The Written Word

In a letter on reading and literature, Pope Francis observes:

Literature is often considered merely a form of entertainment, a “minor art” that need not belong to the education of future priests and their preparation for pastoral ministry. With few exceptions, literature is considered non-essential. I consider it important to insist that such an approach is unhealthy. It can lead to the serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of future priests, who will be deprived of that privileged access which literature grants to the very heart of human culture and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual.

While the Pope is focusing on the education of priests, much of what he says is relevant to everyone.

I have always considered literature to be one of the most important of the arts and of scholarly disciplines. This is not because I’m a writer, though the depths I found in reading are certainly a good part of why I became a writer.

I recall any number of moments from my youth – and from last week – when I read something that made me think about the world differently from the way I had before. A lot of works that have given me this awareness were fiction, but that sort of truth has also come from poetry and essays and some transcendent nonfiction.

It’s usually fiction that hits most deeply, though, and those deep moments do not come only from books deemed “great” by those that get to define the canon.

This is why I dislike it when writers refer to themselves as “professional liars.” Literature – and I use that term broadly – is about telling deeper truth as opposed to reciting facts. (I don’t think journalism should be just about reciting facts either, though it is a different way of using facts to get at the truth.)

Truth is always more than facts. When you try to reduce it to facts you miss the point, though perhaps not as much as you miss the point when you assert blatant lies as “truth.”

I resent the jokes about English majors as well, even though I wasn’t one of them. (I am proud to have an undergraduate degree in Plan II, which was the liberal arts honors program at the University of Texas, and even prouder of the fact that I didn’t, in fact, major in anything.) I took a lot of literature courses; they just weren’t all in the English department.

I think I learned more about literature in classics classes and maybe even in French classes, bad as I was at French, than in English classes. And also just by reading. I have been reading for so long that I do not even remember how I learned to do it, but I know that I could read before I started school.

I spent a summer in Guatemala studying Spanish. After I mastered enough of the language, I began to frequent bookstores. Eventually I read Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in its original Spanish. It was lyrical in a way that the very good translation of it was not, because Spanish is just enough different from English to tell things in a different way.

That book moved me greatly in both English and Spanish. It also remains one of those books that I cannot discuss well in either language. Samuel R. Delany’s Dahlgren affected me much the same way (though only in English). My reaction was not an intellectual one, though I am sure Chip’s writing process was, in fact, methodical and intellectual. Garcia Marquez’s may have been as well.

That someone can use words and language to create a work that hits me in my guts and emotions is always amazing to me, but it does happen.

Stories matter. Literature matters. And they matter on many different levels.

Now reading was not something most people on Earth did up until a few hundred years ago. Literature existed before that, of course, and some of it was even written down. However, much of it was oral – storytelling, poetry, plays.

Reading is much more private, even if we meet in book clubs and share our reactions.

And reading fiction is still considered elitist, apparently. Many people don’t do it, even consider it a chore. These days, it seems a lot of people are assuming reading will be replaced by screens and even – per Star Trek – by “holodecks” where we experience a story.

Certainly, given that reading and writing are not all that old in human history it is worth considering whether they will be surpassed or changed by technological changes. After all, the advent of writing changed the skills of reciting and memorization, which were vital ways of keeping stories and history alive. And the technologies of writing and publishing do keep changing.

I suspect that reading and writing – and by that I mean much more than the reading and writing we all do on screens all the time – will survive, though I am sure there will be adaptations. (No, I don’t think the “AI” will do the writing for us, though real AI might do its own.)

One reason that I think they will is precisely because both reading and writing are primarily solitary acts. That is, one spends time either reacting to words or putting them down, based on what one brings to the book or the project.

Audio, video, stage performance, even recitation – all those things are much more collaborative. The larger the production, the more collaboration.

Now that’s in no way a bad thing; it in fact can be a very good thing. I have sung in choirs and played in bands, and doing something as a group can be transcendent as well.

And given that humans are social beings and that developing the skill of working with others is incredibly important in everything from politics to science and technology – despite all the hero worship that focuses on one person – it is also something to be encouraged.

But I also think most of us need to spend time alone in our own minds (and, for that matter, in our own bodies), and both reading and writing give us that kind of space.

It helps us develop our own understanding. It helps us discover our own ethics. It gives us something to bring to the group, a perspective others might not have seen.

We’re going to continue to need books – whether published in print or electronically – and the ability to write.

I am currently reading Percival Everett’s James, which is his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. I’ll leave you with two thoughts from that book.

One, I’m having to read it slowly because in almost every chapter I hit a point where I understand on a deep and visceral level what it was like to be a human owned as property.

Secondly, a small stub of pencil and a few sheets of paper are vital elements in this story. James has to write about what he knows, to understand and to share.

I completely understand why.