The Golden Bowl
…a meditation on the value of reading pre-electric authors
“To be educated is to read — and to be changed by what one reads.” - Dr. Thomas Gwaltney
Back in April of 2023 I shared a few strategies for swimming cross-current to the cultural undertow in an essay titled “Lateral Moves”. It was a follow-up to the previously published post here, “Negotiating Upcoming Wrinkles,” based on a re-reading of Madeline L’Engle’s classic children’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time.
If you’re a new subscriber, I encourage you to give these posts a look. In fact, even if you’ve been subscribed from the beginning, there’s a ton of stuff already published on this channel that might be worth revisiting. Here, as with the mass media, the “latest thing” is not the only thing worth paying attention to. There’s value to be found in things from the past. But, I get ahead of myself.
Here’s the basic safety tip I shared previously for if you’re swimming in the ocean, or maybe even a big lake with surf, and find yourself being swept away from land and into open water by an undertow. The recommendation is not to swim against the flow and risk exhaustion but instead to swim crosswise to the current, that is, parallel to shore, until one reaches a place where the current isn’t running. Only then, swim towards shore.
Personally, I don’t like the direction I feel society is being swept. More and more it feels like a riptide or undertow that is moving so fast that it’s futile to swim against it. So, what to do? Well, one idea is: swim crosswise. A big part of the cultural undertow is electronic. So, not surprisingly, one thing I’ve found helpful is to make sure my media experience includes reading physical books printed on paper, not just electronic media displayed on a screen. Like face-to-face interactions, being out in nature or engaging in physical tasks, the fact that bound printed matter is not electronic makes for an immediate improvement of my condition. The minute I pick up a book, meet with people, go outside, or engage in a physical task, I’m not looking at a screen, I’m looking away from it, moving my attention in another direction. Swimming cross-current. Instant benefit.
But for the past several years I have also prioritized including some older books in my reading list, particularly those written by authors who were born before 1900. I call these people “pre-electric authors”. Most people born in the 1800s or earlier didn’t grow up in electrified boxes, and I think that’s part of the value in reading their stuff. There’s a kind of luxuriant pacing to the writing. The works of Mark Twain, Edith Wharton or Charles Dickens are different from modern writing, still accessible with some effort, but different. It’s not just vocabulary, sentence length, storyline or subject, but all of these put together in a way that reflects a kind of holistic worldview, a set of values and assumptions about the world.
One big benefit of reading these authors is having a “foot on the ground” a bit further back in time. Here’s how I think it works: Picture standing on a 2x4 or on the rail of a railroad track. That’s the present. It’s narrow, it’s focused, it seems like it’s all that’s real and supporting us at the moment. But imagine having a walking stick that touches the ground not so very far away from that rail. Suddenly one has a tripod effect, and in my experience this can provide greater stability and perspective. If our media diets consist mainly of whatever is being shoveled at us today in our news feeds, that’s like standing on the thin rail of the present — easy to get bowled over.
My suggestion here is that, yes the voices of many of our contemporaries are important and worth paying attention to, but if we broaden our media diet to include writers from deeper in the past, we can better contextualize current thinking and strengthen our present-tense minds to deal with present-tense concerns.
Right now I’m about halfway through a 600-page novel by Henry James titled The Golden Bowl. First published in 1904, on the back cover of my edition is an endorsement by current British writer A. N. Wilson, who calls it “One of the greatest pieces of fiction ever written.”
This is my second attempt reading it. The first time, I failed: I gave up. No mistake about it, I found this to be really difficult reading. The sentences are long, some of the vocabulary and usages are unfamiliar, and the entire pacing and structure of the work are strange and new to me. Just following the story is a bit of a challenge at times, so much so that I gave up when I first tried to read it. But as I picked it up again this summer and kept at it, sometimes only reading a page or two at a time (which requires me to remember what happened on the previous pages), I started to find a way of working with the demands of this particular text.
At a basic level, thus far it’s reading like a story of complicated love. Nothing new there, I guess. That said, old as the book is, it is new to me in the way the author explores and elucidates amazing depths of subtlety in the characters of this story, and how he frames the action and dialog so that everything said and done takes on heightened significance. This sensibility is also woven into the scene-setting and other descriptive language in the book. Here’s an example to give you a bit of the flavor of the thing:
“They had taken, for their walk, to the cropped rain-freshened grass, after finding it already dry; and the chairs, turned away from the broad alley, the main drive and the aspect of Park Lane, looked across the wide reaches of green which seemed in a manner to refine upon their freedom.” (p. 95)
A couple years ago I read Bleak House by Charles Dickens and faced similar challenges at first. After sticking with it for a while, though, things started to click and I really enjoyed it. For one thing, I gained enormous appreciation for Dickens’ trenchant social criticism. But even more, I knew I had found a deeper level of understanding when I noticed the author’s sense of humor. Same is true here with The Golden Bowl. There’s no laugh track here, no camera pointing to the America’s Got Talent panel to cue us how to respond. We’re basically on our own, and there’s a kind of delicious freedom in the process of discovery.
But again, it took effort and practice before this reading could be described as pleasurable. The effort it requires is probably part of the reason it’s worth doing. This is not “escapist” literature, to be indulged in while the “real news” and “real life” of the day go unattended. In my view, it’s more like an antidote to the fear-driven, compulsive consumption of the news in a culture of insane acceleration and profound dissociation with the stabilizing influences of the past. This kind of reading exercises memory, learning, and the ability to focus our attention over longer periods of time. All of these are helpful things. And just to put this in a larger context, it’s worth remembering that for most of the last 2000 years one was only considered “educated” if one knew classical Latin and Greek. For people who already speak English, authors like William Shakespeare or Emily Bronte should be considerably more accessible than that.
Bottom line, memory, learning and focus never go out of style — or at least they had better not. And if there’s anything else I need to emphasize it’s to point out that all media that include language in the mix rely on some level of hypnotic trance induction. They just do. When we watch TV or go to a movie, scroll the social media feed and so on or even read a book, on some level we’re entranced. My concern about much of the current media environment is that it makes it really easy to go entirely passive in that entranced, semi-hypnotic state. On social media we are even overtly encouraged to “react”. So, we addictively scroll, then click a button and “react”. I see that as a path of personal and social degeneration. The narrow path, the harder path, requires more of us. And from what I’ve seen, it leads to better outcomes.
Of course, if reading old books isn’t your thing, I totally get it. Still, take a look at the foundations of what I’m sharing here about reading older books: In my experience this involves novelty, skill acquisition, and the practice of extended mental focus, as well as a fully engaged memory. You may find some of the same things in learning to play the penny whistle, so go for it, if that better suits you. Earlier this summer I bought a used unicycle for 30 bucks, and let me be clear: I’m finding that thing a lot more intimidating than these old books right now. I’m still working up my nerve to ride it, but I got it for the same reasons.