Reading and Freedom of Thought
July 14, 2010
A READER who asked for suggestions for his college literature course writes:
What a treat to return to the Internet after several days away to find your thoughtful and lengthy response to my admittedly difficult request! Thank you very much for taking the time to respond – you’ve introduced me to some new writers and refreshed my memory on some others. I haven’t read Meredith or Gissing; I’ll look into those. I have read Sarah Orne Jewett in the past but forgot about her – great idea. I had also forgotten about Blixen/Isak Dinesen; I was just thinking I might try to put together a connected story/film lesson or two using her story Babette’s Feast and the excellent film version. I like the idea of starting with some of the ancient Greeks and especially A.’s idea of Antigone and the natural law. Teaching The Book of Job as literature is also an intriguing idea.
You and your readers have given me both practical help and encouragement and I’m deeply grateful. I’m feeling a renewed spirit to get back to my planning and to do the best I can for my students with the time that has been given to me. God bless and keep up the great work.
Laura writes:
Good luck with your course. And, here’s one more thought for your students. When we read great books, we need to respectfully free ourselves from their authors. Even works of great genius must be filtered, processed, refined, sifted and renewed by us. We pay homage and try to understand these works on their own terms, but we must also distance ourselves from them. We must learn to think for ourselves.
A.D. Sertillanges, O.P., author of the immortal masterpiece The Intellectual Life, put it this way:
Whatever engenders nothing is non-existent; my reading must enable me to engender thought, in the likeness, not of the author who inspires me, but of myself!
That is, I think, the last word on the question of books. A book is a signal, a stimulant, a helper, an initiator, – it is not a substitute and it is not a chain. Our thought must be what we ourselves are. When we read, our masters must not be a goal for us, but a starting point. A book is a cradle, not a tomb. Physically we are born young and we die old; intellectually, because of the heritage of the ages, “we are born old; we must try to die young.”
Men of real genius do not want to pinion us, but to make us free. But if they did aim at enslaving us we would have to resist them, to be on guard against an invasion of our liberty that would be so much the more destructive as we have not equal resources for the struggle. We must emancipate our soul. The more our thought springs from our inner depths, from what is incommunicable in us, the more it will reflect man, and the more readily will other men recognize themselves in it.
