The Confession, Not the Priest

I have been corrected. It seems I have yet again made too much of modesty and been called to task for it. A friend wrote, having read my last, and told me to "stop going on and on about all the books you haven't read, especially the ones you have." It seems I do that quite a bit. My friend goes on to write flatteringly about my own reading, as just a bookseller and bibliophile, in comparison to his as a more educated and accomplished critic, though he didn't put it in quite those terms.

"You make too much of your lack of education. You own more books than any sane person I've ever met, and you've read more of what you own than I ever will."

I quote him here, and I hope he will forgive the liberty, because, while I am proud of his good esteem, and inclined to let him brag a bit for me, I question how he came to think that what I've read matters as much as how he has. My friend has always read to a purpose. He has studied and thought and considered in a way I never could, with tools I never acquired, with a discipline I lack, and always in pursuit of an entirely respectable goal; a degree, and then another, employment that pays more than a living wage, his own education and the opportunity to put that education to good use. It's true, I have read widely, obsessively and long, but I have never read anything with the intention of teaching it. If he has a list in mind of "all the classics" I've read that he hasn't, of "all the poetry and history" he never will read that I have, I'm inclined to ask him, in response, if he really believes he's suffered any more, and contributed less as a result of what he hasn't read, than I have done with my failure to do anything much with all I have? Who is the better man, for all our books?

I concede my vanity. It is no small thing I think, to cause such irritation to a good and faithful friend. But I do believe he misunderstands my modesty as false. My embarrassment at all I do not know, of all I have not read, or read well, or am unlikely to ever read, is genuine. Obviously he shares this with me, though he seems to feel he has a better right to it. I disagree. "Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think," Alexander Pope said. Mine has been the happiness of an easily amused man. My friend has known the enviable satisfaction of thinking, and writing, more deliberately than that. It is a question of volition, as well as condition. He has made much of the less he's read, but then he had, and took the chance to do so. If my choices were more circumscribed, they were none the less my own. If all I have to show for the education I did not get from schools, but from books, is the library I sit in, writing just this, then I have every right to preface my remarks with any apology I think appropriate for the opinions I herein express. If I harp too much on the same string, reminding my few but faithful readers and friends that my only qualification for writing here at all, namely my acquaintance with the books I sell, the books I own, and the books I've read, what else, pray tell, should I do but ask for their indulgence of my presumption? I've never had to teach anyone else how or what to read. I've seldom written anything that has earned me so much as the price of a good lunch, or with any more lofty aim than the entertainment of my friends and the passage of a happy hour or two at my desk.

"You are no dilettante," he tells me, but how else define the word if not by my example?

As to my education and the want I've felt of a better all my life, again, there is, in the end, no one more responsible for that than I am. Such correction as I've made of the inadequacies I've experienced may seem admirable, at least in the absence of any substantial accomplishment resulting, and yes, I am not too little proud of what I have managed lazily to read, but the central lesson of my reading life has been an appreciation, an awe of all I do not know. If in communicating that I've failed, or if, in the attempt, I've given the impression that my intention was to parade such erudition as I can claim, then I would as soon not write here again or at all. But I am willing to risk misunderstanding of my motives, if I can communicate at least something of my reverence for my books.

Evidently, I need to stop being so unforgiving of the education I did get. At least I was taught enough to know I was not being taught enough. That's something more than many might claim. But every discovery I make, later and later in life, makes me wonder that such good things were never put before me when I might have put them to better use?

How was this possible? How had I never read Pope but in passing and with so little remembered pleasure? My assumption has been that my lack of a higher education had kept me from appreciating the poet's place in our literature and language. I must have missed out on the class or classes that might have taught me better. Turns out, from subsequent conversation with my friend, and with other equally accomplished English majors from respectable colleges, they were no more likely to have read Pope at length than I had been with a rather modest high school diploma. Seems Pope need not be any better taught, or taught at better length, nowadays, than any other dead white male. I was reminded that professors teach to the length of a lesson plan, just as their inferiors do in public high schools, and that other than what can be passed over in a survey of The Norton Anthology, is no more likely to register with an undergraduate at Harvard than it might have done with me. It seems, at least according to my friend, that most better educated people in this country are no more likely than I was to have read much of anything by any given author, whatever his place in that now somewhat discredited, rather ramshackle Holy that used to be reverently called The Pantheon. Now, those with decent degrees will have learned, it seems, to read deeper, and presumably more thoroughly and thoughtfully than I am ever likely to on my own, a fact I've come sadly to accept as irreparable, but as to what they've read in learning these enviable critical skills, that, it seems, is now something of a crapshoot.

And yet, having come to accept that one need not have read Dickens or Dryden, or even Pope or much of Shakespeare (!) to deserve and receive a degree in English, I am so regularly mortified by my own ignorance of so much that by right is understood to be "essential reading," I can not shake the nagging thought that too much that is not only good but great, too much that is not only important and worthy, but more entertaining, enlarging and fun than a goodly portion of the literature that is used and taught, has been allowed to fall into the shade of considerably lesser, if more easily taught, talents. Who, for example, chose The Rape of the Lock and why, if not for the most obvious reason of length? If that work is even still taught at all, in high school or after, there must be a better reason for preferring it to all the other products of Pope's pen? I wish this could be explained to me. It seems, even on rereading, an unlikely choice, requiring as it seems to, more reading about than reading, if it is to be understood by contemporary students? I know I was glad to come to it again after I'd read not just a biography of Pope, but much of the rest of his work. And while my instructor was about it, he or she could also tell me why any poor soul is made to march through the whole vast acreage of Clarissa, and never let to run with Tom Jones or Perigrine Pickle? Why the pleasures of Vanity Fair might not suit the purpose as well as any earnest "problem" novel of the period?

But now here I am presuming too much again on my own experience, criticizing institutions of which I have had entirely too little experience, and, it would appear, risking again being thought a popinjay for reviewing my own reading even as I lament my lack of higher education. It seems I am exactly the kind of hopelessly woolly-minded egotist my friend so gently tried to stop me being here.

Give it up, my dear, I am incorrigible.