Category Archives: Nonfiction

Thursday, April 20, 2006 · 7:47 pm

Subversive reading

I’m loving Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, and I’ll probably be posting about it quite a bit. If you love reading and love thinking about reading in a more theoretical and historical kind of way, you’ll love this book.

So we all know how reading can be subversive; Manguel talks about how totalitarian governments fear reading and readers. What intrigues me in the passage I’m now reading is the way he connects this subversion to silent reading, as opposed to reading out loud, which, back in much earlier times, was the norm. People would read everything out loud, usually to an audience or with a group of people also reading out loud (imagine the noise!). To describe this shift, he mentions the famous scene in St. Augustine’s Confessions where Augustine is amazed and puzzled at Ambrose’s silent reading. Reading that is done out loud is more subject to explanation and interpretation by someone else; it is more of a public act, more of a communal one: “Reading out loud with someone else in the room implied shared reading, deliberate or not,” Manguel says.

But silent reading allows more room for private thoughts:

The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal … and the text itself, protected from outsiders by its covers, became the reader’s own possession, the reader’s intimate knowledge, whether in the busy scriptorium, the market-place or the home.

This, as you might imagine, made people nervous. Silent reading leads to idleness and day-dreaming – and to heresy:

A book that can be read privately, reflected upon as the eye unravels the sense of the words, is no longer subject to immediate clarification or guidance, condemnation or censorship by a listener. Silent reading allows unwitnessed communication between the book and the reader, and the singular “refreshing of the mind,” in Augustine’s happy phrase.


Until silent reading became the norm, Manguel says, heresies were usually individual and small-scale. Silent reading, however, made it possible for heresies to spread and become large movements.

Here’s to silent reading! Here’s to heresy!

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Wednesday, April 19, 2006 · 7:49 pm

Sacred Reading

I’ve begun Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, and so far I like it. Manguel says some cool stuff about reading sacred texts:

In sacred texts, where every letter and the number of letters and their order were dictated by the godhead, full comprehension required not only the eyes but also the rest of the body: swaying to the cadence of the sentences and lifting to one’s lips the holy words, so that nothing of the divine could be lost in the reading. My grandmother read the Old Testament in this manner, mouthing the words and moving her body back and forth to the rhythm of her prayer.

The body gets involved in reading in the Islamic tradition too:

The legal scholar and theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali established a series of rules for studying the Koran in which reading and hearing the text read became part of the same holy act. Rule number five established that the reader must follow the text slowly and distinctly in order to reflect on
what he was reading. Rule number six was “for weeping …. If you do not weep naturally, then force yourself to weep”, since grief should be implicit in the apprehension of the sacred words.

Even if, like me, you aren’t a particularly religious person, you might also find this description moving. I think it’s interesting to consider words or the experience of reading as potentially sacred, even if one doesn’t believe in the sacredness of one particular text or doesn’t believe in a transcendent God. Maybe the act of reading itself can be a sacred thing — In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, etc., a form of communing with other people — rather than any particular text.

I also like the way he talks about reading as physical as well as mental, and as so complex, it involves the whole person. We usually think of reading as solely mental, not involving the body at all, beyond the obvious way the eyes and brain are involved, but Manguel writes about reading as an act that involves the whole person, thoughts, emotions, memories, and the body. It’s so hard not to think dualistically, about both reading and religious experiences – reading is seen as mental, not physical, worship can be seen, as it often is in Christianity (although not always), as solely spiritual, not physical. But it’s not so simple as that.

Here is Manguel’s take on a passage from Oliver Sacks:

Dr. Oliver Sacks argued that “speech – natural speech – does not consist of words alone …. It consists of utterance – an uttering-forth of one’s whole meaning with one’s whole being – the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition.” Much the same can be said of reading: following the text, the reader utters its meaning through a vastly entangled method of learned significances, social conventions, previous readings, personal experience and private taste …. In order to extract a message from that system of black and white signs, I first apprehend the system in an apparently erratic manner, through fickle eyes, and then reconstruct the code of signs through a connecting chain of processing neurons in my brain – a chain that varies according to the nature of the text I’m reading – and imbue that text with something – emotion, physical sentience, intuition, knowledge, soul – that depends on who I am and how I became who I am.

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Saturday, April 15, 2006 · 7:52 pm

An End to Suffering by Pankaj Mishra

I’ll write about my backpacking trip tomorrow (too tired at the moment), but for now, here’s a review of An End to Suffering I wrote before I left:

Pankaj Mishra’s book An End to Suffering has a lot of good things going for it, but ultimately I found it frustrating. I’m not saying it’s not worth reading, exactly; I don’t regret having read it, but I thought it has unfulfilled potential.

The basic idea of the book is to explore Buddhism from a number of angles: the history and teachings of the Buddha, the history of Buddhism in Asia, the European “discovery” of Buddhism in the 19th century, the response of western philosophers such as Nietzsche, the role of Buddhism in the contemporary world, and Mishra’s own discovery of and thoughts about the Buddha. The book moves back and forth among these approaches, and it moves around in time, considering early on the 19th-century response to the Buddha and only later giving an account of the Buddha’s life.

Mishra mixes the personal with the social, historical, and political. He gives a lot of details of his life in India and his later travels to England and America, and he discusses his changing ideas about the west and about his religious experiences. I find books that connect the personal to social and political issues can be deeply engaging: not just giving the dry facts about Buddhism (although those are good), but discussing what those facts mean to the author. I like to observe congenial minds making sense of information and ideas, and thinking through their implications, for the world and for the author.

But I’ve seen this sort of thing done better than it is here. One of my favorite books along these lines is Diana Eck’s Encountering God, where she considers similarities between Christianity and Hinduism, and writes about her own religious struggles along the way. I learned a lot about both religions, I found myself moved by Eck’s personal experience, and it helped me think through my own religious history. I’m always on the lookout for more books of this sort – in fact, if you know of any, please let me know!

Mishra does discuss his personal experience of Buddhism, but I got the sense that he hadn’t quite sorted out his feelings and ideas fully. This appears to be a story of his early dislike of India and fascination with the west – its explorers and philosophers – which changes over time into an appreciation of Buddhism as a viable response to the troubles of the western world. But this change is never really fleshed out, and, if this is the story he is trying to tell, it’s unconvincing. I’m not sure he’s resolved this tension between his relationship to east and west. What comes through most strongly is his admiration for all things western. Now, complicated feelings are potentially very interesting, but I want to see that the author has fully come to terms with them. Perhaps Mishra wrote the book too early in his life, before he has had time to make sense of his past.

Maybe it is a problem with the way he structures the narrative. His jumps in time end up confusing the arc of the story, so that what could be a clear narrative – about moving from a dislike of India and a fascination with the west to a more balanced view of both – becomes all jumbled up in the reader’s mind. For example, one of the first things he discusses is the “discovery” of Buddhism by 19th century European explorers, a very promising topic. But I don’t know why he writes about this first, and he never explains. In his telling of the story, he praises these explorers for their bravery, and he recognizes that they did harm too, participating in European colonialism, but the impression I get is that he is still fascinated by them almost in spite of himself and that he’s not really fully acknowledging their very mixed legacy.

At times his narrative jumps become hard to follow, and I found myself wondering again and again why he was writing about a particular topic at that moment. The book needs more framing, I think. I wanted to know where we were going and how we would get there. Or, if I couldn’t have that, I wanted to come to trust Mishra that he would take me somewhere worthwhile. I don’t HAVE to know exactly where a writer is headed, after all. I actually really like narratives that wander a bit. But I have to trust the writer, and I didn’t really trust Mishra.

So, read the book for some great information about Buddhism. It’s valuable for its discussion of Buddhism in the west. I didn’t need another book giving me the basic facts of the Buddha’s life and his teachings, as I’ve read those before, but this book offers more than that. But I think Mishra hasn’t quite gotten control of his own story yet.

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Monday, April 3, 2006 · 6:08 pm

Nickel and Dimed

I discussed Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed with my students today, and I’m not sure what to think of their responses. They picked up right away on the fact that her experience was very different from that of the low-wage workers she describes: that she knew she had money to fall back on if necessary, that she knew this was temporary, and that those facts would change the nature of what she went through. I think they are right there, although they weren’t acknowledging that Ehrenreich knew those things too.

What disturbed me a bit is that they were awfully quick to question whether Ehrenreich was telling the truth about her experiences and that they quickly began to question her motives. One student thought it was unfair to “use” the people she worked with in her book to make money. I have mixed feelings about that. As I wrote in my previous post, I have some misgivings about her attitude toward the people she describes. She seems to expect her class differences to stand out. But I also suspect that some of my students were looking for a way to discount the political message Ehrenreich is getting across. The students were much more eager to talk about Ehrenreich’s own position as worker and writer than about poverty. I’m happy to talk about Ehrenreich’s rhetorical stance in the book – it is an English class after all – but that conversation became a way to avoid the point she was trying to make. After all, Ehrenreich is trying to open up the often-hidden world of low-wage workers, and I don’t want them to get ignored in my class once again. We’re continuing our discussion of this book for a while; we’ll see how the rest of the time goes.

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