On Reading and Writing

I’ve always been a big reader. Writing came pretty naturally to me and I realized early on that the quality of my writing had a lot to do with the amount I read. The best way to develop a firm grasp of language and learn to communicate effectively in your writing is to spend a lot of time immersed in how great writers do it.

This always seemed like a fairly obvious truth to me: to be a good writer, you should first be a good reader. It was thus a surprise to encounter this Salon article that posits that there’s a new generation of aspiring writers with no interest in reading.

The evidence of this as a trend is largely anecdotal, so I’m not sure just how seriously to take it. That said, it’s difficult for me to imagine how someone would even come to the idea of wanting to make writing a focus of life without first cultivating the love of language, storytelling and knowledge that to me seem so intertwined with reading.

I often think of the history of literature as one long conversation. Different writers over time can borrow ideas and style techniques from one another to create something new. Shakespeare took stories from history and many of the great writers that came before him. Jorge Luis Borges, my personal favorite, often wrote of his preference for reading over writing and both his fiction and non-fiction essays are littered with ideas and references to other writers. Dante made this idea of writing as a continuing conversation over generations explicit with his use of Virgil in The Divine Comedy. The two even meet with several other poets in their time in Purgatory and discuss various issues related to poetry and religion*.

The written word allows us the great privilege of maintaining our knowledge of the ideas and stories of the brilliant men and women who came before us. If a writer rejects learning from the writers of our past, he or she lose the opportunity to be a part of the great conversation. So much of what’s been new and progressive throughout human history has come about due to our ability to build off of the ideas that came before. A refusal to embrace that means you’re likely to stay a few steps behind those that do.

*I might be the only person to read The Divine Comedy and prefer Purgatory to Inferno, specifically because I love the idea of Dante using it as an artistic outlet for having an imagined chat with his favorite writers.

The Value of the Humanities

I went to an expensive liberal arts college on the East Coast, the kind you often hear derided in articles questioning the value of expensive higher education that reaps limited professional rewards. To many, choosing an emphasis on the humanities in higher education seems foolhardy, but my experience has convinced me otherwise. I’ll be paying for this education for many years to come and do wish I’d better understood the full implications of my loans and their interest a little earlier in the process, but even if I had, I’d have gone to the same school and sought out the same classes and experiences.  I’ll never regret the education I got, although I may bemoan those loan payments every month.

So, what makes it so valuable?  How can I justify my four years studying literature, philosophy, film history and foreign languages rather than a specific trade that may have more directly led to job security (and likely much less debt)? For me, that question’s complicated, but easy to answer: I feel like it made me a better person and a better thinker.

On the professional end, it made me better at writing, communicating my thoughts well and analyzing problems.  It  gave me a much greater confidence in my sense of self and ability to take on life.  Every job I’ve had since college I’ve been able to: pick up a great variety of tasks; balance many responsibilities at once; handle my time well; think creatively about the best way to address the issues placed in front of me; and, perhaps most importantly, get along with and work well with other people. While the professional value of a degree in the humanities isn’t immediately clear, it brings with it a variety of skills that can pay dividends in many possible fields and positions.

I remember once being asked by a colleague who preferred reading non-fiction what I felt the value was in works of fiction. To me it seems so obvious: fiction teaches you empathy.  We live in a society where it’s so easy to fall into the common trap of us vs them. We all encounter instances where people are viewed in terms of their political identity rather than as individuals, or largely dismissed altogether in the general consciousness (when was the last time you thought much about what a prison inmate’s life is like, for example?).  This is much harder to do if you spend a considerable amount of time letting your mind be taken over by characters in different contexts than your own.  It teaches you to make more of an effort to understand the world as it looks and is for others and compels you to care more about the experiences of people you have no direct relationship to.

I think that really speaks to part of what makes the humanities so important.  It teaches people to see the world through a larger lens and consider how our actions and decisions influence people beyond us. I wish more of our society saw fit to value this as much as I do.

This post was largely inspired by a couple of articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so.  This article in the New Yorker talks at length about how an education in the humanities compares to other focuses in higher education.  This piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education gives current students a chance to explain why they embraced the decision to study liberal arts rather than something more “practical.” They all speak poignantly on the subject and, hopefully, prove some of what they’re saying to any possible skeptics in the process.