Mark Edmundson, why read?

When did you first start reading?

You actually memorized it?

Can you still do it?

How does reading change your life?

But there are other people who, for whatever reason, just don`t fit right into the established values. They find themselves disgruntled, dissatisfied...

Oh, all the time. All the time.

I read Updike`s most recent novel, right? I guess what I disagree with in there -- though Updike is a wonderful verbal artist, spectacular technique,...

A nihilist is somebody who doesn`t believe in anything, right?

I assume it comes from the Latin word, nihil, which means "nothing," right? So to believe in nothing is a great temptation in the modern world, when...

Yes.

This was in 1977, and we were at a place called the Woodstock Country School in Woodstock, Vermont. And I maintain that it was the last hippie school...

Actually a parent would say that about a kid?

You know, Leaver I don`t think ever read Emerson, but there`s a line in Emerson that he would have loved, "The power that in you is new in nature,"...

This is part of Leaver`s faith that there`s a little germ of something special in everybody. And what a teacher is supposed to do is look hard and find...

I did. I did. And we had an interesting exchange. We were talking about why the school failed. And I said, "We just had to take too many borderline...

I was a young teacher. I was 24 to 27 years old.

That was from 1977 to about 1980.

I had a BA from Bennington College, and whatever degree they should have given at the cab-driving garage that I drove out of in New York City.

Did you do a graduate degree somewhere?

And then what?

And that is?

So every semester, you teach how many kids, what course?

In your book, you write about Marcel Proust. Now, I must confess, I wouldn`t know much about Marcel Proust if it hadn`t have been for this show and...

OK.

My mother gave me this four-volume Proust for my 17th birthday, and every time I feel I`ve earned the right to do it, I quit everything and reread Proust....

Yes.

Right. Since `93.

It`s -- two reasons. One is pure enjoyment. Proust is one of the most entrancing writers that ever lived. And the second, he can teach you something....

I really think that the written word is what defines us as superior creatures to all the other creatures on earth. Man is characterized by a number...

Mark Edmundson, that was in 2001, in Shelby Foote`s room, where he wrote the Civil War history, part of it. What about Marcel Proust? He`s read it nine...

Have you ever read that "Remembrance of Things Past"?

How many times?

You also say that you read it to learn about what you really are, what you are -- instead of what Proust says, what you think of yourself?

Who else would you read, if you had time? You have free time, you can read anybody, tell us who that would be.

Let me show you a little of Robert Richardson...

... who was here some time ago. It was back in 1995. He wrote a book, "Fire on Ice," (sic) about Emerson. And let`s see just a little bit of what he...

THE MIND ON FIRE": Emerson and Thoreau are the people that I read when I`m feeling bad. They`re people -- I come away from reading them feeling better...

Do you agree?

But the interesting thing about Emerson is that not only is he somebody who`s a wonderful prophet of self-reliance and vision and poetry, he`s also...

I was born in Malden, Massachusetts.

Right. But you got to keep in mind, growing up in Malden and Medford as I did, we might as well have been 5,000 miles away from Concord, Massachusetts....

I first started reading Emerson, actually, when I entered graduate school. I knew there was some kind of renewed excitement about this guy. Various...

Thoreau is a tough, brutal critic of one central tenet -- one central tendency in American life, and that is consumerism, all right? Simplify, simplify,...

I would open up Thoreau`s "Walden," and if I were pressed for time, I would just read the chapter called "Economy."

In Emerson, I would look at the great essay, "Self-Reliance," and then all of the other essays in the first series.

Ranges from 20 to 40.

Well, I ask them questions that sometimes raise the roof a little bit.

Well, we`re reading "1984," and I say, Hey, if you woke up tomorrow morning and "1984" Big Brother world had taken hold, how would you behave? Would...

You say you have an attitude about -- a student can say anything they want to in your classroom, even if it`s homophobic or racist or anti-Semitic....

Also, I think a lot of the kind of angry conservative movement that rubs me the wrong me, the Rush Limbaugh kind of stuff, came about because people...

Sure. Sure. It goes two ways, though. Professors are liberal, but there`s a lot of flexibility of mind that I see among my colleagues whom I admire...

Well, conservative -- I`ve heard the conservative talk show hosts say that students pander to their professors because if they don`t, they will flunk...

In your book, you kind of teed off on Jerry Falwell, who teaches in your state and runs Liberty University in Lynchburg, not far away from Charlottesville,...

At the same time, I got to say, when I look into the world now and see how little sure faith there is in religion and government and even media, I understand...

Well...

Well, the inevitable reaction of liberals who don`t like where their kids are going to school is to send them to private schools immediately. And I...

There`s another subject you talk about a lot, poetry. Nikki Giovanni teaches at Virginia Tech, in the same state you do. And she was here this year...

1968-1998": Poetry is an essence. When we want to compliment anything, when we want to -- there was a Super Bowl last week, you know, Sunday, and we...

Poetry. What is it?

You told a story about Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But then suddenly, in about 1854, you start to see extraordinary things going on in his journal. He`s reading Ralph Waldo Emerson`s work, but he`s also...

Just on a whim, he sends it off to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who`s got more prestige than all of our Nobel Prize winners put together. Emerson gets the book,...

But here comes the poetry that`s about everybody. He writes back to Whitman right away, and he says, I`m so grateful for getting "Leaves of Grass."...

He was a little bit annoyed, but Emerson was a good sport on some level, and he also simply thrilled about this volume of poetry. So basically, he let...

I tend to read lying down. Usually, I have a beaten-up old couch in my study, and I`ll lie on the bed and read. But sitting up isn`t the game for me....

It really varies, but you know, I try to take home a new book that I`ve never read every weekend and go through that, all kinds of different books --...

I do.

My older son is 15 and my younger son is 12.

My older boy was obsessed by reading and being read to when he was very young. When he was about 8 years old, we went through the totality of "Don Quixote."...

I do, only because I had that sense of kind of being out of place, of dislocation that a lot of future obsessed readers get. And I would have quested...

My mother is still alive. She was a mom, a homemaker. My father was somebody who barely graduated from high school and went on to be, through his own...

My father died in 1984, when he was in his mid-50s.

He didn`t, though he did come and visit me one day at Yale, and we took the tour of the campus and we walked around. And it was a very poignant moment...

Frank McCourt, "Angela`s Ashes," was here, and here`s a couple of comments from him.

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Well, McCourt`s got his finger on it. You really start to learn when you become a teacher because you`ve got to! The next day, they`re going to be asking...

Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

I learned a whole new way, for instance, of looking at "Portrait of a Lady," you know? I...

Which was that...

Which is that Henry James has created this marvelous character, Isabel Archer, who`s beautiful and free and young and just arriving in Europe and being...

And a couple of students -- I say Isabel all the way, but a couple of the students said, James was right. What`s bad about Isabel, all that optimism...

I teach every level, from first-year to ending graduate students.

All of the students at the University of Virginia are accomplished students. You know, they`ve done well. They`ve succeeded. They`ve gotten high scores....

Well, I`m continually, of course, finding parents who say to their sons and daughters, Stay out of the English department. You must go to the comm school....

By and large they`re electives.

I look forward.

But of course, the book which mattered more than any other in American history was the Bible.

They went on reading it. Their children and grandchildren read it. They - often in families, it was the custom to go all the way through the Old Testament...

And it`s often surprising how frequently you come across congressional orators and presidential orators, which carry echoes of the Bible.

What do you think?

Some distinctions worth making. The Old Testament or the New, you know? The New Testament to me is the great book of hope, and the Old Testament is...

So, it`s not just that there`s been a book at the center of our culture. There`s been a kind of squabble over that book that`s ongoing.

Sure. Teach it all the time.

Well, the students who know the Bible best often tend to come from a fundamentalist or a resolutely Christian background. But since they`ve showed up...

Well, I grew up Roman Catholic, was part of the church until I was 11 or 12 years old, and then came to the conclusion - two things - that, you know,...

So, my friends and I all rebelled simultaneously - the Luthers of Milton, Massachusetts.

Absolutely not.

No. Not at all.

The students are very mixed. And you can never predict, based on sitting down and talking to them, how many will be resolute churchgoers, how many,...

It`s a complex question. Religion is absolutely central on one level. Ninety percent of Americans believe that God knows and loves them personally....

Do you ever get into a discussion in the classroom and arguments about this?

How do you do it?

We all want to go back to the time when dad was omnipotent and gave us complete protection and complete love. And so, we create religions that restore...

What was your own relationship with your dad?

I hope that I`m a little bit less stubborn and unreachable by argument than he is, and maybe a little softer.

Sure. It`s something of a generational thing. Of course, there`s a shift in childrearing in general.

And also, a sense, as quiet as it may be, that comes in many ways from the romantics, that there`s a whole lot to learn from children if you`ll step...

Well, my son Willie is the best spontaneous blues improviser that I know. He`s a wonderful artist on the guitar. And that`s partly because he simply...

Where do you write in your life? In your home, or at your office, or ...

How long have you had that, by the way?

This book, "Why Read?" is 146 pages long. It`s relatively small. How long did it take you to write this?

And the student said, I wrote that in five minutes. And Blackmur said, how old are you, son? I`m 18.

It took me 51 years to write that, you know?

Right.

Oh, "Great Books," yes.

Wonderful book.

Anyway, Hegel also sounded better aloud. And I began to understand him, at last, by reading it - declaiming against the late night traffic on West End...

And when I finally got to the point where I thought I understood a good bit of the "Introduction ... on the Philosophy of History," I was very, very...

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It`s moving. It was a great premise for a book. I`m going to go back to school, and I`m going to do it right this time. And I`m going to integrate it...

How do - and you write a lot about philosophers in here, including Freud, who you say you`ve spent your life with.

Why, by the way?

Freud is great on depression, great on mourning, great on a love that`s going sour. His view of human beings when they`re at their worst is astounding.

These are great thinkers. Just a stoical, very tough-minded thinker. Far too tough-minded for our current addiction to cheerfulness.

I did.

I did. I wrote a dissertation that talked about Freud in the context of the romantic poets. And I tried to offer a romantic reading, a poet`s reading,...

Heidegger is the hardest. Not because what he`s saying per se is so difficult, but because the experience that he wants to extend to you is the experience...

Simon Winchester wrote a book, "The Professor and the Madman," about the Oxford English Dictionary.

He talks about the English language. Let`s listen.

English is a living language. Unlike the French, who said - the Academie Francaise, who have these, the 40 immortals, who said - this is the French...

So, the OED is now 20 volumes, with three additional volumes produced in the last five years. Now, sensibly, it`s going online on CD ROM. And it`s showing,...

Are we lucky to be living in an English-speaking country, versus a lot of the other languages you might have studied?

And it`s wonderful that people can coin words and have them actually show up in dictionaries two or three years later. He`s right. It`s not going to...

Have you ever studied another language?

I`ve always wanted to ask - never asked anybody this. I`ve always wondered why writers through the little, sometimes Latin phrases, but often the French...

Yes.

Why do people do that?

Other times, because, though there ought to be an English equivalent, there isn`t. The one that pops to mind is "schadenfreude" - the German word that...

Do you have a favorite, or favorite words that you like to use when you write?

So, the exclamatory pat on the back is, I guess, part of my stock in trade.

I punctuate a lot. I try to guide the reader as much as I can.

So, I was talking to a group of students at the University of Massachusetts this weekend, and they knew I was from Medford. Many of them were from similar...

The great line of a 20th century American literary critic, he says that new words and new metaphors increase the stock of available reality. You know?...

Gertrude Himmelfarb has written a lot about the Victorian period. She`s got this to say about the language.

... a good chunk of my life reading and thinking about the Victorians. I find them an enormously stimulating - it`s an enormously stimulating period....

And it was very interesting to see my Victorians in contrast to the Continental thinkers. The Continental thinkers very often much more profound, more...

Your reaction.

But I like what Gertrude Himmelfarb is saying about making the Victorian period available to people as a source of other values - and I think she does...

I do a little bit.

Schopenhauer is a very daring, early romantic philosopher.

Why Buddhist?

Ultimately, I think it`s a failure. Human beings can`t do it, and suffer all kinds of sorrows when they try to go too far in terms of denying desire.

And when somebody desires to have no desires, you`ve got a serious case of repression on your hands.

I want to be influenced by the part of Buddhism that emphasizes kindness, nonviolence, benevolence, respect for life.

So, the poet that I like the most, next to Emerson, is probably William Blake. And he`s a tough, prophetic, left-wing, revolutionary poet.

Do you vote, by the way?

Did you always vote?

What do you find in your classrooms from your students about being involved today in politics?

But as intelligent as they are, and as engaged in many aspects of life as they are, the great majority of my students think that politics is a sham,...

Cornel West. Here`s what he had to say.

Yes. The advantage of reading is that there is a connection between cultivating the art of living and fighting courageously for the expansion of democracy.

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Yes.

OK.

Everybody believes in democracy in a knee-jerk sort of way.

You know, if you look back in the direction of other people who have been democratic - the Athenians, the Iroquois, the Vikings - they have their good...

Here`s what you write.

How extensive is that?

They love Bush. They love NASCAR. They love football. They`re beyond help.

And there`s a throwing up of the hands. And there`s a turning inward, a desire to talk only to ourselves and to our most gifted students.

I think that`s a worthwhile thing, and I think that`s part of the democratic project.

Who wrote the Port Huron Statement?

Students for a Democratic Society.

Years ago.

It`s a wonderful piece of populist, John Dewey-type, democratic writing.

This is real, and it`s really out there. And the idea of talking about Emerson or Shakespeare, into a context that`s been shaped by that kind of mean...

So, how do you deal with it on a day-to-day basis. Do you have to talk yourself into allowing the other side to be heard?

I have to talk myself into, sometimes, you know, giving a lecture that`s going to be challenging to some of the people in the room, who may say, ah....

And when you can think, as I can think, that are making some small contribution to the sort of thing that West is talking about, you know, enhancing...

Right.

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And also, very few that deal with how a young adult woman sets about planning her life.

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Well, I`ve written one. I wrote one called "Teacher," and it was an homage to a teacher that I really loved, Doug Meyers (ph), whom I call Frank Lears...

I do hope, somewhat in distinction to what Conway says, that there will women who are able to be inspired by men`s memoirs, and men inspired by women`s,...

Well, back to the title of your book, "Why Read?", if again, someone is watching and they`ve not been a big reader, what would you tell them about starting?...

So, I would encourage people to read what it is they like and what they`re drawn to, with the idea that someday they`re going to graduate to Shakespeare...

If you had your time, would you prefer fiction over non-fiction? Or which one would you prefer?

Those are very deep an inward voices that you get in a good novel, from the narrator, and in a good poem. And once you can start to reproduce those...

I think of the radical writers, though, there are some outstanding cases.

So, I openly confess to a sort of - it`d be wrong to say penis envy for Gore Vidal, wouldn`t it, but you know what I mean.

It does. Hitchens is a terrific writer. And Vidal is, as well.

Here`s an older book spoken about by Milton Friedman, on the other side.

It`s a book well worth reading by anybody, because it`s a very subtle analysis of why, how it is that well-meaning people who intend only to improve...

He`s talking about "Road to Serfdom" - Hayek - a bible for people on the conservative political side.

So, you`ve never read "Road to Serfdom."

Mark Edmundson, we`re out of time. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you.