The Art Of Living

The Art of Living
By Epictetus, A New Interpretation by Sharon Lebell
Harper San Francisco, $11.95 paper
ISBN 0-06-251346-X

“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not.”Epictetus

Epictetus is the Stoic for the common man. He expresses his ideas in clear, focused language without artifice or rhetorical trickery. Sharon Lebell, writing a “new interpretation” of his work, focuses on the message and renders Epictetus’ meaning in similarly clear and present English. The result is an excellent book of short passages on how to live a good and moral life.

There are many books to explain philosophical schools of thought like Stoicism. Epictetus had little use for such theoretical discussions. His teaching is down to earth, directly accessible to the man on the street, and easily applicable to everyday living. This holds true with his ancient words even today.

According to Sharon Lebell, Epictetus concerned himself with two questions: “How do I live a happy, fulfilling life? How can I be a good person?” This is the “single-minded passion of Epictetus,” one of the three greatest Stoic philosophers. (The other two are Marcus Aurelius and Seneca.)

Epictetus did not start out his life with the respect afforded a popular philosopher. His beginnings were as a slave in A.D. 55 at the eastern end of the Roman Empire. In her introduction, Lebell says that he demonstrated a superior intellect from an early age, impressing his master, Epaphroditus. He became a student of Musonius Rufus, a famous Stoic teacher who favored equal education for women, something unheard of in the society of that time. Epictetus went on to teach in Rome until the emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from the city. He moved to Nicopolis on the coast of Greece and lived out his life in exile. “There he established a philosophical school,” Lebell writes, “and spent his days delivering lectures on how to live with greater dignity and tranquility.” Flavius Arrian, an historian and one of his students, copied down his lectures for the ages.

Marcus Aurelius was also one of his students. He wrote of his first teacher in his book, Meditations. What did Epictetus teach him? “To put up with discomfort and not make demands. To do my own work, mind my own business, and have no time for slanderers.”

Lebell casts his character as a “humble teacher.” He was not interested in fame or power. “Epictetus believed that the primary job of philosophy is to help ordinary people effectively meet the everyday challenges of daily life, and to deal with life’s inevitable major losses, disappointments, and griefs.”

As the title of this work states, Epictetus focuses on living a good life. For him, “a happy life and a virtuous life are synonymous. Happiness and personal fulfillment are the natural consequences of doing the right thing.” His teachings and this book, focus on three main themes: “mastering your desires, performing your duties, and learning to think clearly about yourself and your relations within the larger community of humanity.”

The book is set up as a manual, with short passages that merit some deep thinking. The book shares elements of Buddhist and Zen writing—thin books that cause expansive thought and consideration.

He begins by clarifying how we come to freedom and happiness. We must recognize that some things are within our control, and some things are not. “Within our control are our own opinions, aspirations, desires, and the things that repel us…Outside our control…are such things as what kind of body we have, whether we’re born into wealth or strike it rich, how we are regarded by others, and our status in society.”

Lebell adds a summary aphorism at the top of each passage, such things as “Stick with your own business,” and “Recognize appearances for what they really are.” The reading is easy and very accessible. Lebell writes in plain, everyday language. The concentration comes with application to life; that is what Epictetus wants us to focus on, and Lebell’s interpretation does just that.

The wisdom of Stoicism drips from every page. “Circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations,” Epictetus tells us through Lebell. “Events happen as they do. People behave as they are. Embrace what you actually get.” Stoicism takes as a major tenet the acceptance of life as it is. The idea is to accept what is thrust upon you, and therefore out of your control. It is a waste of spirit to bemoan what is fated. Accept fate and move on. This idea recurs throughout this manual.

This advice also extends to people. “Things and people are not what we wish them to be nor what they seem to be. They are what they are.” People—friends, relatives, our children—often fail us, or fail to do what we think they should. We must let go and not try to live their lives for them. They must make their own decisions on their own journey. It is a recipe for a non-judgmental way of being, and the truth is, we can really only control our own actions. We cannot control others, events that happen, or the universe spinning through space. We can only control ourselves. Therefore there is a certain amount of freedom and peace that can come from simply letting go of all that we cannot control.

Of course, the most powerful part of the book is where Epictetus seems to be speaking directly to us through the telephone line of history. “If you wish to become proficient in the art of living with wisdom, do you think that you can eat and drink to excess? Do you think that you can continue to succumb to anger and your usual habits of frustration and unhappiness? No. If true wisdom is your object and you are sincere, you will have work to do on yourself. You will have to overcome many unhealthy cravings and knee-jerk reactions.” I doubt there is an ancient Greek or Latin word for “knee-jerk,” but Lebell does a good job of using modern words where needed to convey Epictetus’ ideas.

Where I think my students might benefit from this book is in his words about wisdom and individuality. “The life of wisdom, like anything else, demands its price,” he says. “You may, in following it, be ridiculed and even end up with the worst of everything in all parts of your public life, including your career, your social standing, and your legal position in the courts.” The price of not doing what is right is also made clear. “If you try to be something you’re not or strive for something completely beyond your present capacities, you end up as a pathetic dabbler, trying first to be a wise person, then a bureaucrat, then a politician, then a civic leader. Those roles are not consistent.”

The hallmark of Stoic philosophy is a calm consistency, a person who can be counted on to be cool under pressure and put the needs of others ahead of her own needs. These are the lessons embodied in this book and rendered so truthfully by Sharon Lebell.

The Art of Living is chock full of wisdom and good advice for everyday life, even life in the twenty-first century. The truth in history, philosophy, even literature, is the time test. Does the work stand the test of time and still remain relevant? For Epictetus, teaching so long ago, on the steps of a city far from his home, living in exile, the answer is a resounding yes. He speaks so clearly through the years that we should feel compelled to listen.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Meditations
By Marcus Aurelius, Trans. by Gregory Hays
Modern Library Classics, $5.95 paper
ISBN 0-345-47237-3

“States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.”

Plato, The Republic

Don’t we wish.

So begins Gregory Hays’ Introduction to his translation of Marcus Aurelius’ words. It seems Marcus Aurelius was fond of quoting Plato, and in Hays’ view, we could not find a better ruler who fit the description of a philosopher-king. “He never thought of himself as a philosopher,” Hays writes. “He would have claimed to be, at best, a diligent student and a very imperfect practitioner of a philosophy developed by others.”

Marcus Aurelius was most likely first educated in reading and writing by slaves before being “handed over to private tutors to be introduced to literature…especially Vergil’s great epic, the Aeneid. However, Hays believes the real goal of his education was rhetoric, “the key to an active political career under the empire.” Unlike young students today, Marcus Aurelius trained in the art of the argument, forced to take one side or the other of the issues current in his day. The classes were conducted in Greek and Latin, so he was fluent in both languages.

Philosophy in Marcus Aurelius’ day was concerned with how to live life. According to Hays, this is a different focus than most modern schools and departments of philosophy. In ancient Rome, philosophers dealt with the questions of living, making ethical choices, constructing a just society, responding to suffering and loss, and coming to terms with death. The end result was “a set of rules to live one’s life by,” in Hays’ words.

Hays believes that this kind of philosophy was created by Socrates, the fifth century B.C. Athenian thinker. A progressive stream of this philosophical thought, one Marcus Aurelius embraces, is the Stoic school. “The movement takes its name from the stoa (‘porch’ or ‘portico’) in downtown Athens where its founder, Zeno…taught and lectured,” writes Hays.

“Of the doctrines central to the Stoic worldview,” continues Hays, “perhaps the most important is the unwavering conviction that the world is organized in a rational and coherent way. More specifically, it is controlled and directed by an all-pervading force that the Stoics designated as logos. The term (from which English ‘logic’ and the suffix ‘-ology’ derive) has a semantic range so broad as to be almost untranslatable.” Fortunately for us, Hays gives the explanation his best shot and does an admirable job of it. Logos operates in human beings and in the universe, and could be equated with nature or God. Hays believes that when John writes in his Gospel that “the Word” is God, he is “borrowing Stoic terminology.”

Everything in the world follows an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, the outcome of which is determined by logos. We can either follow this chain willingly, or be dragged along by it. Doing what is right and just is to create harmony; we also have the ability to do the opposite which will lead to hardship and difficulties, but either way, the outcome is out of our control. Therefore, Stoics believe that we should face these outcomes without emotion, without personalizing the situation. The outcome is simply the result. We cannot change it, but only accept it without losing control of our emotions and composure.

Hays boils down the philosophy to a clearly defined quest. “The questions that the Meditations tries to answer are primarily metaphysical and ethical ones,” he writes. “Why are we here? How should we live our lives? How can we ensure that we do what is right? How can we protect ourselves against the stresses and pressures of daily life? How should we deal with pain and misfortune? How can we live with the knowledge that someday we will no longer exist?”

Marcus Aurelius offered a variety of responses to these questions. Clearly, though, his primary belief is that we must see things exactly as they are, without the coloring of subjectivity and personalization. “It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problems,” Hays writes. “This requires not merely passive acquiescence in what happens, but active cooperation with the world, with fate, and above all, with other human beings…Our duty is to act justly…” treating others as they merit. Finally, we must also see that things happen to us that are outside our control, and therefore, these things cannot hurt us. What our enemies do to us hurts our enemies far more than it damages us.

Marcus Aurelius adopts a theme of the “transience of human life,” according to Hays, an attribute not only of the Stoic philosophy, but Marcus’ character. Death is never far away—something that must be accepted as part of the cycle of life, not to be feared or despaired of, but to be embraced.

We also must put up with the foibles of others, and restrain our anger towards them, for they, too, are searching for the secret to a successful life.

The translation itself is divided into twelve books, of which the first three are titled: “Debts and Lessons”; “On the River Gran, Among the Quadi”; and “In Carnuntum.” Each book takes the form of dialogue or numbered aphorisms. It is not a narrative but a collection of sayings and words of wisdom to contemplate.

Marcus begins by attributing what he has gleaned from each “teacher” in his life. “My Grandfather Verus: Character and self-control. My father…Integrity and manliness.” Within these lessons are the precepts of Stoicism. Marcus learns “Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love.”

From Maximus, Marcus learns “Self-control and resistance to distractions. Optimism in adversity—especially illness. A personality in balance: dignity and grace together. Doing your job without whining. Other people’s certainty that what he said was what he thought, and what he did was done without malice…A sense of humor.”

The thrill in all of this is not the enlightenment of the lessons. Surely, we have all heard similar aphorism and precepts before, but the connection back to ancient times of such time-tested lessons is the key. We see an ancient Roman trying to live the same way we struggle to survive in this world today. Some might look at this and say, things never change, and become depressed. The lesson from the Stoics is that the tests are always present, always active, and human beings struggle to deal with these tests of courage and strength. Therefore, to engage in such philosophical inquiry is to engage in living fully as a human being. It is what it means to be alive.

Some of the aphorism are structured like dialogues with himself. “No one could ever accuse you of being quick-witted,” he writes. “All right, but there are plenty of other things you can’t claim you ‘haven’t got in you.’ Practice the virtues you can show: honesty, gravity, endurance, austerity, resignation, abstinence, patience, sincerity, moderation, seriousness, high-mindedness. Don’t you see how much you have to offer—beyond excuses like ‘can’t’? And yet you still settle for less.”

Marcus Aurelius even touches on some favorite themes of literature teachers. “Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other.” Of course this makes sense, given the way Greeks and Romans view public discourse. Rhetoric and argument were central to the education of the time, and therefore, these things were the constants while subjects under debate might be as diverse as science and politics, poetry and civic duty. Reading Marcus Aurelius, I wonder if we have not become to compartmentalized in school. Even with general education courses, are we really turning out well-rounded and well-educated individuals? Marcus Aurelius desires to be cogent and well-versed in all matters, all topics. To him, this is what it means to be fully engaged in living.

The value of this book is in the way the writer lays out a schematic for life. We could all use some Stoicism right now, what with our politicians and their excesses, the pedantic and often infantile level of public discourse, and the growing superficiality and emptiness of the life of the mind. In this age of all access, of unlimited information at our fingertips, have we ever been more out of sync with the heartbeat of our world? Maybe it is time we listened more carefully to the past for the keys to the future. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations as translated by Gregory Hays is an excellent place to begin.

Revisiting The Gutenberg Elegies

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
By Sven Birkerts
Faber & Faber, $15.00 paper
ISBN 978-0865479579

A decade ago, I read a book that changed me on a subatomic level. That book is Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies. I recently revisited the book on my shelf when I was doing a thorough summer cleaning.

Birkerts, a lecturer at Harvard and Director of the Bennington College Writing Seminars, classifies himself as an essayist and literary critic. He has written for an astonishing number of top magazines and journals in American letters: The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, and Esquire, to name a few. He is also the author of the previous books, My Sky Blue Trades, Reading Life, and Readings.

In The Gutenberg Elegies, Birkerts writes, “…the greater part of what I do is read and write about books.” He came to be this kind of writer through fate, hearing the call to a life of letters at an early age. He began writing in elementary school and was rewarded with encouragement. “It is easy enough in retrospect to see a book as a screen, a shield, an escape, but at the time there was just the magic—the startling and renewable discovery that a page covered with black markings could, with a slight mental exertion, be converted into an environment, an inward depth populated with characters and animated by diverse excitements.” He quickly found himself possessed by “the mania,” walls of books, piles of journals, and papers everywhere.

Considering oneself a reader is no mean feat in America where action is prized over the thinking. “[I]t is the prevalent bias in our culture,” Birkerts writes. “Doing is prized over being or thinking. Reading is something you do because it has been assigned in school, or because all other options have been exhausted.” Birkerts did not let this cultural lack of enthusiasm for reading deter him, and burned with the desire to be thought of as intelligent and well-read. By tenth grade, he was spending great amounts of time in libraries and book stores, and he did not fight the growing compulsion to be around books.

His four years of college were, in his words, misguided. Birkerts speaks of reading and studying, but still feeling a desperation in terms of figuring things out. “I worried that I might have some kind of a breakdown. I would stretch out in the dark and listen to classical music on the all-night station, waiting for the window square to lighten and my anxiety to abate.”

He begins his writing career on an impulse. He had read the work of Robert Musil, but could find very little criticism about him. “I had read the work,” he writes, “I had ideas—maybe I could write something.” He compares this moment to the proverbial light bulb going off over his head. “I sat at the desk I had built into the corner of my room and I worked. I went through the books and copied out lengthy passages I wanted to quote. I filled sheets of paper with ideas, drew connecting arrows. And then, relying on my memory of writing college papers, as well as on the example of essays I admired by writers like George Steiner, Susan Sontag, and Brodsky…I launched forth.” His feeling of success is palpable. “For, no sooner did I begin putting words on the page than I tapped a rightness and ease I had never known before.

As a critic, his criteria is simple: “The books that matter to me—and they are books of all descriptions—are those that galvanize something inside of me. I read books to read myself.”

The real meat of this book is Birkerts’ belief that we are in the midst of a cultural metamorphosis caused by electronic communications—or, that the Internet is killing reading. We have heard studies recently that reveal Americans’ lack of enthusiasm for the written word. We have also heard how reading is flourishing—the Los Angeles Times’ Festival of Books is one of the hottest events of the year in the city. So what is the truth? How many people are really reading? What are they reading? Birkerts believes it is not literature and not reading as in deep thinking.

Birkerts offers an anecdote about teaching a literature class at a local college. After carefully selecting texts with student interest in mind, he is appalled to discover that students will not read anything that they have to think over or consider deeply. They want the movie version. What’s more, they cannot make it through the classic Cliffs Notes or Sparks Notes. The language used there is beyond their comprehension.

He asserts a new paradigm: people born in and after the 1970s cannot access an entire history of culture, myth and stories because the medium of language and expression is completely alien to them. “…[T]he understandings and assumptions that were formerly operative in society no longer feel valid. Things have shifted; they keep shifting. We all feel a desire for connection, for meaning, but we don’t seem to know what to connect with what, and we are utterly at sea about our place as individuals in the world at large.” Later, he makes his point clear. “Looking out at our society, we see no real leaders, no larger figures of wisdom. Not a brave new world at all, but a fearful one.”

Birkerts breaks down our postmodern plusses and minuses into two categories. The gains of postmodernity are: increased awareness of the big picture; expanded neural capacity; understanding leading to tolerance; readiness to try new things.

The losses to postmodernity illustrate a steep price for the above plusses: fragmented sense of time and loss of reverie; reduced attention span and impatience with sustained inquiry; shattered faith in institutions and explanatory narratives that shape experiences; divorce from past and history; cut off from sense of geography and community; absence of a strong vision for the future.

We need to reorient ourselves, according to Birkerts. He posits a humanistic code: we confer meaning from experience; we communicate symbolically through language; and literature holds the meaning of experience. Only in reading do we slip out of our everyday ruts and consider the higher purpose of existence, our origins and destinations. What my students think of as reading on the Internet is simply having access to a gigantic amount of information. However, much of the information is not vital, or even relevant. A student must sift and work through to glean the important nuggets of thought and idea, but few students want to take this time. The pace of life is too fast and there is little time for deep thinking. It is all snap decisions and forward momentum.

In his chapter, “The Owl Has Flown,” Birkerts discusses life before 1750. Few books were available, so people read them over and over and discussed them. After 1750, people read books, magazines and newspapers and read them once to race on to something else. Depth was sacrificed for sheer volume, with “a shift from intensive to extensive reading.” Therein lies the key. We consume information with little digestion—there is a dearth of critical and analytical thinking.

Students have trouble comprehending that it is not enough to know where to find the information, or to be able to cut and paste it into a document. They must digest it, understand it, and be able to utilize it fluently in their work. What I keep pounding into my students is that everything is connected. It is that whole global village thing—history, philosophy, current events, literature, culture, the life of the mind—all connected, all important. They must make these connections to be good students of literature, or any other subject.

Literature offers us not facts, but truths about human nature and the processes of life. Deeper, wiser people will result from reading deeply and considering ideas, so as hard as it is, we must force our students to read. Reading causes us to reconsider our lives in the light of what we learn. Therefore, it is not always a pleasant experience especially when it is assigned for class, but reading is always a necessary experience.

What is the solution? We are “a culture in which image and presentation have assumed a substantiality formerly unthinkable.” But Birkerts argues that we cannot ignore a deeper inquiry, the desire to know, to discover, to understand. It is part of who we are, so we must embrace it.

“If literature is to survive,” Birkerts says at the end of The Gutenberg Elegies, “to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous. That is, it must throw up a serious challenge to the emergent status quo; it must shake and provoke people even as it leads them back toward a reconnaissance of selfhood.

I cannot track how many times I have returned to Sven Birkerts’ themes and ideas in my teaching and writing life. In this book, he develops and displays the problems and pitfalls of our American culture and the life of the mind. His writing has the clarity of a bell whose toll calls us back to what is most important: the idea, the humanistic desire to think, to analyze, to wonder. This is who we are, our true nature, and Birkerts believes we should not let technology deter us from our humanism. Computers and technology are simply tools to enhance our study, our quest to understand our world. The thinking is up to us.

The Pesthouse

The Pesthouse
By Jim Crace
Vintage Books, $13.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-307-27895-1

“Hard times make stones of us all.”

Jim Crace in The Pesthouse

The scary thing about the recent spate of post-apocalyptic novels that have been published lately is that the idea of surviving and living on after a cataclysmic event such as a nuclear holocaust has entered the public consciousness and imagination. If we can imagine it, can the actual event become a reality?

Jim Crace takes a more lush and evocative approach to the end times in The Pesthouse than Cormac McCarthy did in The Road. In fact, the two novels illustrate the differences in modern British and American prose. Whereas McCarthy is lean and spare, Crace writes voluptuous sentences. His novel is full of setting and character, no everyman or unchanging landscape of ash. He moves us from the high country across an unnamed, rushing river, and on down to the sea where salvation is a possibility for the characters of Franklin Lopez and Margaret. There on the coast they can meet a ship to take them out of America and across to Europe. That’s right: in Crace’s world, people flee from America. Immigrants become emigrants, a reversal of conditions in America today. In Crace’s novel, America is a dead country with infrastructure destroyed and lawless bands of criminals running rampant through the countryside.

Crace begins with a moment in time. It is night, and several characters find themselves caught in this moment, when a mountainside slips away and rumbles into the lake, but the real danger for the inhabitants of Ferrytown is the cloud of gas that escapes from the lake during the landslide. The poison slips across the land, killing every living thing.

As the new day dawns, we find Margaret in an old stone hut called the pesthouse, where she is recovering from the flux, a plague-like illness sweeping the countryside. She has had all the hair on her body removed and been ostracized from Ferrytown. It is the only way the people of the town know to fight the disease. The baldness also marks the victims so that people know to avoid them. The irony is, the disease makes Margaret only one of two survivors of the landslide.

The other survivor is Franklin Lopez, a gigantic boy-man who is traveling to the coast with his brother Jackson. Franklin has hurt his knee, and therefore is hiding in the hills above Ferrytown when Jackson journeys down to investigate the town. When the brothers part, they will not see each other again. Jackson is killed in the landslide.

This sets up the meeting between Margaret and Franklin and launches them on their journey together to try to reach safe passage to Europe. Each carry touchstones of their past lives. Franklin has his brother’s coat, made for him by their mother, colorfully composed of goatskins. Margaret carries “her three lucky things—a silver necklace that was old enough to have been machined; a square of patterned, faded cloth too finely woven to have been the work of human hands; some coins from the best-forgotten days, all inside a cedar box…”

The coins include modern pennies, dimes and quarters that she found on a river bank. She describes the presidents on each as “mostly short-haired men,” and identifies the motto, “In God We Trust.” With the penny, “She dragged her nail across the disk to count every column and tried to find the tiny seated floating man within, the floating man who, storytellers said, was Abraham and would come back to help America one day with his enormous promises.” History becomes mythology.

These artifacts of the past are lost for some of the novel. The coat becomes a portent of evil, and the cedar box is recovered in the pesthouse, ironically a place of safety and refuge.

Of course, Franklin comes across Margaret, feverish and near death in the pesthouse, and nurses her back to health. In and out of consciousness, she remembers him rubbing her feet. Franklin does this because he believes disease leaves a body through the feet. So he begins his relationship with the desperately ill Margaret by rubbing her feet.

After she is better, and Franklin’s knee has healed, they start down the trail together. In Ferrytown, they encounter the dead, in their beds, in the fields, in the midst of activities. Franklin ransacks the cabins and homes for supplies, and thus outfits himself for the trek ahead.

Crace is very good at weaving in the history and mythology of America. These new emigrants making a beeline for the coast dream of a past nation. “The optimists among them believed that once the river had been crossed, something of the old America would be discovered,” he writes, “the country their grandpas and grandmas had talked about, a land of profusion, safe from human predators, snake-free, and welcoming beyond the hog and hominy of this raw place; a country described by so many of their grandparents in words they’d learned from their grandparents, where the encouragements held out to strangers were a good climate, fertile soil, wholesome air and water, plenty of provisions, good pay for labor, kind neighbors, good laws, a free government and a hearty welcome.” It is the American dream of long ago, of what was and never will be again. Jim Crace excels at bringing every American’s nightmare to life: what will happen when it all ends? As we know from history, all empires must end and the American empire most likely will not escape mortality.

The remarkable aspect of Crace’s writing is the richness of it. There is a grace and beauty in its fullness. He tells a story, and he does so in such vibrant detail that the ordinary becomes beautiful. His description of an abandoned, damaged highway is poetic and clear, avoiding clichés and overused descriptions. “It did not take them long to reach and climb the first of the two parallel mounds that protected the road from the wind…this great swath of track could easily take two teams of horses, each fifty wide or more. It had to be the pathway of a giant or else to have been designed to carry something huge and heavy—those wooden war machines, perhaps, that Margaret had heard talk about, the ones that broke through walls, or shot boulders in the air, or hurled fire.” His prose is so rich with mythological imagery that it takes a minute to realize Crace is writing about a common roadway, although one in extreme disrepair. “The road…seemed built—by how many laborers and over how many years? At what immense cost?—to take great weights. Its now damaged surface, much degraded by the weather and time, comprised mostly chips of stone, loose grit, and sticky black rubble…” Such ideas float about regarding the Egyptian pyramids—what race of men or slaves could build such massive structures?

The ocean, too, is rendered poetically without resorting to tired language. Margaret wakes in the night to hear the waves crashing on shore in the distance. “…[T]he sounds she could hear were only breathing and the wind, and the restlessness of horses, and something deeper, far and near, a sort of restful quake. That was a sound she’d never heard before, but still she recognized it from the stories she’d heard. The snoring sea.”

The journey takes the young couple over rough terrain. They are terrorized by bandits, Franklin is captured by them as well, and Margaret winds up carrying for an infant when she is separated from the child’s grandparents. So the three make a trinity, not unlike Jesus, Mary and Joseph—Margaret is a virgin—searching for a place to rest, to be taken in, and possibly, start another life.

All along the journey, Franklin cannot help feeling pulled back, back west to his mother and the farm. In the end, in all this rush to escape the dying country, the west holds particular attraction for the cobbled-together family. As when the country was first settled, Franklin sees the west as a chance to start over in this now unfamiliar landscape. He sees the opportunity to begin again and reinvent himself, which ironically, was the attraction of the west for people at the start of America.

Jim Crace’s novel pulls the reader into a world we only dare to imagine. He does so with such poetry and grace that we must consider what America might become after the empire falls. In Crace’s view, the land returns to the wild, the untamed, the savage.

Margaret and Franklin are such clearly drawn characters that we can feel their uncertainty while reveling in their strength and resilience. The book is a page-turner, exciting as it is wise. In many ways, it is a better novel than McCarthy’s The Road because the story is richly told. It is the kind of novel that reads like a dream—it is America that our travelers wander, but it is nothing like the America we know. The power of fiction is to create worlds that parallel our own, and then feature characters who act out our worst fears and nightmares. The lesson of The Pesthouse is clear: when everything is lost, the human spirit will endure. We will find danger, we will witness horrors and immense suffering. So to, we will find love, salvation, redemption, and hopefully, a chance to live again. In our darkest dreams, this is the only comfort we have.

Quiet, Please

Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian
By Scott Douglas
Da Capo Press, $25.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-7867-2091-0

What are we supposed to glean from Scott Douglas’ memoir of his five years as librarian in the public libraries of Anaheim, California? Here are some random first impressions: patrons often use the computers and bathrooms for inappropriate behavior; librarians do not read, and Douglas himself lies about his own reading; Douglas now believes books are not everything; he is a typical slacker who goes off to graduate school on the city’s dime; the main attractions at modern public libraries are food sales and computer usage; he wants to be the next David Sedaris; the very idea of a public library as a gateway to knowledge for the masses is a pipe dream.

To be fair, Douglas does work in some history of libraries, from Alexandria in 300 B.C. to Andrew Carnegie and the first public institutions, and finally, to Bill Gates and his gifts of computers and software from the Microsoft empire. But there is little discussion of books. Douglas could have just as easily set his memoir inside an airplane factory. He is, in fact, into paper airplanes, as well as the computer game, FreeCell. His smug tone and attempts to channel Sedaris are off-putting and at times, downright irritating.

His use of footnotes, ala David Foster Wallace, another of his admitted heroes, is also annoying, and adds nothing to the narrative. “I think [the footnotes] give the book a certain urgency and energy,” he says. “The generation I grew up in is now being raised on DVD’s (sic) with commentary tracks. In many ways, the footnotes serve as my commentary track to the memoir.” Sorry, but a book is not a film. And, in a clarification, if the generation has already grown up they cannot now be raised on DVDs.

Douglas begins his story with his first days on the job as a library clerk. He tries to pass himself off to his co-workers as a reader and a man of intellect only to discover that his fellow employees are as clueless about literature.

He goes on to discuss his first forays into storytelling for young patrons, and to discuss how his first week in the library is the week of September 11, 2001. But he cannot give the tale sharpness or poignancy. His discussion of terrorism and resulting mood of the country is particularly shallow. While discussing the collapse of the twin towers with a friend over lunch, he writes, “How long until people don’t remember what 9/11 means?” His friend does not think anyone will ever forget. “I looked down at my pizza,” he continues. “My friend had picked the place for lunch because he had seen a commercial on TV advertising free bread sticks.” After pausing for a footnote about how much he likes free samples of bread sticks, Douglas compares the way Americans remember the Oklahoma City bombing to the way they might someday remember 9/11: as a shadowy, unfocused memory. It all comes off as superficial.

Douglas moves on to discuss his adventures in graduate school, an opportunity paid for by the city of Anaheim. He characterizes one professor as a “cocky, boastful goof who used big words to prove points.” Should he have used smaller words? “Nothing he said made any sense,” Douglas writes, “but I liked him because he had sweaty armpits, which were fun to draw in my notebook in lieu of real notes.”

Later in the book, Douglas takes offense when a teenager calls him a “faggot” for no particular reason. He takes great pains to tell us he is not gay, and that this incident, and similar ones, makes him hate teenagers. So name-calling and ridicule are fine when hurled at a goofy professor, but not when the insults are directed at him?

His remedy for putting an entire class to sleep with a boring story? “[T]ell a fart joke. Or if you don’t know any fart jokes, make a fart noise.” Douglas reveals his immaturity and vacuity with such comments and scatological attempts at humor. David Sedaris, Mark Twain, David Foster Wallace, he is most certainly not.

The book is a disappointment on so many levels. Even in the nuts and bolts editing, Douglas and his editors miss the mark. Awkward and grammatically challenged phrases abound: two fellow librarians “reminisce of the career of Julia Roberts.” He changes the names and characteristics of people in his story “so as not to receive a lawsuit.” He writes in another place that conspiracy theories “centered around 9/11.” When he questions an advisor about a failing grade, he writes that “the program prohibited her to tell me.” The problematic passages detract from the effectiveness of the writing, although the book would have made only a slightly better impression if it was copyedited properly. Inept writing and use of language in a book allegedly about books and libraries does not impress.

The only real value in this sophomoric carnival is the ample evidence that public libraries are in trouble. When Los Angeles went on a campaign to remodel its branch offices, many reopened in fantastically modern buildings with a bit more square footage, but with half the books replaced by a large number of computer stations. Douglas details this process in his library. As the influence of the computer grows, older books are not replaced. The budget shrinks for new books, and people come in to surf the Internet and check email. The library becomes a community center. The idea of a public library is diluted and eventually will be discounted altogether, the real “dumbing down” of our society and culture.

To his credit, Douglas does make an issue of how many immigrants and non-native English speakers come in to find books and information to learn the language and culture. It seems the public library system is ignored by middle and upper class Americans, with the exception being the elderly and the mentally handicapped. But Douglas is condescending and superior in his tone with these patrons as well.

Indeed, like the classroom, the library is changing. What disturbs is not just the lack of books, the limited funding of libraries by the city, the disrespect patrons show towards books, learning and the life of the mind. These are the fault lines in the rupturing American culture, but it is deeply disappointing that those whose job it is to promote learning, reading and writing, the librarians, have such poor attitudes and insufficient maturity to redefine and invigorate sacred space, the temple secular, the holy library. Front and center, that is the message clearly offered in Scott Douglas’ memoir.

The Toughest Road

Stick a fork in this school year; it is done. I signed off on the last grade sheet after scoring the last final exam.

So let the reflection begin. What did I learn this year? How will I revise my courses and syllabi? How will I do things differently next year? What will I spend my summer doing to improve my craft?

A glimmer of an idea arrived on my doorstep in the form of the denigrated and declining Los Angeles Times, dateline June 21, 2008. In a front page story, we learned about Phil Holmes, “one of the great English teachers of his generation,” who is teaching the final years of his career at View Park Preparatory High School in South Los Angeles after thirty-five years at upper crusty Harvard-Westlake. Was he fired? No, he chose South L.A. for the students, the same students he now informs are failing the quarter.

Mr. Holmes is relentless. He demands excellence and he will stop at nothing to get it. He is a role model for teachers and an inspiration for students.

“He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important,” Mitchell Landsberg, the Times staffer writes, “and, at age sixty-six, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day’s lessons.” Holmes leads the class in a thorough examination of an essay, even criticizing the student critics, ripping up their theories and responses, labeling arguments as “mindless.”

“The entire class was like this, Holmes leading a discussion in which no point, no word was insignificant. He could be brutal…” The students, most of whom are African-American, love and appreciate Homes’ efforts. Therefore the testimonials for Holmes’ methodologies are numerous. “I was taught to think,” says Barton H. Thompson Jr., a Stanford law professor and former Holmes student.

Landsberg writes that “Creative writing, Holmes believes, is a frill for most high school students. How many, after all, will become poets or novelists? But virtually all will need to write some form of persuasive essay, in college and in their careers. That is Holmes’ central focus.”

I studied the article and ordered the textbook from Amazon: The Uses of Argument by British philosopher Stephen Toulmin. I absorbed the mantra of Holmes’ courses: “Writing a sustained case, free of mechanical errors, in a readable style…Claim, clarification, evidence and warrant, cemented by ‘backtracking,’ a practice in which the writer re-reads and challenges his own work and answers any questions that arise.”

Next year, I must push harder. I must take the students down the toughest road. Notes will be collected frequently and graded. The syllabus will not change, I do not care how many other tests are scheduled for that day. I will pound in lessons on vocabulary, writing, grammar, critical and analytical thinking, and literature. The reading schedule will be set in stone. In short, 2007-2008 will serve as the last year I am waylaid by superficiality, triviality and distraction. There is nothing more important than the study of English in the classroom, every day, for the full hour, for the 180 school days of the year.

I will spend the summer preparing for this intensive focus. I will review every text, every note, every lesson plan, every activity. I will sharpen and refine and revise until everything shines like the sun and cuts to the point like a razor. I will redouble my efforts to teach and be the best possible teacher for my students.

And I will expect my students to be nothing less than brilliant, every day. Education is too important, and we are at a critical juncture in our cultural lives. If we do not inspire smarter students capable of thinking critically and analytically, competent with research and information technologies, able to think strategically and act decisively, then this country is doomed.

All of this will be done quietly, but with intensity and passion.

Mitchell Landsberg ends his portrait of Phil Holmes on such a note: “There are no fireworks, no speeches, no round of applause. Just this: As he walks out the door and heads to the parking lot, Phil Holmes knows that today he delivered a good lesson. He didn’t waste a second. He made the students think.”

Such will be my re-emphasized mantra for 2008-2009.

Lists, Lists and More Lists

I said these were difficult weeks. I stared at my book shelves and made some tough decisions. So what was left out, you might ask?

I teach all four high school grades, all honors or Advanced Placement courses. These kids still do not read enough, but they are far more likely to read than our mainstream college prep courses. Therefore, every book I had to cut was agonizing. The only bright spot is that several students asked me for a list of books I cut so that they could read them over the summer.

I lost a lot of literary blood in my ninth grade English course. Laurie Halse Anderson, an amazing writer of young adult titles, was usually our first read of the new school year. Catalyst is a moving and intense book, but it is a work the students can read on their own. They do not need me to teach it to them.

Within their Prentice Hall anthology, the students read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I usually add to this A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Considering that our theatre department performed this play during the 2007-2008 school year, most of the students know it well. Therefore, out it went.

I also cut Skellig, by David Almond. It is a book rated for middle school, but contains some incredible William Blake references. I teach it in conjunction with a set of Blake poems. Blake is covered extensively in tenth and twelfth grades, so Skellig got the ax.

English II Honors for tenth graders suffered some major cuts. I lost Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The play is showing its age. I find the last act incredible, but the lead up is a bit slow and small town, which is the point, however my twenty-first century students struggle to stay involved in the narrative.

I have taught Death of a Salesman to sophomores for thirteen years straight. The play makes me cringe—that is how well Arthur Miller nailed the characters. I see all sorts of people in the Loman family; they are the ghosts that haunt the American landscape. After thirteen years, I felt it was time for a rest. I will bring it back at some point, but not for next year.

I usually try to schedule a major work of mythology during the sophomore year, because once we hit AP classes in eleventh grade, I cannot squeeze it in. Students are supposed to have a handle on mythology by junior year; the AP exam does not go back past the sixteenth century, but students are expected to catch the allusions. However, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is extremely redundant. It also took a long time to teach—sometimes as much as three months. We cannot spend that much class time on a single work. Therefore, if they see any Ovid at all next year, it will be in excerpts, not the full epic.

I have decided to try to finish all the literature by the end of the first semester and then spend the entire second semester on writing skills, grammar, vocabulary, and research writing. I think we need this focus going into AP Language and Composition.

For the eleventh grade course, we have two class periods per day. The first class period is the actual AP Language and Composition course; the second daily class period is a writing, grammar, and test preparation period. Having ninety minutes each day allows me to cover a lot of ground. Still, there had to be cuts.

I have taught Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman for several years running, and it is an incredible book so I have kept it for summer reading. I have paired it with The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a novel I taught for the first time this year with success. I had to cut In My Father’s Name by Mark Arax, a local hero-writer of mine. I also dropped The Catcher In The Rye for the same reason as some other books: it needs a rest. I have taught it every year for thirteen years or so. The students love the novel and really respond to it, so I will bring it back at some point.

I dropped the Vietnam novel, The Things They Carried, a book that never fails to move me, especially when Tim O’Brien writes about dreaming Linda alive again. Linda is a girl O’Brien had a crush on when they were in fourth grade. She died of a brain tumor. The final scene of the novel, where they are ice skating through his dreams, is one of the most moving passages I have ever read. I wanted to focus on more material from the Norton Reader, several thousand pages of nonfiction writing, so O’Brien’s book had to go. This was a painful cut for me, but necessary.

I briefly flirted with teaching On The Road by Jack Kerouac and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. My students have expressed interest in the Beat writers before, especially after our visit with Aram Saroyan. In the end, Kerouac’s work was a little too specific to an era, although it killed me when I first read it. Kesey’s book may return another year.

In many ways, the senior AP Literature and Composition course was the most challenging to pick books for because those students have a shorter year than the rest of the school. I cut units on the Bible, including the Book of Genesis and Book of Revelation. I might still give them some copied pages to study.

I cut completely an excellent textbook, Writing About Literature, mainly because the book is expensive and I have handouts that cover many of the same topics as the chapters. I did not feel we did the book justice this year, and I do not like that feeling. Students pay money for a book; we need to use it to its fullest potential.

I cut Beowulf, like Ovid, because it was drawn out and redundant. With the poor movie version released this year, it has also become cliché. Again, I had to consider the sixteenth century-present focus of the exam.

I reinstated Shakespeare’s Hamlet, replacing the Scottish play, and briefly toyed with also adding Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but we barely have time to go through Hamlet once from Shakespeare’s point of view.

The biggest battle on the senior level was whether to add in Frankenstein and Crime and Punishment, both novels that have appeared in essay questions on the AP exam, and that I have taught previously. In the end, I added them in, even though I am still not sure I will have time to cover everything. I told my students today that we will be racing the clock, but with the school year drawing to a close, their minds are not wrapping around this information. Therefore, I will have to push hard with them in the fall in order to get everything covered.

On this year’s exam, the students had a free response essay question that contained the following books:

The Age of Innocence
Alias Grace
All the King’s Men
All the Pretty Horses
Anna Karenina
Billy Budd
The Brothers Karamazov
Catch-22
Cold Mountain
The Color Purple
Don Quixote
Emma
Equus
Frankenstein
Glass Menagerie
Henry IV, Part I
Huckleberry Finn
Invisible Man
King Lear
The Kite Runner
The Misanthrope
The Piano Lesson
Pride and Prejudice
Pygmalion
Reservation Blues
The Sound and the Fury
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sula
A Tale of Two Cities
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Tom Jones
Wuthering Heights

Based on this list, and others like it, I felt the heat to pick the books that would maximize my students’ reading level. As always, planning classes is an activity that is never finished. The classes and texts are always changing, always being adjusted.

Several years ago, I compiled a list for each grade level of all the books we have taught in previous years. It is from this list that we choose books each year, and the list is always being updated. Here it is:

Grade Nine
1. The Human Comedy by William Saroyan
2. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
3. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
5. The Odyssey by Homer
6. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
7. Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
8. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
9. The Giver by Lois Lowry
10. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
11. Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
12. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
13. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
14. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
15. A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
16. Skellig by David Almond

Grade Ten
1. Night by Elie Wiesel
2. The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
5. Antigone by Sophocles
6. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
7. My Antonia by Willa Cather
8. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
9. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
10. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
11. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
12. Our Town by Thornton Wilder
13. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
15. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
16. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
17. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
18. The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie
19. Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson

Grade Eleven
1. The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
2. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
3. October Sky by Homer Hickam
4. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
5. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
6. Cat On a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
7. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
8. Fences by August Wilson
9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
10. The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger
11. The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
12. A Raisin In the Sun by Lorraine Hansbury
13. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
14. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
15. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
16. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
17. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
19. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
20. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
21. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
22. A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton
23. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
24. Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie
25. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
26. The White Album by Joan Didion
27. In My Father’s Name by Mark Arax

Grade Twelve1. The Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3. 1984 by George Orwell
4. The Stranger by Albert Camus
5. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
8. Othello by William Shakespeare
9. King Lear by William Shakespeare
10. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
11. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
12. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
13. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
14. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
15. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
16. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
17. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
18. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
19. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
20. Remains of the Day by Kashuo Ishiguro
21. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
22. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
23. Lucky by Alice Sebold
24. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
25. Big Fish by Daniel Wallace
26. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

I have moved books around over the years for honors and AP courses, but this is basically what my students should read before they leave high school. I just wish we had time to teach every book every year.