Lit Up Page 8

  I was restless, hungry for information, and several times during the day I would rush from one site to another, from the Times website to the Washington Post website, from Talking Points Memo (liberal politics) to RealClearPolitics (conservative politics), from the New Yorker website to the online magazine Slate. I scanned Metsblog for news of my strong-armed, hitless team. I looked at pieces on music and movies; I constantly consulted Wikipedia and IMDb (Internet Movie Database) and sports sites. I read long articles on literature, politics, and economics, too, but if I really wanted to hold on to them, I would have to read them slowly, in hard copy. When I later thought back on what I had read online, the text was a sliding, unstable mass. I couldn’t remember a lot of it. I read it too quickly and jumped ahead, and the experience, taking it as a whole, was a flirtation with everything and nothing at the same time. And yet, the activity satisfied in some way. My anxiety has been relieved. I had been informed.

  The Internet informs, informs, informs; connects, connects, connects; but I could say from my own experience that it also dissolves deep concentration, maybe even dissolves the self, whereas reading something in depth patches it back together again. As you read in depth, you’re in touch with the large movements of history, commerce, art. You listen to an artist who speaks to you intimately in her own voice and transfigures the street, the office, war, individual lives, common dreams, and outrageous fantasies, re-creating the language as she re-creates the world and mind. You move outward and inward at the same time, drilling into yourself, matching your own acts against those of men and women in fiction, in history, in sports, in science, anywhere. After that, the book settles into your unconscious; it affects you without your knowing exactly how.

  Reading on the Internet—the new, jumpy, waterbug-on-the-pond style of reading—was beginning to interest neuroscientists. It was something we were doing to ourselves, a way of possibly messing with the neurons and synapses that made cognition work. Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid (2007), a study of the evolution of “the reading brain,” has done a lot of experimental work with children. In her book, Wolf has expressed her fears that “those children who have cut their teeth on relatively effortless Internet access may not yet know how to think for themselves. Their sights are narrowed to what they see and hear quickly and easily, and they have too little reason to think outside our newest, most sophisticated boxes.” More recently, she speculated that small children who spend their time reading on screens may never be able to settle down into “deep reading”—the kind of sustained immersion in a text that yields the greatest pleasure and learning. “Reading is a bridge to thought,” she told the New Yorker in 2014 (July 16). “And it’s that process that I think is the real endangered aspect of reading. In the young, what happens to the formation of the complete reading circuitry? Will it be short-circuited and have less time to develop the deep-reading processes?” When they need to read seriously later, she fears, the circuits just won’t be there. She needed, she admitted, to do “longitudinal” studies—to test children’s reading over a long period of time. But her fear was alarming enough, since it raised the specter that incessant online reading in childhood could be a kind of lead-paint or asbestos poisoning.

  Wolf was also troubled by the way adults were reading, and she gave her own experience as an example. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of emails, she told the Washington Post (April 6, 2014), she sat down one evening to read Herman Hesse’s late novel The Glass Bead Game. “I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movement to generate the most movement at high speed. I was so disgusted with myself.” She didn’t give up, though. “I put everything aside. I said to myself, ‘I have to do this.’ It was really hard the second night. It was really hard the third night. It took me two weeks, but by the end of the second week I had pretty much recovered myself so I could enjoy and finish the book. I wanted to enjoy this form of reading again.… I found my ability to slow down, savor, and think.”

  Wolf sounds like someone recovering from illness or alcoholism. One wants to cheer her on as she retrains herself to read. But what about kids? “We can’t turn back,” she concluded. “We should be simultaneously reading to children from books, give them books, help them learn the slower mode, and at the same time increasing their immersion into the technological, digital age.” In other words, we have to teach children to read books, but also teach them to read on the screen. We have to teach them how to monitor themselves and control their wandering impulses.

  Well, good luck with that. My own experience is clear enough: In a chair, on an airplane, in bed late at night, I am alone with a book; I can read it, close it, think about it, toss it. When reading online, I’m constantly tempted to read email, check the stock market; I’m tempted to find out how much a used 2009 Accura or a new sponge-mop costs. An Italian red, a Barolo called Palás, which I drank once and loved, costs eighty dollars a bottle. Really, is it that much? Habitually, I jump. And kids are less patient than grown-ups. To get them to stop hurtling away as they read, you would have to confine them to computers without Internet access; or, more severely, mesmerize their attention, perhaps pin open their eyes and manacle their hands, doing to them what was done to Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Short of doing that, they will jump away and possibly, as the research suggests, retain little of what they consume. What they read online doesn’t imprint.

  Mr. Leon, I realized, was trying to plant new circuitry, though he certainly didn’t put it that way. After the digital fast, and the question of false happiness, he made the students read a speech from Mustapha Mond, chief ideological spokesman for Huxley’s World State. Mond forbids the publication of a brilliant scientific paper on the ground that it might lead people to think that “the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.” Well, here were the words of the Devil, absolute evil for Sean Leon. He was definitely in favor of “intensification and refining of consciousness.” For the students, he was in effect posing the old question: Was it better to eat the apple or not? Even if knowledge makes us miserable, wasn’t it better than blissful stupidity? After all, why would anyone want to live in any place as boring as Eden? Or in Huxley’s mock Eden? Consciousness, something ruled out of the question by the controllers of the World State, was exactly what Sean Leon was trying to liberate in his students.

  “Why does Huxley write this way?” Mr. Leon asked, referring to Mustapha Mond’s prohibition of consciousness. “Identify four more passages that connect to this one.”

  They flipped open their copies of the novel, which by now were festooned, as Mr. Leon required, with yellow, purple, and aqua Post-its marking key pages. Again I thought that the books looked like some rare species of bird with too many feathers to get off the ground. But if the books remained stationary, the class took off. If they hadn’t really gotten Huxley’s novel at first, they had it now. One by one, they found passages in which the World State ideologues insist that every form of consciousness and knowledge threatens happiness, and they found scenes in which John, the Othello-quoting man from the Savage Reservation, speaks up for emotion, sensibility, intellect, even pain, and at a certain point Mr. Leon withdrew, sitting quietly in the back of the room as the conversation raged on.

  * * *

  At the end of class, everyone left, including Sean Leon, and I was alone in the sanctum, now quiet except for the half-muffled sound of shouts and greetings and the occasional squeal of rubber on linoleum as someone raced down the corridor. School music. What had Mr. Leon’s digital fast established? I had given up my apocalyptic tremors. Still, many of the students, with their digital needs and satisfactions, were as much enfolded in pleasures as Huxley’s sated citizens of th
e World State. Was that bad? Only a prig would deny students enjoyment, and Mr. Leon, however severe at times, was no prig. It was the amount of time they spent in social media and the rest that bothered him, and its mediocrity as an experience. As we saw in the poetry session, and as I was beginning to learn by talking to them, they had troubles, they could suffer, they had souls. Yet Mr. Leon implied that the students were in “chains,” to use Rousseau’s word that he placed on the board at the beginning of the year. He loved literature, he wanted students to love it, and he believed in the character-forming experience of reading difficult books. He wanted to strike the leg irons, open the links; he was out to make a new boy, a new girl. He wanted to get them to talk to one another, not to text one another. He demanded conversation rather than networking.

  I roamed around the empty room and stood for a while at the front at Mr. Leon’s place—where he stood before he began moving around. What was the soul, anyway? The question was an embarrassment for anyone but musicians, clergymen, and newspaper columnists. On social media, kids could develop a way of presenting themselves, even a way of branding themselves. They understood marketing, and they could become mini-celebrities in which every little thing that happened to them was of immense importance. But in this online world, the soul—dear God! The idea itself felt quaint, the term odd, outdated, vague. People now spoke of attentiveness, information, persona; they spoke of skills.

  “Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. “Man has a soul, though you can’t locate it either in his purse or his pocketbook or his heart or his stomach or in his head. The wholeness of man is his soul.… The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it.”

  But no one talked that way anymore. No one talked like Lawrence. His insistence on the wholeness of experience was magnificent, but, worldly and practical as we are, we might put it this way: much of soulful life comes from parents, the culture and neighborhood in which you were raised, the friends and enemies you make, the work you care about, the God you worship; the soul emerges from the satisfactions you enjoy, the pains and losses you suffer, the hobbies you love, the music you listen to, the plays and movies and TV you watch, and—largely unknown to urban kids—the nature that makes you whole. You go through everything, match yourself against everything, and, after trying on many selves as a young person, something like an identity takes hold as a sum total of experience. The experienced self yields a soul. Education in the largest sense creates social beings, citizens, and also a soulful life, and reading has to be a big part of the slow-moving, slow-gathering process. At the end, reading something immersive and commanding, even losing yourself in it if you were lucky, falling into a book as if nothing else in life mattered, reading it at a lunch counter, in the subway, in bed, listening to it in the car—that was the time when you fell into happiness and reasserted your identity. If you don’t read books, and if you don’t get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

  Standing in the empty room, I knew that when the room was full, I wouldn’t say any of this to the students. It wasn’t my job. But it was Mr. Leon’s job, and they were listening.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BEACON, DECEMBER AND JANUARY: ORWELL

  “Politics and the English Language”

  Compare and Contrast

  The Ethics of Being a Student

  1984

  Where Are the Women?

  The Proles

  Why Read Grim Books?

  “This may be the most important essay you will ever read in school.”

  So Mr. Leon began. He had handed out to the class copies of “Politics and the English Language,” the famous diatribe against vagueness, abstraction, and “humbug” that George Orwell published in 1946, just after the end of the greatest of all European wars. The piece was a response to a specific abuse of language—the clangorous propaganda that the adherents of fascism, communism, and democracy employed to marshal their fighting forces and citizenly morale. After the war, the piece survived its original impetus and was read as pungent general complaint against bad English prose. “Politics and the English Language” was familiar to thousands from freshman comp courses in college. But did it still make sense to teach it, and to teach it to a tenth-grade English class?

  Thinking of the many political hacks he had heard in the thirties and forties, Orwell recalls “the curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.” But not just political hacks were given to the zombie style. Educated people in general were addicted to pretentious and lazy diction (“it is a not unjustifiable assumption that…”) that served as a retreat from the difficulty of saying what they meant. “Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” And Orwell made a simple translation of good into terrible prose, a translation that the late David Foster Wallace, in a 1999 essay, “Authority and American Usage,” justly called “famous.” I would actually call the translation immortal, the single most devastating criticism of style ever composed. Familiar as it may be, I have to quote it. First Orwell summoned a magnificent passage from Ecclesiastes (9:11, King James Version):

  I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

  And then he translated it into standard educated English:

  Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

  If any of us could understand—really understand—what that translation meant, we would hear a command in our heads—“Don’t be a fool”—that would make it impossible to write a certain kind of terrible sentence. Along with Strunk & White’s slim volume The Elements of Style (1959), and William K. Zinsser’s On Writing Well (1976), Orwell’s coruscating article was probably the most widely known of the many doomed efforts to get English-speaking people to blow the sawdust and stuffing out of their prose.

  In recent years “Politics and the English Language” has been criticized as naïve and misleading. Orwell believed that if people made themselves write simply and clearly, they would find it harder to lie. But we could all think of liars and political nihilists who wrote and spoke plainly. As Louis Menand put it in a New Yorker piece (January 27, 2003), “Short words with Anglo-Saxon roots have no relation to truth or goodness.” And, in his usage piece, David Foster Wallace pointed out that the title “Politics and the English Language” was redundant, since issues of usage and grammar are always enmeshed in politics. The powerful impose their usage on the less powerful. In his own account, Wallace once ran into angry protests from African American college students when he told them that they had to write standard English, not Black English, if they wanted to succeed in the world of “power and prestige.” Standard Written English was what Martin Luther King Jr.used, and what Barack Obama and Henry Louis Gates now use, and it’s the “dialect” in which black “judges and politicians and journalists and doctors and teachers” communicate. Wallace’s own needs were clear. Despite the circus-car exhilaration of his prose—clauses popping out of sentences, line after exfoliated line of hyper-adumbration, elaboration, qualification—the hipster David Foster Wallace was as devoted to standard syntax as a mandarin writer like Gore Vidal.

  Orwell’s essay might be vulnerable, but it’s still blunt and funny, and for Mr. Leon i
t was gospel. “This is important, folks. Not just in 1946. For people in totalitarian and Third World countries, language is very powerful. It’s relevant to our country, too, because many of us sitting in front of TV have been hoodwinked.” He went after Barack Obama’s campaign speeches in the 2008 election. “What do ‘hope’ and ‘change’ really mean? How do we hold Obama accountable for hope? Many people voted for him because he said ‘Yes we can.’ Why? He made them feel good about the possibilities of the future.”

  Mr. Leon then challenged the students to find a published example of the crimes against language that Orwell wrote about, and, a few days later, they came back with slogans from Occupy Wall Street, the noisy street protest that was then roiling Lower Manhattan—“People Not Profits” and “Billionaires Your Time Is Up!” and “Wall Street Is Our Street.” Not as bad as Orwell’s hack political phrases from the thirties and forties—“bestial atrocities” and “stand shoulder to shoulder”—but bad enough. Mr. Leon was forcing the students to go beyond instinctive sympathies. Most of them, I guessed, came from liberal families, and they may well have agreed with the emotions expressed by the Wall Street protest, but he was asking them to find the dross and cant in sentiments they approved of. “You can get people riled up about one thing and it can be used for another issue,” he said. “Obama is perpetuating the same trick as Republicans are. We fall into orthodoxy so quickly. When the times are bad, language suffers.” And, inevitably, he turned Orwell’s analysis against their own media habits. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” Orwell had written, and now Sean Leon said, “The way your generation is texting and instant-messaging, you could say your thoughts become degraded and that, in turn, makes it easier to have degraded thoughts.” He was after them again.