Discovering Books and Reading My Way Out
originally written 2014
There was a distinct irony to home schooling, which only I could enjoy. While my parents planned my indoctrination with a Christian curriculum, I used most of my “school” days to read secular books and engage with the devil.
I loved to read. It was the only way to develop my sense self freely, feed my intellect, and escape the confines of my prison. I taught myself during these years. For much of my youth, I was an autodidact.
My education was gleaned through reading whatever books I could get my hands on. I subverted the educational intentions of my parents, and explored the world through books, often secretly checked out from the library and snuck into the house. In the process, I learned how to learn.
I learned despite a boring and oppressive curriculum. I learned without teachers. I learned without a school. I discovered an impressive gift during these years, which would permanently define my ethos. As the philosopher Robert Nozick once said, "We are not identical with the books we read, but neither would we be the same without them." (1)
Love of reading was actually an inherited trait, learned through the example of my father. I remember my father did two things every Sunday: he went to church and he bought a newspaper. In every house we lived, my father’s books were always in prominent display on large bookshelves. Some of my earliest memories are shelves perfectly lined with books.
Subconsciously, books will always feel like home to me. My father spent hours every night studying the Bible or reading newspapers. In our house, books were a constant presence and reading was a holy activity. Like manuscripts in Medieval times, I grew up believing that books were a "precious object." (2)
So, reading became second nature. It was a way to conform. But more importantly, it was also a means of escape.
During my home school years, I began to use most of my free time to explore my father’s books, spending countless hours slipping my finger over each volume. Some were historical books filled with pictures from the Civil War, the 1960s, or maps of ancient Rome. There was an abridged Oxford English Dictionary and countless other reference books.
Some books were old classics, like Dickens, Thackeray, and Kipling. There was even a complete works of Shakespeare, each volume separately bound in blue leather. I would dabble reading these, working more on Dickens and Shakespeare than the others.
Most of the books were Christian, in one way or another. My father owned several Bibles. There was the King James, the Latin Vulgate, the New Revised Standard edition, Bibles with commentary, Bibles with maps, study Bibles, abridged Bibles, and devotional Bibles. He also had hundreds of commentaries on the Bible, devotional studies, or idealized testimonials about being a Christian.
There was even a multi-volume series that claimed to decode the prophetic books of the Bible. These books were somewhat frightening because they prophesied the “end times” of the apocalypse when Jesus would come back on a white horse to judge mankind and send the damned to hell. For decades, I was programed by my parents to believe that the world was ending soon.
Some books used Evangelical Protestant readings of the Bible to debunk other religions, explaining how Muslims, Jews, Mormons, and everyone else were destined for hell because they worshiped false gods. Some books described America as the province of Satan, filled with atheists, feminists, gays – the whole host of the damned.
Some books described America as a Christian nation, pointing out how every notable American believed in Jesus, from George Washington to George Bush. There were also Christian novels. Some were classics, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Many were modern Christian novels.
The most interesting Christian novels focused on “spiritual wars” between demons and angels. These books told lurid tales of unscrupulous liberals, drug-addicted celebrities, and vicious abortion doctors. The most frighteningly vivid novels explained the torturous violence of the apocalypse, which my father told us, again and again, was looming in the near future.
Once I became acquainted with the religious nature of my father’s books, they largely lost their luster. Even at the time, as a young boy, I sensed how silly many of these books were. But there were some other books that caught my attention.
Deep within the bowels of this mountain of Christian literature laid an unnoticed and surprising corner of dusty books. For many years I passed them over because I did not recognize the authors and I could not classify their content based upon the titles. Then one day I happened to open one. I’m not sure why my father had these books. I never bothered to ask. They must have been from elective courses in college. Yet, unlike most of his other college books, which he gave away or destroyed, he saved these books for some reason. I don’t know why. But it was a fateful decision.
At first, I did not completely grasp the meaning of these books. Upon my father’s self, I found Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
After several readings, these books slowly opened up not only other worlds, but they also opened up a sense of self, and began to inspire a purpose. My true education began at last.
As a philosopher once recalled, "The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for. They accompany me every minute of every day of my life, making me see much more and be much more than I could have seen or been." (3) I too felt this way. I will always feel this way. These books, and many others, would awaken me from a deep existential slumber. They would help clarify my own existence and open up a world of possibilities. I carry the words of these childhood books still written in my mind, burning in my heart.
These books would eventually change my life, but it took a while. Most were quite difficult to understand. I had to read them all more than once. I remember trying to read Ellison’s Invisible Man the first time at the age of thirteen. I was disappointed when it was not about an invisible man, or any other super hero with special powers. I lost interest and dropped the book on my floor.
But after a few months I got bored and picked it up again. It was difficult and strange. The cruelty of the battle royal was very alarming. But I was drawn in by the narrator, a young black boy trying to find his place in a hostile white world. I will forever remember those words written on the assumed letter of recommendation as he traveled north to escape the racist prison of the South, “keep this boy running.” Here was a character searching for wholeness, searching for identity, searching for freedom, and nobody could help him – nobody would help him. He literally finds that he has no place in the corrupt, crazy world, living underground by the end of the book, relishing the alienated freedom of his invisibility.
That message struck me deeply and helped me understand my own situation.
I read the Catcher in the Rye shortly after. Again, a young protagonist searching for a way out of the false and confining world of school, adults, and meaningless existence. This book was much easier to read. And like Ellison's book, it hit me on a visceral level, speaking to my condition.
After reading these two books I was significantly changed, although I couldn’t put my transformation into words. It was more of an unconscious feeling. I spent many afternoons pondering the meaning of these books and the meaning of my life.
I knew that I was not alone. Others had felt my alienation, my disappointment, my confinement. Others had searched for freedom. Through these fictionalized stories I found my self, waiting. Unexpectedly, I found my self in the prose of another.
I was caught off guard. I did not expect literature to communicate so clearly and to penetrate my self so powerfully. Up until this point, most of the secular books I had snuck into the house were a diversion, an escape from reality – they were fun.
Ellison and Salinger were different. These books were more difficult to read. The plot was not always exciting. The messages were more obscure. It was almost like reading the Bible. Actually, I came to realize that it was like reading the Bible. Just like the Holy Book, these works of literature were also holy books because they held meaning, deeply hidden, but waiting for the patient and active reader.
In these holy books, there were deep and cryptic lessons on the human condition. These books described a reality and an experience that was very different from my own, yet there were profound similarities. As M. H. Abrams once explained, "In a receptive reading of the text as literature...we participate from the inside with subjectivities very different from our own - the subjectivities both of the author and of the characters that the author has bodied forth - and so are enabled to see ourselves as others see us, to see others as they see themselves, and to acknowledge in others some part of ourselves." (4)
I read about myself in these works of fiction. In these books, I found my own experience, my own longings, my own fears, my own dreams. I was the invisible man. I was Holden Caulfield.
For some time, I had been searching for an identity and a place in the world. These books communicated truths that helped me to understand and articulate my inner self. Books also provided a link through the past with other people who wrestled with similar experiences and problems. I did not just read books, as the philosopher Montaigne once explained, I discussed and dialogued with the dead as contemporaries, as friends.
It would be a year later when I opened the pages of Thoreau’s Walden. At several times I almost stopped reading because the book was so difficult, but for some reason I kept coming back. I sensed that there was something – something that I needed to find in those pages. I felt urgency and impatience in Thoreau’s tone. I intuited a deep wisdom underlying his conversational prose.
It was as if this man was reaching through history, shaking me from a slumber, and trying to teach some hidden truth. And then I found it. I found a truth I will always carry with me.
Thoreau said to me, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, to live deep, to suck out the marrow of life, to put to route all that was not life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
As a boy, these words hit me like a hammer. I was anguished in my prison, realizing how I had not yet lived. I was stillborn. I had been wasting time playing empty games dictated by adults. My life was planned according to a pattern that chaffed and cut my inner self.
I felt transformed. For the first time my inner self felt legitimated and strangely powerful. I resolved to breathe after my own fashion. Let others be damned, I would see who was the strongest! I began to see life as a gift.
Despite external dictates and expectations, I realized life was mine to live as I would make it. My life was clay. I could form it according to my own design. I realized that Thoreau too had been trapped by the confines of tyrants. He too had been kept from living freely. But he rebelled against his fate. He made an exodus to the woods, sought out his true self, and managed to live deliberately at great personal cost.
“What concerns me now,” wrote Thoreau's friend Margret Fuller, “is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life.” (5) I would read Fuller’s much later in my life, but these words express the profound aspiration I had upon reading Thoreau for the first time.
Thoreau, Ellison, and Salinger gave voice to the rebel inside. I was inspired with a vision of another type of existence. I vowed to dig more deeply into life’s mystery and find my own way.
But who was I?
How should I live?
I knew nothing. I was totally ignorant about that which really mattered. So, until I could find my way, I became more actively rebellious, breaking the chains that bound my ability to be me.
I was at the beginning of a quest to live deliberately.
I wanted to discover my self and test the boundaries of being. I had found a way out, but I was not yet free. I realized that I could not act until I had broken away from the confinement of home schooling. I waited patiently for the first flower of freedom quickly budding within. I longed for high school because it would be my escape.
References
(1) Robert Nozick, The Examined Life (New York, 1989), 15.
(2) Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800 (London, 2010), 104.
(3) Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Touchstone, 1988), 245. I agree with Nussbaum that books can become false authorities and that, quoting Seneca, there should be "a space between you and the book" (35). However, I disagree when Nussbaum says that "books are not 'alive'" and that they display a "inflexible sameness, addressing very different people, always in the same way" (34). Instead, I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson who argued that books can communicate a person's ethos and experience, and that we can interact with a book as living thought. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 34-35.
(4) M. H. Abrams, "The Transformation of English Studies: 1930-1995," American Academic Culture in Transformation, Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds. (Princeton, 1997), 147.
(5) Margret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Larry J. Reynolds (New York, 1997).