Leslie Leyland Fields

Sentencing Ourselves to Pieces

 

I wrote an essay in my sleep last night---about books. Everyone in my dream was holding a book open, tilting their heads, reading  thoughtfully.  Books were not dead, the printed page would live on as a vital and treasured source of knowledge  and experience.

 

It was a good world. It was a good essay. It was a good dream.  I kept pondering whether I should wake myself up to write it down.  I did not, concluding that my slumbering self would surely remember an essay of this import. Upon waking, however, its particulars and its message of hope eluded me.

I know what happened. I made the mistake of watching  PBS's Frontline "Digital World"  just before bed, and paid particular attention to one interviewee's prognostications about the book:  Marc Prensky, the author of Digital Game-Based Learning,  who describes himself on his website as an "internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant and designer in the critical areas of education and learning. " He says this about books and kids:

You don't have to read them (books) to take in what's in a book. .  . .  If I said to kids, "You  know, you don't have to read all that much. But what I'd really like you to read are these few things and these excerpts, and these parts, and then I'll tell you why you should read them. . . . And no, you don't have to pore through Silas Marner as I did in high school. There are very few books you have to have read."

(I confess I would have been more willing to grant his pain in high school had he named The Brothers Karamazov or Gibbon's 8-volume The Fall of the Roman Empire. Silas Marner clocks in at a mere 200 pages.)

Let me understand this. If a writer's work is truly important and excellent---it earns the exalted status of being pieced and excerpted. And then I wonder, the writers whose work rises to this esteem, how did they arrive at their insights, brilliance, and genius?Through an education built on carefully selected snippets?

We have forgotten why we read, I fear.  We need information, yes. We need knowledge and discernment more.  We need imagination far more.  We need beauty and possibility even more.  Without these, we are sentenced to a single spirit, a single mind, a single life.  This is what I used to say when books lay on every shelf and people at least aspired to read.

We need to read whole books for far more important reasons now. College students can no longer attend  to an entire lecture without facebooking and IM-ing.  We text through our meals, we interrupt our visits for every vibration in our shirt pocket. We finish very little single-minded or single-handed.  We are sentencing ourselves to pieces, dividing our language, our hours, our very selves among multiple media, shrinking our thoughts into bits and tweets, excerpts and texts.  We cannot attend.  We no longer seek silence.  We have lost our ground of being, and cannot remember what holds us together.

Last week I walked into my first graders classroom.  The kids were sprawled on the floor, cross-legged on the carpet, leaning over their desks, all with a book in hand, faces inches from the page, intent.  SSR time, Silent Sustained Reading. For twenty minutes every day. Were these the faces in my dream?

Maybe college classes can do the same. Maybe we can as well. Silent. Sustained. Reading.  Maybe we will remember back to first and second grade, why we read books then, from beginning to end. That slow immersion, that aching marinating in a world of such light, drama and color, whose ending would bring delight, even wonder, and always an appetite for more.  We always longed for more of the book, never less.

"Why are we reading if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?" asks Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. Which can be called as well, "The Reading Life."  Why indeed?  But don't stop with this quote.  Read the whole book. Read as many whole books as you can. Sentence yourself again to beauty and whole-hearted delight.