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As a life-long reader, I am inspired by Matthew Long’s Beyond the Bookshelf, an exploration of “the intersection of life and literature.” His Substack publication asks:
—How does what we read influence how we live our lives?
—How do our life experiences influence what we read?
But the thing about intersections? They can cause a lot of accidents.
When my life first intersected with the books I needed the most—Walden, Freedom from the Known, A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook, the Tao Te Ching—I crashed. I couldn’t live up to the ideals I’d been digesting and I blamed both myself and the world, and sometimes the book.
Freedom, that’s what I was looking for in those early years, and these literary works bespoke the notion from just about every angle. But I thought freedom was something you get, not something you realize, and so for the most part I missed the message (though it was brewing).
I burned a book once. I’m not proud of it. Thankfully it was not a public book burning. I performed the ghastly deed on a charcoal grill behind the little house I once shared with my young children and their mother. The book was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I destroyed my copy of this heavy, controversial novel not because I rejected its hypothesis. At the time I was a sucker for Rand’s views on rationalism, individual rights, and self-interest as a moral imperative. In the 1990s I was probably an angry libertarian-in-the-making: Seatbelt laws? An infringement on my personal liberty! Smoking bans? Those stupid enough to smoke will learn their own lesson. Income taxes? Invasive and unfair!
Oh, but I have changed since then, considerably. Age, an open mind, and lots of reading have made me less angry and defensive, more compassionate, understanding, and liberal minded. I would sum up my evolved sociopolitical views in this way: We all have to live together so let’s agree on a set of rules that benefits everyone, and let’s take good care of each other.
But back then... I was young, emotional, unhappy in my career, unhappy in my mistake of a marriage, and feeling trapped by the demands of a life I’d carelessly co-created.
I’ll tell you why I burned that book. Because my clarity of mind and my moral courage were not even close to that of Rand’s uncompromisingly self-assured architect, Howard Roark, who proclaims in the face of those who would have him sacrifice himself to the common good, “I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine.”
Pshaw, I was an emotional wreck compared to Roark. Or to Rand’s other iron-willed exemplar of masculinity, the powerful steel magnate, Hank Reardon, in Atlas Shrugged. Or to Krishnamurti and his intransigent dedication to affecting a revolution of the mind by dismissing all authority, all conditioning, and meeting life head-on, without fear, judgment, or desire. Or even compared to Thoreau, my hero, a man who chose solitude over domesticity, and never seemed to waver in his self-legislative march:
“I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me.”
My diminished life of domesticity included a wife who disdained my reading, two babies who needed food, clothing, and an endless supply of diapers, and a pile of bills that just kept sprouting like bacteria in the mailbox. And I dreamed of living alone in a cabin in the woods? Of going back to college? Of quitting my carpentry job and becoming an artist? Not saying I would have done these things at the time, at least not at cost of taking care of my family, but it would have been nice to have a little support, a little hope for the future.
I dreamed, I was a dreamer! I knew life could be better, fuller, richer, more meaningful.
But my wife hated my dreams. She hated my books. She hated that I turned down a job as crew foreman for a large commercial bridge-building firm. If I had to work construction I at least wanted to work with wood—a beautiful, living material—not with cold steel and sterile concrete, girders and re-bar and greasy construction equipment. The very idea felt like prison to me.
That my life partner so palpably resented my unwillingness to take a position that would have doused my flickering light did not bode well for our future partnership.
You’ve probably grasped that I had taken a wrong turn in my life and was now trying to figure out how to live with the consequences. Books helped. A lot. But sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I wavered. In those moments, I blamed my books for my unhappiness, for evincing a world I could dream of but never obtain, and I empathized with my wife for the insecurity I must surely be causing her.
My self-doubts were especially poignant on this day. The book I was reading at the time took the fall. I made a ritual act of dousing The Fountainhead with lighter fluid and dropping a hissing match onto its cover. I was alone, but I left the charred remains on the grill, artlessly hoping my wife would see what I’d done for her.
I replaced the copy, of course. And less than a year later I became a marriage statistic.
Nowadays I read anything I want, whenever I want. I read fifty books a year and the only people I allow in my life are those who can respect that. I did continue to make my living as a carpenter but I’ve also dedicated much of my spare time to working with wood as an art form, building furniture, guitars, a cedar canoe. I did finally return to college to earn my degree in English, with a focus on American literature and Thoreau in particular. And I even lived by myself in a cabin in New Mexico for one summer.
It’s been a long, slow process of recovering from my early mistakes, and books have accompanied me, guided me, and entertained me through the ensuing years. I’m currently finishing The World is Briefly Gorgeous, a heartbreakingly beautiful book about a boy who grew up in a working-class New England neighborhood not too dissimilar from my own. The author, Ocean Vuong, writes of the limited but liberating capacity of books:
“A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.”
I, for one, am certainly moved by the limitless pages of literature. Moved to check my self-defeating assumptions and to trust my inner voice; moved to, perhaps not fly, but to walk confidently in the direction of my own heart; and moved to understand that I already am what I’ve wanted to be for so long: I am free.
Books and publications mentioned:
Long, Matthew, Beyond the Bookshelf
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: or Life in the Woods. 1854
—The Journal of Henry T. Thoreau. Volume I, 1837-1855
Krishnamurti, J. Freedom from the Known. 1969
Krenov, James. A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook. 1976
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. 4th century BC
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943
—Atlas Shrugged. 1957
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. 2019
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So interesting!
I have never read AR however I have a friend who confided in me several years ago that I was the only person she felt safe to tell that she loved AR as a young woman and still resonated with the idea that personal autonomy, rightly expressed, results in benefit for everyone. To me, unity as diverse flourishing occurs when we occupy sovereignty and oneness as two equal sides of the same coin, and having realized at least a little, that our oneness is with G-d (or the Womb/No-Thing/Buddha Mind/Christ consciousness, whatever) - as well as with our entire physical ecosystem, including one another (we all share air, water and matter with Gaia) we won't want to exploit or hurt our own bodies - at least if we are healing any self-hatred we may have and are working through an psychic autoimmune diseases whereby we attack some aspect of ourselves. At the same time, I don't believe in the social contract because it was never entered into honestly by any of us. A truly benevolent society looks nothing like the right or the left.
I once wrote a poem about a bird with two things, one on each side, and a heart that pumps blood to both so they can balance and the ether/spirit that animates the whole bird so it's heart can beat, it's wings can pump and it can fly! How can we find the win win win win soulutions if our free speech is suppressed and we are limited to a solutions presented by those who created the problems, then call us a certain kind of theoriest when we point this out? How can we truly care for people if we suppress viewpoints that inconvenience control agendas and only virtue signal without truly improving the lives of vulnerable people?
So much good stuff in here Don; I just wanted to say that I read Vuong’s book a while back, and that EXACT line that you quoted is one that’s stayed with me for so long, and I see that it’s stayed with you as well, which is lovely to know.
Also as an aside, I studied in a Krishnamurthi school (one of the OG ones founded by the man himself!) for two years as a teenager, and I certainly wasn’t able to reject all conditioning, judgement and authority in the way that he wrote about, haha.