Part I: False Starts

In twenty-five years of teaching high school English, I’ve often given a little speech that starts something like this: whatever you end up doing, whatever your career or way of living, keep reading – fiction, nonfiction, any genre or topic you choose – because you’ll eventually come across something that you need to read. As speeches go, it’s probably a bit soft and fluffy, and many students, I’m sure, have felt that they would do just fine reading nothing at all. And they may be right. But I’ve aged into the kind of fellow who wants to tell you that a book at your elbow is always a good thing – that (to paraphrase a former professor of mine) literature, and the skills needed to understand it, are equipment for living.

In a collection of essays, Wayne C. Booth writes about literature as “the company we keep” – a kind of social and ethical fellowship in which we, the readers, are shaped by the characters we encounter and their confrontations with the worlds they inhabit. I’ve always liked Booth’s way of describing the rhetorical methods and effects of literature – all of the levers and trap doors and hidden bookcases that authors use (or fail to use, or stubbornly resist, or deliberately misapply) to manipulate us into a particular worldview. I like knowing how the machinery of fiction works, how the gears and pulleys operate. Beyond that, though, it’s an article of faith that reading changes us and potentially extends to a reality beyond the page. As Booth points out in an essay called “Rhetoric and Reality,” it’s not just that language reflects reality – language creates reality, tangibly, out there, “in real life.” Language is action, and literature is the most dynamic application of language that we encounter.

So, a good novel gives us good company and, often, leaves us more or less as it found us – but, like Chaucer’s pilgrims telling their tales on the way to Canterbury, the company we find helps pass some time on a longer journey. That alone is significant. A great novel (and that phrase is subjective, I know) gives us good company and passes the time, too – but also, I think, delivers a psychic kick to the head, a realignment of soul and cosmos, and we remain changed long after the book is back on its shelf. There’s a sort of narrative alchemy (as a friend of mine puts it) by which all of the nitty-gritty elements of fiction durably transcend the whole they make.

This summer, I was in the mood for a psychic kick to the head. I’d spent a year huffing and puffing my way from one cardiologist to another, until I finally got myself to a surgeon who could repair a kinked valve and reshape an enlarged septal wall. That was very good news – but there were other problems besides my heart. I was feeling, not depressed, but mentally tired, worn thin, emotionally dull around the edges, squidgy in my thinking, sloppy in my habits. And I had this vague notion that, the body and mind being linked, repairing one could mean repairing the other. I went on medical leave in early June (wonderful colleagues swooped in to close out my classes and wrap up final tasks), had myself an open heart surgery, and returned home with a few conspicuous scars and a reading list primed for psychic transformation.

But there were false starts.

For example, I thought that Dante would be good for me. I knew the famous opening lines of The Inferno:

Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood,

for the right way was lost.

And here I was, midway on the journey of my life, after the task of raising children into young adulthood, having sent the two youngest off to college and now watching the oldest launch an exciting new career after moving to a different part of the state, far enough away to make “popping in” a challenge. Ahead of me: the dark wood of tuition payments, a mortgage, rising taxes, inflation, aging, and a mere decade or so until retirement, which all at once seems like too much and not enough. (And, to counterbalance: the new and happy phase of a stable, sustaining marriage – I am not describing a midlife crisis here, just a change in perspective, a view from a strange new summit.) So, why not tag along with Dante and Virgil as they moved from hell to paradise? I found myself a good bilingual translation (Robert and Jean Hollander, a husband-wife team, huzzah!) that supplied many helpful annotations. And I subscribed to a podcast that carefully discussed each canto.

But I didn’t make it past the first circle of hell. I knew I was out when I read these verses:

Here, as far as I could tell by listening, 

was no lamentation other than the sighs

that kept the air forever trembling.

These came from grief without torment

borne by vast crowds

of men, and women, and little children.

This is Dante in limbo, where those who “lived before the Christians lived” and “did not worship God aright” are sent. It’s the home of Virgil, whom Beatrice sent to guide Dante from the dark wood – so our Dante’s tour guide is on a hall pass from hell. 

And I think I knew, academically, that this part was coming. That is, I haven’t read The Divine Comedy (it’s amazing what you don’t have to read to earn a literature degree), but I knew enough about limbo, and where it was in the scheme of things. I should have been expecting this group of worthy poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and so many anonymous others who, by the chance of some careless chronology, had been born before Christ. And I knew, too, that Dante was pulling his own levers and turning his own gears – that to write about the torment of innocents was not to endorse that torment. (This week, back at school, a colleague of mine suggested that Dante is critiquing an injustice here, and I take his point.) But, back home from the hospital, barely able to hold my shoulders straight as I took my first short steps up and down the block, I wasn’t in the mood for any of this, irony or not. I’ve heard plenty of unironic rhetoric about the impossibility of being “saved” unless one were properly baptized, and I’ve paid a price for saying “no thanks” to those who insisted I get myself redeemed. In June, I wasn’t up to the task of suspending my personal grudges for the sake of Dante’s epic poem. I was taking it too personally. This is my fault and I own it.

Someday I’ll come back to The Divine Comedy, though. I don’t know Italian, so I can’t comment on the Hollander translation, but I enjoyed the quality of the verse and the thoroughness of the annotations. This title remains on the to-read list.

Given my irrational reaction to Dante, I’m not sure why I pulled Tolstoy’s A Confession off the shelf, except that, last spring, I had led (poorly, I think) a group of college freshmen through The Death of Ivan Ilyich. There is something to be said about the age at which we read certain books, and I had chosen Tolstoy for my evening students because, well, it had once been taught when I was a young college student. So, we spent a couple of late afternoons talking about Ilyich’s gradually shrinking world, the collapse of his pleasures into pain, the rare comforts of simple human touch – and I could tell that this short work was equipment for living, yes, but I was the one being equipped. If the students were getting very much from the book, I couldn’t tell. I was distracted in my teaching, though I tried my best.

Even so, I left the course with some questions about Tolstoy’s spiritual ideas, and I suppose that’s why I decided to follow up, in June, with his religious writings.

But I found myself impatient with Tolstoy. Here, for example, is what he sounds like as he goes through the spiritual crisis that is at the heart of A Confession:

… I was surrounded on all sides by what is considered complete happiness: I was not yet fifty, I had a kind, loving and beloved wife, lovely children, and a large estate that was growing and expanding with no effort on my part. I was respected by relatives and friends far more than ever before. I was praised by strangers and could consider myself a celebrity without deceiving myself …

There’s a lot of this kind of writing in A Confession – he tells us about the horses he has, his assured place in the literary pantheon, the sexual conquests he had enjoyed, his strength and vitality and ability to work hard like the peasants he educated – and then, he follows up with lengthy lamentations that all of it was meaningless:

The spiritual condition presented itself to me in the following manner: my life is some kind of stupid and evil joke that someone is playing on me. Despite the fact that I did not acknowledge any such “someone,” who might have created me, this concept of there being someone playing a stupid and evil joke on me by bringing me into the world came to me as the most natural way of expressing my condition. 

There’s a lot of this, too — thoughts of suicide and a stubborn rejection of any existential comforts. For Tolstoy in this state, there’s no relief to be found in fellow humans, metaphysics, work, art, and so on.

I can’t make light of Tolstoy’s spiritual condition here. I know that the finality of death can provoke a sense of futility like the one he expresses: what is the point of all this struggling, all these failures and successes, if we inevitably die someday? If there is no God, no plan, then life may indeed seem like a capricious prank, so much sound and fury, etc. These agonies are real, and I’m not making light of those who feel them.

The thing is, this kind of spiritual crisis has always felt a bit overstated to me, and, to borrow a phrase from William James, Tolstoy’s declarations sometimes sound like the sick shrieking of a dying rat. I simply do not understand why the transience of existence renders it meaningless. I tend to be the sort of fellow who believes that the fleeting nature of life is what gives it meaning, and yes, there is a sort of “purgatorial sadness” (James again) to our mortal condition, but it’s a condition that makes possible our joy, too. 

Not that I didn’t value parts of Tolstoy’s confession; I’m merely saying that his feelings of hopelessness in the face of death come from a worldview with which I’ve been unable to connect; consequently, I’m not driven, like he is, to contextualize all of reality within theism, and especially monotheism, and especially monotheism in which the deity is a personal one. This is where Tolstoy seems to end up; his discovery of God is what saves him. That said, I did admire the way that Tolstoy comes to faith while avoiding strict religious orthodoxy:

And I saw that the Orthodox, although they may try to hide it, regard with hostility all those who do not practise their faith by using the same external symbols and words as themselves. And this could not be otherwise, first of all because the assertion that you live in falsehood and I in truth is the most cruel thing that one man can say to another and secondly, because a man who loves his children and his brothers cannot help feeling hostile towards those who want to convert his children and his brothers to a false belief. And this hostility increases in proportion to one’s knowledge of theology. And assuming that truth lies in union by love, I was struck by the fact that theology was destroying the very thing it was advancing.

If you grew up with and left a religion that claimed to be the only true one, it’s reassuring to read something like this, written long before you were born, and know that you were not as alone as you were made to feel. That said – well, I’ve already thought and read and written about this sort of thing before; I’ve already processed these ideas and feelings, and they weren’t something I needed to confront again, not in this confessional form, at least. My interest was distant.

I am not doing justice to Tolstoy. I’m not explaining very well his conception of God or the importance he gives to tradition, and I’m not contextualizing his views in a reliable way. But I’m not trying to write a thorough critical summary or review. I’m just saying: for the most part, this wasn’t the kind of company I wanted to keep this summer. But I did read all of A Confession, and, when I’m in another mood someday, I’ll tackle the other religious essays in the Penguin collection, just to be tidy and, I hope, fair.

There was one part of A Confession that’s stayed with me, though. Here, Tolstoy is writing about the role of art and education in a meaningful life:

The view of life adopted by these people, my literary associates, was that generally speaking life is a process of development in the course of which the most important role is played by us, the thinkers; and that among the thinkers it is we, the artists and poets, who have the most influence. Our vocation is to educate people. In order to avoid being confronted by the obvious question – “What do I know and what have I got to teach?” – their theory explained that it is not necessary to know this and that the poet and the artist teach unconsciously.

That “obvious question” is one that haunts Tolstoy, who is troubled that he cannot directly answer it. Part of his spiritual crisis goes beyond the fear of death. It also comes from a feeling of his own ignorance, a sense that he may be a fraud. His crisis comes because he does not know, clearly and rationally, how to explain the universe, its properties, the nature of space and time and causality, of existence and the nothingness before and after it; therefore, he is unqualified to be a teacher, even in his “unconscious” role as an artist. His success as an artist – the fame, the wealth, the enduring literary reputation he earned within his lifetime – are no substitute for a proper answer to this question: “What do I know and what have I got to teach?” His answer is a quiet, deflated, “I don’t know.” The language of his art failed to create, for him, a reality in which he could feel helpful, useful, and self-improving.

All summer, after I left Tolstoy behind, this “obvious question” kept surfacing, in various forms, for me. I was about to have a long, indulgent break from the routines of my life. I had no task other than to read, walk a bit every day, and be good company for my family and friends. The weather was usually pleasant. Our shady backyard gave me a reliable breeze. A pair of robins built a nest on the broad branch of a maple tree next to the porch where I read. My wife and I played gin by the open front window and watched young parents pushing strollers up and down the sidewalk. But I knew I would be going back to work in September, and I would be with students again, playing the role of someone who knew something and had something to teach. 

What did I know? What have I got to teach?