A Remedy for What Ails Us

Harry T. Cook

10/17/08

Reading a collection of the late Norman Mailer’s voluminous correspondence in a recent issue of The New Yorker, I came upon a line in which he fretted that “in 50 years . . . there may not be anyone alive who’s read all of [Proust’s] Remembrance of Things Past.” The letter was dated June 1966. Mailer’s worry expires in fewer than eight years. I wouldn’t be surprised if by then you would have to administer a polygraph test to anyone who claimed he had.

Truth told, I have never been able to finish that tome thought by many to be a classic. I bog down after a few bites of the much celebrated petit madeleine. Yet I ploughed the distance through War and Peace, though in much the same way that a bicyclist would struggle through a street awash in slush. I can truly say that in other days I read the entire Iliad and most of the Odyssey, though not infrequently with eyes swimming out of focus. My father gave me a set of the Harvard Classics fiction collection for Christmas 1957, and, over time, I have made my way through most of it. I must confess, though, that in trying not so long ago to chase down a turn of phrase I believed (incorrectly as it turned out) had been coined by Thackeray, I found a couple of uncut pages in my copy of Vanity Fair. I can balance that off by noting that I may be one of few people you know who at one time actually owned a copy of his History of Henry Esmond.

My serious reading days began during the McCarthy era, which was known for its shallow thinking and know-nothing-ism – a time not unlike our own. Following the advice of a favorite teacher, I began to read the classics. A firm believer in the Santayana principle that those who cannot or will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, he started me on Mark Twain, pointing out that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were anything but children’s books. He told me that I would learn at least as much American history from them as I would from reading the text assigned for his own history class. He was right. Later, at the same time as I was dealing more or less full time with adolescent hormones, I came under the influence of another mentor who introduced me to Charles Dickens (beyond A Christmas Carol), Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Sinclair Lewis, W. Somerset Maugham and Alan Paton in no discernable order of importance. I filled myself with that new-to-me substance and came away a changed person – more serious and interested in big ideas. College and graduate school years brought on Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, William of Ockham, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Marx and Engels. None of it was easy reading. Much of it seemed tedious at the time. But it was like being surrounded by majesty and greatness, sometimes dazzling even when I could not quite comprehend the ideas or follow the arguments. What that regimen of reading did for me was to lengthen and deepen my attention span, which in those days was pretty short. It introduced me to the concept of the long, broad thought that defies compression into what would come to be known as a sound bite.

All of that recollected experience, a lá Proust, makes the 2008 presidential election campaign seem to me exceptionally barren of substance and fraught as well with McCarthy-like ad hominem assault and denigration. Few broad, long thoughts are being considered, much less uttered. Few longish books are being read to establish cultural and historical contexts for the momentous decision about to be made. Far too little reflection is spent upon the remembrance of things past that might be a guide to securing our national future. It’s too late now to pick up Proust or Tolstoy for more than a mere ceremonial scan.

Resist the temptation to consult the CliffsNotes. Not the point. Total immersion in the imagination and thought processes of great thinkers and writers is what is wanted, and that cannot be attained apart from a vast re-ordering of common habits and routines. Thus for the next 17 days, we will be captive to every wink of Sarah Palin’s eye, every bizarre locution of John McCain, every barbarous gaffe of Joe Biden and every attempt by Barack Obama not to be the philosopher of constitutional law that he is, but a guy who would pass up arugula for a Big Mac and drop his g’s when talking with the boys at the bowling alley. When all this has passed, every voting-age American should join a Great Books club, do the reading and thereby acquire a background sufficiently broad and deep as to be a solid basis for critical decision making. Ignorance is the handmaiden of fear and resentment. Making any kind of decision having long-term implications on the basis of fear or resentment is a dangerous business, even as the re-election of George W. Bush four years ago so amply proves.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.