The world’s largest civilian hospital ship takes volunteer medical staff to the Third World where they have restored sight to thousands of people suffering from cataracts and returned smiles to victims of facial tumors and cleft palates. Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes reports.
Perhaps the world’s most beautiful and unique church, the Sagrada Família in Barcelona has been under construction for more than 130 years, since genius architect Antoni Gaudí started working on it in 1883. Long after his death, builders are using modern technology to realize the master architect’s vision. Lara Logan of 60 Minutes reports.
My students are reading Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse (1927), a landmark of modernist fiction that the author regarded as “easily the best of my books.” It is a difficult work to read. Woolf re-forms the conventions of the novel through her experimental use of nonlinear plot, stream-of-consciousness, and multiple narrators. To acclimate, I am turning to Woolf’s advice in a 1925 essay entitled “How Should One Read a Book?”, found in The Second Common Reader.
A disclaimer on subjectivity:
The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at the liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.
A caution against preconceptions:
[F]ew people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.
On the osmotic skills of reading and writing:
Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties with words.
On the special skill of exercising the imagination:
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist — the great artist — gives you.
On the incubation period of reading:
The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgement upon those multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.
On the cultivation of taste:
It would be foolish … to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first — to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating — that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to say, ‘Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is good.’ To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our won identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathize wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, ‘I hate, I love,’ and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts — poetry, fiction, history, biography — and has stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective.
On how a reader influences the author:
[I]f to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
On how reading is an intellectual and creative reward in itself:
I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, those need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’
Here are two excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College, published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.
On the value of a liberal arts education:
It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
On worship:
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
Part 1
Part 2
Here is a round-up of some favorite self-inventories and resolutions:
Video from the National Prayer Breakfast (February 2, 2012):
From an interview with National Review:
LOPEZ: Is the prayer breakfast just a big show, or is it a real cultural/spiritual opportunity?
METAXAS: It can be both. For some it’s a lot of hoo-ha, a chance to hobnob with all kinds of powerful people, but for many others it’s a glorious and deeply spiritual experience. As with so many things in life, what it is depends on what we bring to it. One thing is for sure, much good has come out of it over the years.
LOPEZ: Is there something confusing to people — even scandalous — about hanging out and joking with people who we believe represent evil policies — abortion, the erosion of religious freedom?
METAXAS: That’s a spectacular question. And the answer is complicated, because ultimately this is a judgment call, with two sides that need to be considered carefully.
On the one hand, God commands us to love our enemies. He makes clear that if we think we are morally superior to them, we are mistaken. In his eyes, we are not, and he loves our enemies because they are children created in his image. If they are wayward children, utterly lost and misguided, it breaks his heart and on some level it should break our hearts too, and motivate us to prayer, not just to anger. Also, the idea that I cannot sit at a table with the purveyors of awful ideas is something like saying Jesus ought not to have spent time among prostitutes and drunkards. That’s what the Pharisees thought. So yes, we are to go to those who need help the most. It’s an opportunity to reach the lost with the love of God.
On the other hand, the Bible clearly says that Christians are to be very careful with whom we associate, that we are to avoid even “the appearance of evil.” So if I’m seen hugging the leader of North Korea, that can send a message that he’s not such a bad guy, and by the way he is a very bad guy. We have to think about the Christians being imprisoned and tortured by him for their faith. So hanging out with Kim Jong Un could be a very bad idea. Billy Graham got in trouble for this very thing, for naïvely letting the Soviets use him in photo ops. And yet Pope John Paul II visited Cuba during Castro’s regime. In my Bonhoeffer book I talk about how Bonhoeffer was disgusted that some Christians still had this naïve idea that Hitler and Himmler could be converted and were making efforts to get personal time with them, when Bonhoeffer said that that time is past, that these men must be assiduously avoided.
So that’s the question: Has the Obama administration’s record on abortion and on religious freedom made it impossible for serious Christians to reach out to them? When do we say: Enough is enough. We will no longer allow you to co-opt us and pretend that you care about these issues when it seems clear from you actions and policies that you don’t? The president’s track record on religious freedom is scary. So yes, I take this seriously. But I don’t think we are to shrink from judiciously reaching out. We are to speak the truth in love and use our judgment and discernment as best we can. We won’t always get it right, but we must try.
J. K. Rowling recently appeared as a guest on Charlie Rose. She said something about storytelling that bears repeating:
The urge to write comes from a wish to rearrange reality – the reality you are in.
Can infants tell right from wrong? And if so, how would you know? Come to Yale’s baby lab. 60 Minutes Lesley Stahl reports.
W. H. Auden on William Shakespeare’s play, Measure for Measure:
Angelo starts off thinking that the law against fornication is a good law, both for him and for others, and others think he can fulfill the law easily, that he is passionless. They are both wrong. He has a unique relation to law. He wants to be celibate, but there is a difference between his and Isabell’s wish to be so. Isabella wants to give her self to celibacy for the sake of God and her neighbor. Angelo wants to be celibate as a matter of pride because he doesn’t want to be weak like Lucio. A terrible revenge is taken on him. He values chastity aesthetically, he envies Isabella as a stronger character, and he wishes to go to bed with her to appropriate her chastity as something he can absorb. The difference between the superego and conscience is demonstrated in Angelo. He has the former, not the latter. He wishes to show his superior power by judging others, and he becomes involved in a situation with Isabella in which he demonstrates a very conscious, deliberate malice that wouldn’t be true of a less powerful character. When you want to be good for the sake of strength, you can get much worse.
— Lectures on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Kirsch
From George Orwell’s Why I Write (1946):
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.
A final disclaimer:
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
