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COMMENTARY
May 30, 2007
You're fired
In some respects, Tom Wayne of Kansas City, Missouri, is a man after my own heart. He runs Prospero, a second-hand bookstore -- which means that he’d be among the first persons I’d visit if I ever passed through that town. He is in the news currently for burning off his warehouse stock, quite literally. Perhaps no one would have noticed had he not failed to get a municipal permit, before his first book-burning. He has assured the local authorities that he will get one before his next stock reduction, however.“There are nights when you can’t even give it away,” a young lady of uncertain moral disposition once told me. And there are days when second-hand booksellers -- perhaps the most useful persons after priests, in maintaining anything resembling a high civilization -- cannot give away what was once in steady and considerable demand. I wrote some months ago about one of Canada’s finest antiquarian booksellers (Paul Lockwood, Abelard Books), driven by escalating rent and diminishing sales from his downtown Toronto store, into the small spaces of his own home. A few Sundays ago, I discovered a huge cache of books he’d been unable to sell at two or three dollars, now spread on flea market tables and still not selling for one dollar apiece. The saddest part was looking at the original prices, which no one had had the energy to erase. Mr Wayne is subtle. For he has argued that “not reading a book is as good as burning it.” And the art of not-reading books (which requires little skill) is among our fastest-spreading. There are statistics to indicate that the proportion who read books “for pleasure” (what is that?) has shrunk from a high of perhaps two-thirds of the adult population, to less than one-third, over a couple of generations. But these statistics are generated by simply asking people whether they read books or not. To get the truth, you might want to divide both the high and low numbers in half. Marks and underlinings are among irritations to be found in “previously owned” volumes. Very rarely, they improve a book. This is when an educated and thoughtful reader has flagged key passages and appended interesting references and comments. But the standard of marginalia has also declined. In most cases, starting from the ballpoint pen era (and accelerating after the introduction of yellow “hi-liter”), the marks constitute a frank confession of boorish stupidity. And even those tend to dry up after the preface or introduction. So even books “read” are not read. My own definition of literacy is pitched ambitiously above the ability to construe a road sign. My test for an adolescent would be, to read an old-fashioned realist novel (with no pictures) right through, then intelligibly communicate a summary of its plot. For there is a certain interactive quality I am seeking, which I would also pitch above the ability to respond to the “not to be taken internally” notice on a bottle of Dettol. Even the ability to read passages aloud, from e.g. a prolix restaurant menu, strikes me as insufficiently enterprising. Of course, we could argue over which novels to assign. The best novelists tend to shake off the unworthy reader in the first thirty pages or so. This is necessary because they have a lot of characters and situations to introduce, if the body of the novel is to carry much freight. A good writer requires readers with sea legs, willing to broaden themselves spatially and temporally; who have become inured by constant reading to movement on the deck of the imagination. Prospects do not look good, in the state schools through which the “politically correct” cancer has metastasized. They graduate students who are unbelievably narrow; who have no concept of historical time. They can read, technically -- at least, many of them can -- but it is no use to them. For they are incapable of learning anything from what they read, of growing out of their childlike narcissism. They can assimilate nothing except slogans. The only thing they have is “high self-esteem.” Still, there are books even these people read, and they need burning. One thinks for instance of the book entitled, All I Really Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum, published two decades ago. It is a book of breathtaking banality, that exactly expresses not only the beliefs of its author, but those of his unlettered charges. Among the articles of Mr Fulghum’s credo: share everything; play fair; don’t hit people; say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody; hold hands and stick together; wash your hands before you eat. Or to paraphrase, life is just a huge playing field, in which everything that is good or beautiful or true, must be brought down to the level of the tiniest moral and intellectual toddler, and bureaucratically organized so that the feelings of this imbecile will never be hurt. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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