One of the saddest events in recent months has been the banning of books in school districts and public libraries across the country. Fiction has always been a way for people to make sense of our world.
China threatening Taiwan. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing destruction of Europe’s peace and Russia’s future. The addition of Iran’s pro-terrorist regime to the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-Western bloc and burgeoning Brazil’s flirtation with China, too. These are unmistakable signs of an accelerating world crisis.
Measured in terms of dangers posed by nation-states, we are in the most perilous time since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in a major crisis of the Cold War. But advantages then enjoyed by the United States - of geography, wealth and industrial capacity - have dwindled. If political leaders fail to respond and citizens cling to illusions of safety, the results could be catastrophic. Should China achieve dominance, it will not be offering any “peace dividend,” as the United States foolishly did after the fall of the Soviet Union, when instead of shaping history, we took a holiday from it.
One looks for signs of urgency and finds - what? A national security apparatus so porous it can be allegedly penetrated by a 21-year-old gamer in the Massachusetts National Guard. Jack Teixeira, the airman only just able to buy a legal drink, does not appear to have stolen secrets for any of the classic motivations: ideology, money or blackmail. He was, it seems, trying to impress his online friends. His recklessness (cluelessness?) has visited extraordinarily damaging impacts on our nation, including the revelation of “methods and sources” - the consequences of which we who lack secret clearances can only guess.
James Bond stealing the crown jewels of national intelligence is one thing. Edward Snowden, compared to 007, was a sweaty palmed amateur. Now, we have dropped another long level to Teixeira. Who will swipe our secrets next, a sixth-grader in computer lab? We would like to believe that officials are as determined to plug the leaks as the Chinese, Russians and Iranians are to exploit them. As for our allies, can they trust that we are serious when our would-be leaders are talking more about “antifa” or “Christian nationalism” than about the totalitarian powers uniting against us with weapons of mass destruction?
At such a perilous time, many of us turn to novels - in print and, thanks to a marvel of our age, downloadable audio recordings. Time spent exercising or driving has been redeemed as “reading” time. But what good is a novel when the very future hangs in the balance?
My defense of reading fiction in a time of urgent facts boils down to four points.
First, fiction can keep anxious minds from chewing themselves to bits. Winston Churchill knew a thing or two about peril. When his nation, and the free world, took its own pulse each morning in 1940 and 1941, the greatest statesman of that age escaped into a collection of “Captain Hornblower” novels, Moll Flanders, Phineas Finn and Pride and Prejudice, according to the military correspondent and historian Thomas Ricks. When the United States rode to Churchill’s rescue, the troops were led by a general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who treated his nerves with an endless supply of Westerns.
Second, reading can give a sense of proportion, which our distracted age needs most urgently. Algorithms and attention-seekers conspire to inflate every shooting star of a story into an event of historical significance. Reading teaches us that dogs have barked and carnivals passed from time immemorial - but the trick is to spot the rare critical moment. History, concluded Aristotle is “what Alcibiades did and suffered” namely, the few moments when great leaders rose to important occasions. That is the lens we must use to prioritize our energies and the standard we must apply to our leaders.
Third, reading can take us into unfamiliar worlds and better prepare us to live in our own. I recently read, after reading a review on Goodreads, a breakout novel by Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which brilliantly translates the saturation culture of online gaming for audiences who have never spent a minute with an online game. It tells the story of three friends - Sam, Sadie and Marx - whose complicated relationship is formed in the computer labs of Harvard and MIT in the late 1990s. Amid an explosion of creative game design, engineers cheerfully “appropriate” the ideas and work of others and build upon them, making new worlds and fighting safe wars that always end with everyone still alive. One cannot read the novel now without reflexively applying it to Teixeira’s bizarrely casual theft of secrets that might lead to real-world deaths. Politics in Zevin’s novel is atmospheric, but not important. All of her characters are almost painfully predictably progressive, while the characters in Teixeira’s gaming world were apparently reflexive bigots. But in neither world can the participants be taken seriously as political actors, for their politics is just part of the game.
It is sobering to consider the vast ocean of time and effort that has gone into the creation of virtual worlds and the exponentially greater amount of time that has gone into playing them. Then again, did the games replace more serious thinking - or just the hours wasted by earlier Americans on “Gilligan’s Island,” “Green Acres” and other monumental time-sucks of the 1960s and ’70s?
Fourth, and finally time spent with a worthwhile novel is not time sucked away and spat out. It is time, and the lessons of time, brought into focus.
And novels, like real life, make connections that, with time, can add up to wisdom. One of Zevin’s lead characters, Sam, has a badly injured leg - which led me back to John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. That novel anchors its tale in an early battle in the Civil War and anticipates all the trolls and frauds of our era in the character of Cyrus Trask. Speaking of “appropriation,” Cyrus is one of the great appropriating scoundrels of all literature, absorbing almost the entire war into his personal narrative. Cyrus was also a one-legged thief, who lost that leg in that early battle - perhaps the only true moment in his life. His abuse toward his sons in Connecticut after the war leads to sadness and tragedy in California’s Salinas Valley in the early 20th century. The story that carefully and beautifully rolls out across decades ends as a backdrop of World War I. Apart from leg injuries, Cyrus and Sam have nothing in common - apart from the one thing we all share: lives defined by our moral choices. To have considered those choices via fiction is to prepare for making them in life.
“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one,” Steinbeck writes. “Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?”
That is why we must read, even as terrible times loom and circuses explode every day across the media. There remains only one story, but understanding the people in that story requires mental equilibrium and a taste of many worlds, many perspectives. There is only one story, and that story matters - urgently now, when the net of good and evil is full to bursting.
We must not lose its thread.
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