I've had a stressful day. I'm in Pune, India, consulting for a humanitarian aid NGO and training to be a water purification specialist for refugee camps. I've been up since 5:30 a.m., I'm adjusting to a new place, new food, people staring at me all the time like I'm a freak; I'm disciplining myself to smile back warmly, learning new information, lining up the next job, planning research for the next novel, studying French, managing the sublet of my house in another country; by 8 p.m., I was stressed. I needed a drink, but -- because I'm going to Chiplune, in rural Maharashtra, tomorrow to document disaster risk reduction programming in a landslide zone; departure time: 5:00 a.m. -- I needed first to buy a small duffel bag and a notebook and pen. (Somehow I have two mobile phones, two laptops, a camera, a camcorder, an iPod, an mp3 player, a flash drive and an external hard drive with me, but no notebook.)
On my way down Paud Road in Kothrud, Pune, in search of a notebook, I passed a sheet spread out on the rubble at the side of the road (what passes for sidewalk). On the sheet were copies of books, mostly used. I began scanning the titles. A man, the bookseller, heaved himself towards me, and I waved my hands to indicate that I didn't want any intrusion on my browsing. Jeffrey Archer, P.G. Wodehouse, John Grisham. Blink. Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, a book that'd been on my father's bookshelf my entire childhood. The Warren Buffet Way. Four copies of The Earth Is Flat. The Greatness Guide by Robin Sharma. Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul I, II AND III. A wide assortment of Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist, Brida, The Witch of Portobello, Like the Flowing River, The Zahir. The Harry Potter series, including Tales of the Beetle Bard. White Tiger, Inheritance of Loss; How Opal Metha Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.
A slim volume caught my attention: The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Short-listed for the Booker. I'd heard of it. I hadn't seriously considered reading it until it was in my hands. I approached the bookseller and negotiated, ultimately paying less than two dollars.
As I slipped the book in my bag and headed off in search of my notebook, I noticed that my mood was perceptibly lightened. I felt positively buoyant. I had no doubt that my levity was thanks to browsing. In glancing over unrelated titles and drawing connections between them ("So this is how Indians see the U.S.," "So these are the titles that transcend the preference of regional and natonal markets"), in giving time to titles that I wouldn't have chosen (circumstances being conducive) to mull, I'd dislodged the neurotic miasma that'd been souring my evening.
My newfound cheeriness wasn't impaired by the discovery that I'd purchased a counterfeit book -- decent cover but poorly bound and with wobbly centering of the printing on the page -- or the follow-on conclusion that I'd way overpaid.
A recent NY Times articleon the urgent need for humanities departments at universities to justify themselves in light of tough economic times closed with this dispiriting quote:
As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being
what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a
minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the
province of the wealthy.
That may be unfortunate but inevitable,
Mr. Kronman [a law professor at Yale] said. The essence of a humanities education -- reading the
great literary and philosophical works and coming "to grips with the
question of what living is for" -- may become "a great luxury that many
cannot afford."
What crap.
Reading the great books can be done for free, if you don't mind reading them online at Google Books, or if you're Neanderthal enough to use a library. As for grappling with, as another scholar put it, "what it means to be a human being," you don't need money for that, either. In fact, being utterly impoverished is perhaps the best prescription for wrestling with the meaning of human existence.
The "great luxury" is not the inquiry that animates any humanities curriculum, but rather a course of study at an elite university. It's typical of the myopia of professors at such institutions to confuse graduating from an ivory tower with getting an "education." Such snobbishness also feeds growing perceptions (incorrect, in my view) that education in the humanities is useless.
On the contrary, what's of decreasing use in our ever-more-globalized world is the silly notion that wealth and prestige protect one from the vicissitudes of life. This lesson is one that Americans (and especially American hedge-fund managers) are loathe to learn. A genuine education in the humanities would rectify that mistake.
I love reading novels for three reasons, primarily. The first is relief of boredom. The second is the pleasurable stimulation I experience when I'm engaged in a story. And the third is the comfort I derive from novels. Learning from Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, for example, that the contours of generation struggle have changed remarkably little since the nineteenth century made me feel wonder at the consistency of human travails throughout time and the support we can find in the written records of our forebears.
That said, I didn't expect to find comfort in novels for the irritation and insecurity occasioned by the current state of the publishing industry. The decline in reading rates, the competition from the Internet and video games, the market preference for memoirs/how-to's/biz books, the current economic downturn -- these harbingers of the death of the novel I took to be burdens I'd have to shoulder without aid from authors of an earlier era. How often I'd thought my publishing woes would be solved if only I'd been writing during the heyday of Grove Press, in the years of Max Perkins . . .
But Jane Austen set me straight. "[I]f the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. . . . Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body," Austen writes, taking her stand in Northanger Abbey. "Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers."
Ah me. To be assuaged with such thorny balm -- the assurance that writing novels would be a miserable pursuit whenever I'd be born; to be comforted with the knowledge that reports of the death of the novel are greatly exaggerated -- and have been so for some two hundred years; I can only love reading novels even more.
