hope to pare my reading down to only the most vital core: the Bible, Montaigne, Plato, Milton, Shakespeare, Emerson. I hope to read and write less, reflect and think more. Or rather, I hope to read and write at a higher level through better reflection and thought. I truly believe the mind and soul, like the muscles of the body, can be improved through constant and disciplined exertion in an effort focused on their improvement. We shall see.
We read not only for pleasure but for instruction. By reading, we discover our world, our history, and ourselves; and by writing we hammer out the impressions which skitter across our cerebral cortexes into some fashion of the truth, as we have best come to understand it through our flawed and frail human faculties. I hope thusly to distinguish more clearly the truth through the forest of illusions and doubts that presently surround me. I hope to understand myself and my world better - even if this leaves me an imperfect teacher of today's youth. Let this then be my goal for this summer of 1998.
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