Reading is a superpower because when we are reading, we are not just conversing with the dead who created it, but all the dead people who have read that book since, your predecessors, your ancestors, who picked this book up in a library, whose parents read it to them, who were recommended it by a friend whose lives were changed by the ideas. ~ Ryan Holiday
Recently, I was texting with my friend Blue O’Connell about her idea to do a group art event at our downtown public library in celebration of books and in particular, books that are being banned. Her idea sparked something in me. Soon we were having one of those thrilling text threads that rolled and scrolled down my phone.
Here’s part of what she said:
I think one of the causes of the current predicament we are in is lack of education and lack of critical thinking skills. Reading promotes awareness and knowledge. The book that made me an avid reader is now a banned book - the autobiography of Frederick Douglass (Narrative of Frederick Douglass). It resonated so strongly with me because my early years of schooling in inner city Chicago was very bad. In the 60s, I remember riots and gang fights and getting out of school early. I remember teachers locking themselves out of the classroom because of kids throwing things at them. When transferred to the suburbs later in my life, I was tested as 4 grades behind. I was a poor student too, I preferred to daydream out the window and check out. Here I was a white girl but school to me was a form of slavery. I didn’t know how to appreciate learning and see it as empowering until I read Frederick Douglass’ story. But when I read Douglass’s story -- about how he found a way to educate himself against all odds and learned the knowledge = freedom -- that lit a fire in me that changed my life! Once I fell in love with reading - I went from being a high risk student to honor roll. Next book was Jane Eyre!
Blue’s story exhilarates me: to have the trajectory of your life changed so profoundly by reading one book! Here, it seems to me, was proof of the extraordinary power of words, stories and ideas.
My own life has been filled with books and reading from as early as I can remember. There was never a time that I didn’t like reading and stories. The sheer volume of books that have touched me would be impossible to count. So to hear Blue be able to point to one book that changed her and opened her to her own intelligence was a revelation.
And it got me thinking: was there one book that opened me? My first answer was no, it was the ever-presence of books and stories and learning that guided me from childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood. Most conversations with my closest friends have somewhere in them the question, “What are you reading right now?” Books are how I sort out the world. Every book has opened me in some way, I couldn’t possibly point to just one.
But all jazzed up about this library project had me awake at 2am and it was then that I remembered Mr. McSweeny. He was practically mythical in my high school mind. He taught Shakespeare and Chaucer and all the honors English classes. He was terrifying, but his were the only English classes I wanted to be in.
As a freshman, I petitioned get into the one elective class he taught. It wasn’t open to 9th graders but I went to my advisor and begged to be allowed to take it. It was called Utopian and Dystopian Novel and I had no idea what that meant but I didn’t care. I just wanted to take it.
Apparently, I was annoying enough or persistent enough to get in.
We read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels. We read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I loved George Orwell’s Animal Farm because I got it, I understood it even without Mr. McSweeny’s annotation.
But it was Orwell’s 1984 that broke open my awareness, that changed how I viewed culture, government and politics.
It was Big Brother and “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” It was “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” It was two plus two make five.
This is what it would look like if the whole system got distorted and power was for power’s sake. This is the kind of internal violence, and thought invasion that could happen if the goal was not to govern but to control and manipulate.
And like Animal Farm, I got it. I didn’t like it but I got it. In the early 80s, however, this was something that happened in the Soviet Union or somewhere frightening, cold and far away.
Last month, Stoic philosopher, Ryan Holiday was scheduled to speak at the U.S. Naval Academy on the Stoic virtue of wisdom (listen to his talk here). Just before he was scheduled to go on, his hosts asked him to remove any criticism of the recent decision to remove nearly 400 books from the Academy library. He said no. He was clear that he could not talk about wisdom and not seriously question that decision.
Stoic Philosopher, Ryan Holiday
In his banned lecture, he said,
[A]lmost 400 books have been removed from the Naval Academy Library and ... this was no accident, but in fact the official policy of the United States government. And when I first saw the news on April 1st, I suspected at first that it was an April fool's joke. The idea that the best and brightest students in the country are seen as too fragile, too easily manipulable, too susceptible to be exposed to works that people don't like or disagree with. This transgresses the very ethos, the very purpose of higher education, which is to challenge, which is to open doors, which is to allow you to understand things and understanding and being familiar with something is not the same as liking or endorsing or embracing it.
His intention was not to discuss politics directly, put anyone on the spot or cause anyone trouble. In his New York Times op-ed about the incident, he writes
I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.
As Blue and I (and I bet YOU) know, books, stories and words are powerful. And if your goal is to hold onto power for power’s sake, by all means, keep people from books, stories and words.
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” says language specialist Syme in 1984.
“They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em” says Rage Against the Machine.
“You should be curious. You should investigate. You should put everything to the test, as Epictetus said. Find out for yourself. Do your own research. It's why we don't need to be scared about the books you have access to. ...[T]his has to be the work of our life, this path to wisdom and education,” said Ryan Holiday. (Do listen to his talk here. It’s great.)
What’s a book that opened you up in some way? What’s your story about that book? Who would you be without it?