What is reading if one doesn’t keep an account of it? Ah, yes, the wonderful New Year’s resolution to grab those titles, to pin them down with a scribble of writing, to squeeze out some quotes and drop them here, to say, look! I’m reading!
First, well, I haven’t been reading, I've been listening… Audiobooks is all I have time for when writing an academic chef-d’oeuvre, so, I present to you, the things listened to…
Most recently: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. (Here I imagine a spray of confetti. I don’t know why.) Lovely book, lots of characters, tidy end, and this one quote in which, I feel, McBride might be saying “this is the moral of my story”, but who knows. I like it because it gestures toward History.
(From Chapter 18) The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway [...] as the group trumped forward, a rag-tag assortment of travellers moving 15 feet as if it were 15 thousand miles, slow travellers all, arrivals from different lands making the low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or Aroo [sp?], West-African tribesmen, herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them, Isaac, Nate and the rest, into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn't quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history, boiled down to a series of ten-second tv commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of Red, White and Blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troop, moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one days scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled.
I also like hot dogs.
Next, finished just last year, Transcendant Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. I wanted to pause here to praise the narrator, Bahni Turpin, and thank goodness for a quick Google search… I see she’s been praised a bunch, so we’re going to move on. Still, uh, I’m tempted to add that the narration here might have made this book more fun to listen to than to read… On with the quotes.
This, from Chapter 8, is a cool analogy of what research feels like.
Mrs Pasternak said something else that year that I never forgot. She said, "The truth is, we don't know what we don't know. We don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millenia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That's science. But that's also everything else, isn't it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions."
Asking a ton of questions has never been a problem for me. I should be an interviewer. Actually, I think that conversation is different though… it’s not about asking a ton of questions, it’s more about what questions are asked. It can make a conversation boring or interesting, and maybe that’s the fun of it.
Onward!
This quote, from Chapter 40 makes me think of Brad S. Gregory’s book, The Unintended Reformation (I read it a year ago now, and made a summary here).
This is something I would never say in a lecture, or a presentation, or, God forbid, a paper, but at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses, become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith. And I have been educated around scientists and lay people alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.
But, back to non-controversial topics, the following quote is a touching reflection on the problem of drug-addiction and the people affected by it. It’s from Chapter 42.
And that's what so many people want to get at: the cause of the drug use, the reason people pick up substances in the first place. Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like "will" and "choice" and they end by saying, "don't you think there's more to it than the brain?" They're skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they're really saying is that they may have partied in highschool and college but look at them now, look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they've made. They want reassurances, they want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough, that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives. I understand this impulse. I too have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of my self. I don't want to be dismissed the way Nana was once dismissed. I know that it's easier to say "their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs," easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure that everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me. And when I do so, I give in to the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It's just that I'm standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain, is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead, see him as he was, in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It's true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think; "what a pity, what a waste." But the waste was my own. The waste was what I missed out on, whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction.
Recently, on our Jamaica trip, my mother-in-law looked over at me and asked what kind of book I was reading. (It was a holiday, and so contrary to the whole “I’m only listening to audiobooks” spiel above, I had a physical book in my hands.) When I told her it was fiction, she smiled and said she preferred non-fiction.
I do too!
Most of the time!
But the above quote? That’s why there’s fiction!
Do you know why else there’s fiction? For long heartbreaking passages, like the following one, from Small Island by Andrea Levy. I wanted something to read carelessly, at the beach or sheltering from the rain, or bored-to-smiles in an airplane, but mostly, I wanted something about Jamaica. Small Island is full of snappy sentences, funny and bright with imagery. Set in 1948, it describes character’s stories as they live through the war. The long passage is the following:
See me now - a small boy, dressed in a uniform of navy blue, a white shirt, a tie, short trousers and long white socks. I am standing up in my classroom; the bright sunlight through the shutters draws lines across the room. My classmates, my teacher all look to me, waiting. My chest is puffed like a major on parade, chin high, arms low. Hear me now - a loud clear voice that pronounces every p and q and all the letters in between. I begin to recite the canals of England: the Bridgewater canal, the Manchester-to-Liverpool canal, the Grand Trunk canal used by the china firms of Stoke-on-Trent. I could have been telling you of the railways, the roadways, the ports or the docks. I might have been exclaiming on the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster - her two chambers, the Commons and the Lords. If I was given a date I could stand even taller to tell you some of the greatest laws that were debated and passed there. And not just me. Ask any of us West Indian RAF volunteers - ask any of us colony troops where in Britain are ships built, where is cotton woven, steel forged, cars made, jam boiled, cups shaped, lace knotted, glass blown, tin mined, whisky distilled? Ask. Then sit back and learn your lesson.
Now see this. An English soldier, a Tommy called Tommy Atkins. Skin as pale as soap, hair slicked with oil and shinier than his books. See him sitting in a pub sipping a glass of warming rum and rolling a cigarette from a tin. Ask him, "Tommy, tell me nah, where is Jamaica?"
And hear him reply, "Well, dunno. Africa, ain't it?"
See that woman in a green cotton frock standing by her kitchen table with two children looking up at her with lip-licking anticipation. Look how carefully she spoons the rationed sugar into the cups of chocolate drink. Ask her what she knows of Jamaica. "Jam- where? What did you say it was called again. Jam- what?"
And here is Lady Havealot, living in her big house with her ancestors' pictures crowding the walls. See her having a coffee morning with her friends. Ask her to tell you about the people of Jamaica. Does she see that small boy standing tall in a classroom where sunlight draws lines across the room, speaking of England - of canals, of Parliament and the greatest laws ever passed? Or might she, with some authority, from a friend she knew or a book she'd read, tell you of savages, jungles and swinging through trees?
It was inconceivable that we Jamaicans, we West Indians, we members of the British Empire would not fly to the Mother Country's defence when there was a threat. But, tell me, if Jamaica was in trouble, is there any major, any general, any sergeant who would have been able to find that dear island? Give me a map, let me see if Tommy Atkins or Lady Havealot can point to Jamaica. Let us watch them turning the page round, screwing up their eyes to look, turning it over to see if perhaps the region was lost on the back, before shrugging defeat. But give me that map, blindfold me, spin me round three times and I, dizzy and dazed, would still place my finger squarely on the Mother Country. (p 117-9)
Blindfold me, spin me round and my hands will find a book. Hooray for books! Listening to this “Writers and Company” episode, you can hear in the first half the absence of books growing up for one writer, the disdain for the plentiful-ness of books everywhere for another…
But this is long enough and the subject of books is inexhaustible. So here, I’ll take a bow, gather my bookmarks and be off. May you enjoy your reading wherever you are.