Books make you boring...
June 27, 2004
Books Make You a Boring Person
By CRISTINA NEHRING

'm a reader!'' announced the yellow button. ''How about you?'' I
looked at its bearer, a strapping young guy stalking my town's
Festival of Books. ''I'll bet you're a reader!'' he volunteered, as
though we were two geniuses well met. ''No,'' I replied. ''Absolutely
not,'' I wanted to yell, and fling my Barnes & Noble bag at his feet.
Instead, I mumbled something apologetic and melted into the crowd.

There's a new piety in the air: the self-congratulation of book
lovers. Long considered immune to criticism by virtue of being
outnumbered by channel surfers, Internet addicts, video maniacs and
other armchair introverts, bookworms have developed a semi-mystical
complacency about the moral and mental benefits of reading. ''Books
Make You a Better Person,'' a banner outside a Los Angeles school
proclaims. Books keep kids off drugs. They keep gang members out of
prison. They keep terrorists, for all we know, at the gates. This is
what we hear at the 200-odd book festivals that have proliferated
across America from San Francisco to New York. This, indeed, is what
we hear during the N.B.A. playoffs! City dwellers vote and choose a
single book for everyone to read at the same time. ''Read a book, save
a life,'' one radio ad intones; and even in the absence of charitable
contributions, this is very nearly what we feel we are doing. To be a
reader these days is to be a sterling member of society, a thoughtful
and sensitive human being, a winner.

Without the consensus of large parts of the public on this point, a
film like Mark Moskowitz's diminutive documentary, ''Stone Reader,''
could never have provoked the hosannas it has, much less made it into
the aisles of Blockbuster. Loosely organized around Moskowitz's search
for a lost novelist, it shows its hero trudging from one book-lined
office to another, stacking books on the desk, cooing over their
covers in otherworldly delight and leading his friends in raves about
the joy of reading:

Moskowitz (pulling a volume off a library shelf): All these good
covers here. . . . Here's the one. . . . Johnny Goldstein, I think,
read this first. And then everybody had to read it; it was so great.
This is great!

Friend: Yeah, yeah, yeah. . . .

Moskowitz: You just read every day, right?

Friend: Pretty much.

Moskowitz: Every day, you just read. . . .

Friend: Do you remember this? When did you read that?

Moskowitz: ''Old Man and the Sea''? Two years ago. . . .

Friend: What did you think?

Moskowitz: . . . I liked it!

The vacuousness of the conclusions, after all the windup, is
breathtaking. The fact is Moskowitz has nothing whatever to say about
the books he fondles in shot after lingering shot. It's not about the
contents of the books. It's about their fetishization.

It is easy to fetishize things that we imagine are on their way out.
In the age of Comcast and America Online, books seem quaint,
whimsical, imperiled and therefore virtuous. We assume that reading
requires a formidable intellect. We forget that books were the
television of previous years -- by which I mean they were the source
of passive entertainment as well as occasional enlightenment, of
social alienation as well as private joy, of idleness as well as
inspiration. Books were a mixed bag, and they still are. Books could
be used or misused, and they still can be.

Writers themselves carried on about their danger. From Seneca in the
first century to Montaigne in the 16th, Samuel Johnson in the 18th and
William Hazlitt and Emerson in the 19th, writers have been at pains to
remind their readers not to read too much. ''Our minds are swamped by
too much study,'' Montaigne wrote, ''just as plants are swamped by too
much water or lamps by too much oil.'' By filling yourself up with too
much of other folks' thought, you can lose the capacity and incentive
to think for yourself. We all know people who have read everything and
have nothing to say. We all know people who use a text the way others
use Muzak: to stave off the silence of their minds. These people may
have a comic book in the bathroom, a newspaper on the breakfast table,
a novel over lunch, a magazine in the dentist's office, a biography on
the kitchen counter, a political expose in bed, a paperback on every
surface of their home and a weekly in their back pocket lest they ever
have an empty moment. Some will be geniuses; others will be simple
text grazers: always nibbling, never digesting -- ever consuming,
never creating.

''You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw
away his crutch,'' Hazlitt said, ''as expect the learned reader to
throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his
intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like
the horror of a vacuum.'' Such a one is comparable to a person
addicted to talk shows or sitcoms or CNN; no worse and no better, no
dumber but no smarter either. It is not because something comes
between two covers that it is inherently superior to what passes on a
screen or arrives on the airwaves.

There is, of course, a good way of reading -- a very good way, and the
thinkers of old knew it. They were all readers, though none of them
were smug readers: they did not expect compliments but rather offered
excuses for their book consumption. ''Undoubtedly there is a right way
of reading, so it be sternly subordinated,'' Emerson wrote. Thinking
people ''must not be subdued'' by their ''instruments'' -- that is, by
their library. They must be the master of it. They must measure a
book's testimony against their own; they must alternate their
attention to it with an even more passionate and scrupulous attention
to the world around them. ''Books are for the scholar's idle times,''
Emerson said in a statement most academics today would find
surprising, if not shocking.

The point is this: There are two very different ways to use books. One
is to provoke our own judgments, and the other, by far the more
common, is to make such conclusions unnecessary. If we wish to embrace
the first, we cannot afford to be adulatory of books in the manner of
Moskowitz; we must be aggressive. Even a hint of idolatry disables the
mind. ''Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty
to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given;
forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in
libraries when they wrote these books,'' Emerson reminded us -- at a
time when he was, admittedly, already a middle-aged man in a library.

Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them -- or at
least never to hold them in higher esteem than our own faculties, our
own experience, our own peers, our own dialogues. Books are not the
pure good that the festival crowds are sometimes told: you can learn
anything from a book -- or nothing. You can learn to be a suicide
bomber, a religious fanatic or, indeed, a Bush supporter as easily as
you can learn to be tolerant, peace-loving and wise. You can acquire
unrealistic expectations of love as readily as, probably more readily
than, realistic ones. You can learn to be a sexist or a feminist, a
romantic or a cynic, a utopian or a skeptic. Most disturbing, you can
train yourself to be nothing at all; you can float forever like
driftwood on the current of text; you can be as passive as a person in
an all-day movie theater, as antisocial as a kid holed up with a video
game, and at the same time more conceited than both.

Those are the dangers. But there are riches. And we can find them, if
only we disperse the pious fog that is gathering around book culture.
At their best, books are invitations to fight, not calls to prayer.
Consecration injures them. We do better to argue with them than to
caress their spines. We do better to wrestle with our writers as Jacob
with the angel than to worship them as saviors.

Cristina Nehring, a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, is the
author of the forthcoming book ''Women in Love From Simone de Beauvoir
to Sylvia Plath: A Feminist Defense of Romance.''