Walter Firle, [German artist; 1859-1929] “The Fairy Tale.”
Year after year, from early grades to the end of high school, I was the kid staring out the window, waiting for the bell. I did not make trouble—that would have required more effort and a greater urgency than I could muster. After finishing high school, I was a fairly clueless deer peering at distant university headlights, confused about what classes to take and what was the point of taking them. I chose courses rumored to be on the edge of extinction, in the dreaded “H” field –the humanities. This was not an ennobled decision driven by my deeply held convictions about the arts. I had never heard of Kant or Wordsworth or Jung. It was mostly because I did not understand math and could not navigate the sciences.
Outside of the high school Shakespeare/Gatsby/Lord of the Flies, I knew relatively little of “great books,” a fact that caused me virtually no distress. But then I stumbled headlong into the lecture halls and the teachers at the front of those rooms that would change my life. You could not find two apparently more different human beings than Allan Bloom and Northrop Frye. But there they were, in 1978, within a kilometer of each other at the University of Toronto, about to crash my world.
To call Professor Frye an expert in all things literary would be like praising Bobby Fischer for holding his own playing chess in the park. Shy and yet utterly authoritative, he seemed to know every work of every writer of every country of every century of every language that could possibly be accessed – a mind that could Google the depths of literature and literary theory.
He stood there, no notes, no slides or PowerPoints, and delivered, in a quiet voice, a range of references and woven subtleties that would make you physically dizzy, with a good deal of wit and not a trace of ego. I am quite positive that I did not know most of what he was talking about, but it was the first time I suspected—I absorbed it in my body and blood rather than understood it in my mind—that there were matters of gravitas, of sheer life and death, and that they could be found in books like the Bible and poets like William Blake and John Milton and Emily Dickinson.
Allan Bloom, who would later author The Closing of the American Mind, came off as brash and self-involved as Northrop Frye was introverted and humble. Balding, with a speech impediment and a slightly hunched gait, he presented in the first instance as a parody of an academic. But on the other side of that stutter, he was an unstoppable and stern force of mind, spitting charisma, a three-piece suited rock star riffing texts with a sneer and a brilliance that reminded me of my real heroes at the time, Dylan and Johnny Rotten. Professor Bloom strode the stage of the large lecture hall which could not really contain him, inhaling his big cigar, indifferent to the no-smoking sign looming above him. (Apparently a previous heart attack had given him pause - not to give up smoking, but cigarettes). He would ask large intimidating questions and pose philosophical problems and talk of great ideas effortlessly (and, of what he saw as bad ideas, acerbically).
With mixtures of passion and gentle contempt, amusement and dead seriousness, he would speak freely yet without pretension about “truth” and “morality” and “justice” as well as other terms that sounded vaguely dangerous like “eros” and “esoteric,” as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Isn’t everyone interested in the ideal state, in the quest for the real? I could not believe that anyone thought in this way about stuff like that. Plato and Machiavelli, of ancient Greece and medieval Florence, but from distant planets as far as I was concerned, were our guides to the extra-terrestrial landscape of political philosophy and the meaning of life.
So right there and then, shocked into being by both of these men, at eighteen going on nowhere, I began to learn how to read. True, I had managed that task the first time around at the age of five or so and, in childhood, the public library was certainly a refuge as I devoured adventure books and biographies for young readers. But now I learned to read again, learned what words—their sound, their sense, their echoes of other words, their enduring power—really could mean, in a book and in a life. I was, if not reborn, then certainly rebooted. What I figured out, in as much as I was capable, was that there was a world beneath the skull that could transport you as far as you were willing to ride, with enough effort and desire. I eventually finished my doctorate in English literature. A small note of absurdity - Professor Frye never received a Ph.D.
Today we live in a world which often values the image over the word, passive listening and viewing rather than active reading. It is a testimony to how our culture has privileged certain things that, if reading is not so important, then surely it can be interrupted. The novelist Ian McEwan offers a sobering comparison in this regard: “If someone were playing tennis you wouldn't walk onto the court and begin to have a conversion with them; likewise, I think reading is at least as important as a game of tennis.”
McEwan’s inference is that interrupting someone’s reading is seen as insignificant (the thought being you can always go back to your book). But disturbing a game of tennis is a severe breach of manners, a rude disruption in the sacred precincts of the court. This bizarre protocol flips what should be the order of things; people talk throughout funerals and prayer services, but speak at a tennis match and you will get roundly shushed.
As I wrote recently in the Jerusalem Post, “Our lack of esteem about the role of reading indicates a basic misunderstanding of how central a place that pastime plays in our lives. Whether it is perusing the speeches and rhetoric of politicians, to scanning the cultural landscape, to peering at the ingredients of a bottle, the art of reading, closely and accurately, is one of the most fundamental acts we engage in as human beings. And the actual reading of texts, especially ones that have been central in forming the attitudes among Jews for millennia, towards the reality around (and Above) them, is not only a journey of sacred importance, but of existential necessity.”
Read as though your life depended on it; at some point, it just may.
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Further Reading
Northrop Frye – The Great Code, 1981.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987.
Some years ago, as I began to have whiff of my mortality, I began actively to do triage on time, whatever time remained for me, unknown of course, but with a then distant view of the clubhouse, as I was well into the 'back nine.' Part of my approach meant jettisoning various time and labour intensive activities. I gave up playing golf, or rather playing at golf, and also stopped taking guitar lessons, from one of the master guitarists in the world, who played as a studio musician for Santana. With so much additional time, but never enough, I turned my attention to reading and studying various works. At this point, hurry as I might, and as ravenous as I am, I recall Rabbi Jonathan Sacks OBM's comment, that we all have a promised land we'll never reach! Wishing all continued success in this endeavour. Arn Rubenstein