Role Models and Readers

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image: john ruskin in van­ity fair, 1872

 

In sum­mer 2009, I received a let­ter from Professor Michael Thorne of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, let­ting me know that that ven­er­a­ble insti­tu­tion had decided to award me an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters. My reac­tion to the news was threefold.

First, grat­i­fied aston­ish­ment at the dis­cov­ery that the University Board, prob­a­bly in a state of mid­sum­mer whimsy, had picked my name for this splen­did honour.

Second, shame­ful accep­tance of the fact that, while most of my learned col­leagues have had to work hard in school for many years, I, hav­ing dropped out of uni­ver­sity after a sin­gle semes­ter, was about to receive a doc­tor­ate free of charge. If fur­ther evi­dence were needed of the unfair­ness of all things human, there it is. However, in his kind let­ter, Professor Thorne speaks of hon­our­ing indi­vid­u­als “who will serve as a role model to those grad­u­at­ing.” This, I explained with regret in my answer to Professor Thorne, was a role I felt obliged to decline. I would accept the hon­our with great pride — but on con­di­tion of not hav­ing to act as a role model. Role mod­els are always dis­ap­point­ing. James Joyce, in his old age, was stopped by an admirer on the street, who bowed to him and exclaimed: “Master! May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” To which Joyce answered: “No, it’s done lots of other things besides.” All appointed role mod­els have done “lots of other things besides.”

Third, and more seri­ously, my reac­tion to the news was delight in the knowl­edge that this uni­ver­sity, so reck­lessly grant­ing me this hon­our, was named after one of my best-beloved writ­ers, the pugna­cious John Ruskin. He is not one of my role mod­els: I wouldn’t want to fol­low the exam­ple of his pri­vate life, nor do I endorse all of his fiery opin­ions. However, I whole­heart­edly share most of Ruskin’s beliefs: that art and lit­er­a­ture, far from help­ing us escape from real­ity, push our noses into real­ity and encour­age us to take action against daily acts of injus­tice; that beauty has a restora­tive power; that greed is society’s great­est evil. And, above all, that peo­ple are in gen­eral more intel­li­gent than they are led to believe, and that art is for every­one. On all this I agree with Ruskin.

On November 12, I was asked to address the stu­dents grad­u­at­ing this year from Anglia Ruskin University. I began by point­ing out that these stu­dents, receiv­ing their diplo­mas after many years of hard work, were about to enter a world in which the things Ruskin fought against are still rife: a world in eco­log­i­cal dan­ger, in which the poli­cies of greed make it very dif­fi­cult to find decent jobs, a world that puts for­ward the val­ues of the quick and easy instead of the val­ues of reflec­tive slow­ness and the plea­sures of dif­fi­culty to which the uni­ver­sity would have accus­tomed them.

In spite of this, I said, I believed that they could, and would, suc­ceed. The rea­son is that every one of these stu­dents (from all over the world and rang­ing in age from sev­en­teen to sev­enty) had an abil­ity that has enabled us, as a species, to sur­vive up to now — and, if we use it wisely, will enable us to sur­vive in the future: the abil­ity to imag­ine. The biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins has argued that imag­i­na­tion was devel­oped by humans in order to expe­ri­ence the world before we expe­ri­ence it in the flesh; to learn, for instance, that a lion will bite you if you put your hand in its maw, before you phys­i­cally put your hand in its maw.

Ruskin’s mother didn’t believe in this edu­ca­tional imag­i­na­tion. Once, when baby Ruskin reached out to touch a lit can­dle, his mother stopped the nurse who was about to pull away his hand. “Let him do it,” she said. “Then he will learn.” And pre­sum­ably, Ruskin did learn that flames can burn us. But we don’t need to burn our hand in order to learn that. We can read about it in books, and about all other man­ner of dan­gers and delights. We can learn about the world in the sto­ries that we have imag­ined in order to put the world into words. Reading can be a pleas­ant cau­tion­ary experience.

Maybe, if we had read Dickens’s Martin Chuzzelwit more care­fully, we would have rec­og­nized in the deal­ings of the Eden Land Corporation the dynam­ics of the American real estate schemes that crashed the world econ­omy; if we had remem­bered the words of the ’umble Uriah Heep in David Copperfield we would have under­stood what these com­pa­nies’ speeches of con­tri­tion really meant. Maybe, if we had paid more atten­tion to the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, as he tells Alice that there’s no room at the tea table when, in fact, as Alice points out, there’s plenty of room, we would have spot­ted the self­ish Mad Hatters who say that there’s no room for new Alices at the work table. Maybe if we had stopped to con­sider the ruth­less, power-hungry motives of Agamemnon in the Iliad, ready to sac­ri­fice his daugh­ter to obtain fair winds for his fleet, we would know the real motives behind the war­mon­gers of today.

Again, I don’t agree with Ruskin on every­thing. For exam­ple, in spite of being a bril­liantly keen reader, Ruskin was rather shy in rec­og­niz­ing the extra­or­di­nary power we read­ers have. He said that we read in order to get at the author’s mean­ing — not to find our own. I think he was wrong. I think we very much read to find our own mean­ing, in the author’s mean­ing. We read to lend words to our expe­ri­ence. As we read, we trans­late, as it were, the author’s words into our own expe­ri­ence, enlarg­ing the mean­ing of those words, gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion. Not find­ing just any mean­ing, of course, if we read hon­estly, but mean­ings that many times escaped even the author, who is often the least shrewd of the read­ers of that text. We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

This power that we, as read­ers, have, is one of the many pow­ers soci­ety tries to keep hid­den from us. Consumer soci­ety is afraid of our indi­vid­ual pow­ers, and wants us to believe that we are too stu­pid to make our own choices. We mustn’t let any­one tell us that we are not clever enough, or tal­ented enough, or fit enough for what­ever it is we want to do. There will be (because there always are) finan­cial con­sid­er­a­tions, fam­ily con­sid­er­a­tions, con­sid­er­a­tions of health and prej­u­dice and lack of oppor­tu­nity, but in most cases, in spite of the over­whelm­ing odds against us, we can and will imag­ine ways to over­come them. G. K. Chesterton said that the most extra­or­di­nary thing about mir­a­cles is that they hap­pen. I believe we are capa­ble of per­form­ing mir­a­cles.