Walking the Wall

Harold Bloom asked an essential question in the title of his book, How to Read and Why. It is the “and why” that is the most compelling because understanding why we read makes an impact on all the questions about the canon, about what to teach in the universities, about what to read. Ultimately, Bloom sums up, “we read…in order to strengthen the self,” and early in his book he looses the point and removes social implications from the act of reading (22). This is not to say that people are not strengthened by reading, that the reader does not learn and grow at an individual level from the act of reading—but reading, while acted out in a solitary manner, is not a solitary action. In a book completely removed from issues of literature, Rob Bell writes:

[There are] moments when all the ways that we divide ourselves and rank each other and convince ourselves of how different, better, and unalike we are disappear, and we are faced with the fact that first and foremost, we are humans. In this together. And not that much different from each other. (26)

While these moments happen in many aspects of life, there is no question that these moments happen between the pages of a book. Reading (and, conversely, the act of writing) is essentially a dialogue about the human condition taking place between humans. A white, rural, small town American mother reads Beloved and connects to the horror another mother faces in a world she has never known. A young man in college who has never held a gun reads The Things They Carried and connects to the horror and the heroics of war. A young girl reads Incantation and sees her own struggle for identity in that of a sixteen year old Jewish girl in 16th century Spain. Connection to the human condition–to what it means to be essentially human.

Gates, in his book on culture wars entitled Loose Canons, insists that it is not so difficult a task to connect with other cultures, he writes: “There is no tolerance without respect—and no respect without knowledge. Any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully posses another culture” (xv).  Agreeing that a reader can fully posses other cultures and experiences, it still leaves the question of “why should we”. Why should the white American mother connect with the black slave mother of Beloved? Why should the college students connect with the horrors and heroics of the Vietnam war? Why should the young girl connect with the inner struggles of a 16th century Jewish girl?

I think we should read because it does connect us to what it means to be human, it shows us that despite the color of skin, despite the culture, despite the economics, despite the gender, despite the time period–we are all human and we have something to say and we have something to learn from each other. Reading is a dialogue about humanity, it shows us the best and the worst of what it means to be human and it continually asks us to question our assumptions about each other.

Note: I am working on a paper about cultural literacy and issues of the changing canon, questions about what we should read and why we should read, and what and who should be taught in our schools. This was sort of my attempt at prewriting, get the juices flowing, get the words on paper.