Doris Lessing - I hope I'm as good at 88!
Doris Lessing, in her Nobel acceptance speech last night, gave an intense and vivid description of the importance of books - where books really are important, to people who have literally nothing else. Contrast this scenario with our own spoiled, internet-dazzled society: we who think we know everything, Googling away at the drop of a hat, know nothing.
There seems to be an issue with effort. It's so easy just to type in whatever you're looking for - and who cares anyway whether Wikipedia is really reliable. It's close enough, right? And if you're 90% likely to get information that's good enough, who cares that the interpretation was wrong, or the birth year listed was one year out?
When did we lose our respect, our hunger for knowledge? When did looking it up on screen replace actually wanting to know it in the first place?
Lessing says:
"What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: 'What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?' In the same way, we never thought to ask, 'How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?'*
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less."
And she talks about villages in Zimbabwe where people in mud huts with no books and no paper, and certainly no Wikipedia, are trying to learn. It's the hardest thing in the world; often they just want to learn to read. Just as she says these kinds of mud huts have been built always and everywhere - eg in Saxon England - so these places have always existed, where people have to carve civilisation afresh from its raw materials.
America is of course addicted to its legends of the west, and its pioneers, who did just that, and in sod huts to boot. I grew up addicted to these stories. Of course I learned all about it by reading - about children in covered wagons, and how they made their food, and how they built their houses, often with borrowed Indian lore. The trail west was littered with unwanted items, packed hopefully in the east and just too heavy to carry all the way: Grandfather clocks, rocking chairs, small pianos; chests of superfluous clothes. But people didn't abandon their family Bibles, their violins, their John Bunyans, their Paradise Losts.
I also loved stories of the Middle Ages, even the Dark Ages - which was Saxon England, of course. I confused everyone I knew at 15, the year I was in a crazy hippie school called Shanti,** by choosing for my independent project a research paper about Alfred the Great. (This really was a strange thing to do. I had a little card index full of notes, whose sources I meticulously recorded. Other kids, for their projects, did quilting; one gay redheaded boy went to Vermont to be a ski instructor. And one girl in 10th grade, who had been sent to Shanti because she was pregnant, had her baby for her project.)
Now, Alfred the Great really was great. He defined an England for the first time, made it out of the old Saxon kingdoms that weren't strong enough to see off the Vikings individually - East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex (of which he was the king) - ended the hopeless war against the invaders with the truce of the Danelaw, and established a civilised infrastructure. Chief among his achievements was this one simple thing: he built schools. He decreed that every freeborn boy should learn to read, and also that those able to should learn to read Latin. He translated many works into English; his English version of Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy was popular throughout the entire Middle Ages, and he was a poet too: many sections of that work are now felt by scholars to be rather - ahem - original, some in alliterative verse. Alfred knew that, as Doris Lessing says, writers (and thinkers, and people who can simply tell the difference) can come from mud huts, but they are less likely to come from mud huts where nobody reads.
You could also say they're less likely to come from a house where people are watching "Big Brother" or playing computer games all day. Because, fun and ironic as the one may appear to be, and quick as the other may make one's reflexes, they both rely for their success on a lack of discernment, which they also feed.
My "counsellor" at Shanti School, a 32-year-old skinny guy called Chuck, had left his wife in Cincinatti to take the job - at $8K a year, as opposed to a $32K academic job he had also been offered - so as to assuage his guilt at being a white middle-class male. He used to read us his letters from her in what passed for "home room." Once, he even cried. I guess a paper on Alfred the Great - the ultimate affluent white guy - wasn't really Chuck's bag. Already in his bad books for not signing up for the Racism Awareness Workshop (of which more another time, maybe), I tried to argue that Alfred the Great was my Roots, but nobody was impressed. Chuck gave me a B+ without ever reading the paper.
Of course computer games, TV and the internet aren't the problem: they're just conduits. The problem is that we're growing lazy, smug and boring; we think we know everything and don't need to devote our lifetimes to learning. As Lessing puts it, "We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing." This is, for example, how I came last week to be listening to a very nice girl telling me how some people think Curious George is a Racist Book, because Curious George (the curious little monkey) is like a boy, but he's brown (duh) and he gets into trouble (of course he does - he's a curious little monkey!) and this apparently means little black boys are being compared to non-human primates. (Don't even get me started.)
And look at the Shilpa Shetty racism row last summer: in a society where anyone at all in charge was using any discernment, or was able to pick through the platitudes to an actual idea of what is what, none of that would have happened. And your kids and mine were watching it, when they could have been reading Vanity Fair. The book.
Lessing finishes with an amazing story about a young African woman queueing up in the dust for water, small children hanging off her skirt, engrossed in a torn section of Anna Karenina. In her story, the young woman is so engrossed that she can barely put the book down, although she's only managed to pick through one paragraph of it, even when it comes her turn to get water. It may be that Lessing is right, and this woman is more indicative than we are of civilisation. While she and others like her are trying to become "full human beings" - full "of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge" - the rest of us (well, not quite all) are throwing it away as if it didn't even matter. Because to us, as Freddy Mercury himself said, nothing really matters.
I found Lessing's speech incredibly moving. In some ways it reminded me of my own desperation for books when I was growing up; it also made me grateful for my riches, reading about the man in Zimbabwe who, trying to start a library and sent a box of books from America, put them away wrapped in plastic saying, "but if they get dirty where will I get more?" whilst facing my own wall of books. It also shamed me as a parent. When did I get so lazy? I suddenly think I should put a password lock on the computer and ration out the MSN on the basis of chapters read. After all, her shelves are groaning with Jane Austen, To Kill a Mockingbird, I Capture the Castle, A Wrinkle in Time. Is it an insane idea?
* We'll just disregard that for the moment; we know the kind of thing she means. She probably doesn't even know about Chip Dale or Non-Working Monkey, or even Baroque in Hackney. I do have thoughts about all this of course, relating to cumulative structure, the development of ideas, the nature of the blog form and so on - and my thoughts are not all complimentary to blog form - but that's for another day.
** "Shanti" means "the peace that surpasseth all understanding." Call me a Westerner, but the older I get the more I think that "the peace that surpasseth all understanding" can only usefully be applied as a definition of death - and thus, in my book, is something I'm not very interested in. At the least it sounds pretty damn boring. In any case, there was no peace at all in that place, not even the kind most people would be able to understand, and even appreciate. But that too is another story... and it was the first time we ever heard Mama Baroque say the F word!
