On Reading A History of Reading
A few nights ago I finished reading a unique and interesting book: A History of Reading (New York : Viking, 1996), by Alberto Manguel. It's what it claims to be and is a lovely, literary and poetic tour through ideas associated with "the history of reading". (I have more to say about it in my Science Besieged book note.)
As usual now, at least with books that stimulate me, I collected a bunch of paragraphs that I wanted to make a note of; some are in the book note above, some end up here. There's no particular theme, just bits of resonance here and there.
This first one made me think of the current controversy — ripped from today's headlines! — about vaccinating school-aged girls against HPV, some detractors feeling that preventing a sexually transmitted cancer would lead to promiscuity. As we know, but as this demonstrates yet again, such notions that it's all for the good of the girls themselves are not really new.
After the letters had been learned, male teachers would be brought in as private tutors (if the family could afford them) for the boys, while the mother busied herself with the education of the girls. Even though, by the fifteenth century, most wealthy houses had the space, quiet and equipment to provide teaching at home, most scholars recommended that boys be educated away from the family, in the company of other boys; on the other hand, medieval moralists hotly debated the benefits of education — public or private — for girls. "It is not appropriate for girls to learn to read and write unless they wish to become nuns, since they might otherwise, coming of age, write or receive amorous missives," warned the nobleman Philippe de Novare, but several of his contemporaries disagreed. "Girls should learn to read in order to learn the true faith and protect themselves from the perils that menace their soul," argued the Chevalier de la Tour Landry. [p. 73]
I'm one of those people who has never felt quite like I was actually responsible for anything that I managed to accomplish. Years ago, in graduate school, a friend and I chuckled knowingly and recognized ourselves in a New Yorker cartoon showing a man sitting at a desk thinking "What if they find out?" We figured that being found out could happen anytime; it seems that Franz Kafka was a member of our group, too.
Kafka hated both the elementary school and, later, the Altstädter Gymnasium, or high school. He felt that, in spite of his successes (he passed all his grades easily), he had merely managed to deceive his elders and "to sneak from the first into the second Gymnasium grade, then into the third, and so on up the line. But," he added, "now that I had at last aroused their attention, I would o f course be immediately thrown out, to the immense satisfaction of all righteous men delivered from a nightmare." [p. 88]
Oh, now on to censorship — for our own good, naturally! Does this bit about Comstock and his fortitude in not wavering in the face of public opinion, when he knew he was on Jesus' mission, sound anything like any modern-day US presidents you know?
In 1872, a little over two centuries after Charles II's optimistic decree, Anthony Comstock — a descendant of the old colonialists who had objected to their sovereign's educating urges — founded in New York the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the first effective censorship board in the United States. All things considered, Comstock would have preferred that reading had never been invented ("Our father Adam could not read in Paradise," he once affirmed), but since it had, he was determined to regulate its use. Comstrock saw himself as a reader's reader, who knew what was good literature and what was bad, and did everything in his power to impose his views on others. "As for me," he wrote in his journal a year before the society's founding, "I am resolved that I will not in God's strength yield to other people's opinion but will if I feel and believe I am right stand firm. Jesus was never moved from the path of duty, however hard, by public opinion. Why should I be?" [p.284]
And a bit more about Comstock. Fortunately, Mencken had handy the pin to pop that balloon, a sentiment that seems widely applicable to today's moralists / ultra-conservatives.
"Art is not above morals. Morals stand first," Comstrock wrote. "Law ranks next as the defender of public morals. Art only comes in conflict with the law when its tendency is obscene, lewd or indecent." This led the New York World to ask, in an editorial, "Has it really been determined that there is nothing wholesome in art unless it has clothes on?" Comstock's definition of immoral art, like that of all censors, begs the question. Comstrock died in 1915. Two years later, the American essayist H.L. Mencken defined Comstock's crusade as "the new Puritanism", …"not ascetic but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock down sinners." [p. 287]
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Thursday, 22 February 2007 at 05.18
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-"the new Puritanism", …"not ascetic but militant. Its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock down sinners."-
I figured this meant the skewering of Bush and company by current blogsites, who think they are right and standing firm.
on Thursday, 22 February 2007 at 23.51
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RSF, speaking for myself, Bush's day to face the Ultimate Decider will come. I wouldn't want to be him when that happens, even considering just one commandment: thou shalt not lie. I'll criticize, with gusto, but I'll also leave final judgment of Bush to Whom it belongs.
on Friday, 23 February 2007 at 00.14
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Some people seem to need precisely defined, rigidly enforced rules starting from childhood. I suspect this is largely a matter of not being able to handle uncertainty, or worse, self-doubt, about being loved and accepted by others, especially parents.
So the deal as they understand it — and desperately want and need to understand it — is, if I always do these things and never do those things, I will be a good person, accepted and loved by people I care about and by God.
The thing is, childhood is about learning in many ways. These include doing wrong, absurd and/or impulsive things and suffering the consequences. Parenting, meanwhile, is about teaching children right from wrong on a level way above where love and acceptance reside in the heart and mind.
So kids do wrong things, get in trouble, get punished, maybe feel guilty about not being in mom and dad's good graces for awhile. But they learn early on that none of this results in denial of parental love and acceptance. If the young handle adolescence at all well, certainly if they manage to get beyond adolescence, they learn that all that catching hell for various infractions they endured was really their parents' love and acceptance in action.
I think people like Comstock fail to make some of those connections, maybe because they can't. I think they harbor serious feelings of self-doubt, even self-loathing, for things they thought, said or did that were never found out. They never got punished, so they harbor guilt and fear.
What I have no idea of is whether this psychological makeup is a matter of nature, nurture or some combination. If I had to guess, I'd say it's a combination.
Where this goes from being a neurosis to, I think, full-blown psychosis is when these rigid folk seek to exceed expectations of parents and God, maybe make up for some of their wickedness that went unpunished, by imposing their notions about right/wrong and love/acceptance on everyone else.