It seems there’s been a bit of an uptick lately in musings on either side of the internet-is-destroying-our-attention-spans vs. internet-is-changing-our-consciousness-for-the-better debate.
I don’t know which point of view has the right of it, even if I do think I read a lot of edifying and interesting things on the ‘tubes. But what I do know is that, once upon a time, I loved to read books so much that I got myself into trouble for goofing off reading at least once a day.
I got in trouble for reading when I was supposed to be doing homework, cleaning my room, listening to my teacher, studying for church, anything. It made my 5th grade teacher so mad, all that reading stories all the time, she forbade me from picking up a book that wasn’t a textbook or assigned all year, even during recess and lunch when she said I ought to be playing with the other kids. Since I spent more time with books than people in the 5th grade, that was exactly the kind of disaster you can imagine it was likely to be.
It would have ticked of my 5th grade self so much if I’d known I was going to even get to go to college where you’re supposed to read all the time and then practically stop touching books from then on. Oh sure, you know, maybe a couple novels a year, a few non-fiction books for reference (and you don’t necessarily read those through like a novel, anyway,) magazines for planes and trains, that sort of thing.
But no more reading books like a chain smoker, barely finishing one before picking up another one and lighting in. No.
So anyhow, I’ve been reading more books lately to correct this terrible situation. Below the fold, I’m including favorite excerpts from recent reads that I haven’t already loaned out to someone else.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston:
Times and scenes like that put Janie to thinking about the inside state of her marriage. Time came when she fought back with her tongue as best she could, but it didn’t do her any good. It just made Joe do more. He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it.
So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush. The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor. It was there to shake hands whenever company came to visit, but it never went back inside the bedroom again. So she put something in there to represent the spirit like a Virgin Mary image in a church. The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in. It was a place where she went and laid down when she was sleepy and tired.
… Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of [Joe] tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over. in a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let [Joe] know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.
I just finished Hurston’s book this morning and I could go on about how much I liked it, but that doesn’t mean as much as to say that it was so real that it was like reading the inside story of my own divorce and past romantic misadventures, like the story of finding that all the things I was told to want were hardly worth having and being glad to finally know it. It was that good.
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer:
The restaurant was devoid of everything except a guy–the maitre d’–who was sitting with his head in his hands. I was not surprised by this. Jobs in some parts of the world involve nothing more than a commitment to turning up and doing nothing for eight or nine hours. When your shift is over you go home and do nothing there as well. If your job is outdoors, then employment becomes indistinguishable from loitering. if your job involves being indoors, then it is often indistinguishable from the most abject despair.
Dyer is a travel author, so his job involves going all over the world, running into new people and mostly losing track of them, which he writes about in this series of autobiographical short stories. I’m only about half through reading it, but that passage there was on the page I opened it up to in the store that made me take it home.
I’d love to be able to add a passage or two from “Lake Shore Limited,” by Sue Miller, “Wishful Drinking,” by Carrie Fisher, or “Wench,” by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, but as I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve already loaned those out again so I can only tell you that they were wicked interesting and I recommend them heartily.
So instead of that, I’ll close with a passage from a book I read a while ago. It’s not exactly a favorite, as such, but most illuminating.
The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli:
Where a fear of God is lacking, the state must either fail or be sustained by a fear of the ruler which may substitute for the lack of religion. But since rulers live only a short while, such a state must vanish as soon as the abilities that sustained it have vanished. Hence it follows that states which rest solely upon a man’s abilities are of short duration and pass from the scene when his abilities are no more; and it seldom happens that they are renewed in his successor. As Dante wisely says:
Seldom does human probity ascend
From branch to branch; and this He wills, who gives it,
That being sought from Him, it may descend.
Therefore, the welfare of a republic or kingdom does not lie in its having a prince who governs it prudently while he lives, but rather in having one who organizes it in such a way that it may endure after his death. And though it is easier to persuade rude men to accept a new order or new opinions, this does not mean that it is impossible to do the same with cultivated men and with those who think they are not rude.
The people of Florence do not think they are ignorant or rude, yet Girolamo Savonarola convinced them that he conversed with God. I would rather withhold judgement as to whether this was true or not, for one must speak respectfully of so great a man. But I will certainly say that multitudes believed him without ever having seen anything extraordinary to compel their believing it. His manner of life, his teachings, and the matters he dealt with were enough to win their confidence. No one should therefore fear that he cannot accomplish what others have accomplished, for, as I said in the preface, men are born, live, and die in quite the same way as they always have.
… The rulers of republics or kingdoms must therefore seek to preserve the principles of their religion. Having done this, they will find it an easy matter to keep the state devout, obedient, and united. They should seek to favor and strengthen every circumstance that tends to enhance religion, even if they themselves judge it to be false. The wiser they are about natural reality, the more they should do this. Because wise men adhered to this rule, faith in miracles took root even among the false religions, for these wise ones sought to promote them, whatever their source and lent them their authority so that they came to be believed by everyone.
Between Machiavelli and the Godfather movies, a person can acquire a good aesthetic for a political education; it’s all spelled out. Though if you don’t want to read The Prince, even after that, you can always check out The Onion‘s brief interpretation of this classic work, “Area Applebee’s a Hotbed of Machiavellian Political Maneuvering.”