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- Poor literature. No one reads it anyone more — and more importantly: no one cares to read it. Culturally, we no longer feel guilty about avoiding books — we no longer need to hide it. The era of awesome/sorta-high-brow TV (or whatever) is justification enough: we’re getting all the cultural calories we need.
- Literature isn’t memoirs or self-help; it’s not middle-brow novels: it’s a transfusion of life back into life; its the deep and the dark and the otherwise forgotten and also beautiful parts of life that we ignore for the sake of simplicity and repetitive predictability. Literature for me, too, means memories; some of my happiest moments. War & Peace by the fire-place at my parents’ house last winter, Hamlet in my high school English classroom, Wittgenstein in my college library, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch in a car on the way to a debate tournament, and so on. Thousands of books, each with a memory: a location in time and space. Thousands of books: each of which taught me something. And it’s that — that network of associations, shared ideas, resonances, syntactical formations — which I think of as literature. Deep learning, deep yearning.
- “Language is the only homeland.” Czesław Miłosz.
- There’s enough leisure in America — no matter your economic level (I really believe this) — to read; we don’t live in a hunter-gatherer society; we don’t have to walk hours to get water. Books are a cheap, universal, democratic, radical tool: and we choose not to learn them; not really. At best, we pretend to.
