“I have so much love to give!” laments former child star “Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith in the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia, disheartened by the dismissal he’s just received from Brad the Bartender, his gay bar crush. “I just don’t know where to put it!”
We contemporary consumers of literature might offer up the same frustration. Notice, if you will, that I did not say “readers.” Not because you or I don’t read anymore. We are, in fact, the ones who still DO read. You wouldn’t be here at Close Reading otherwise.
Nonetheless, the genteel word “readers” is inadequate for the condition in which we self-declared readers find ourselves. “Consumers,” on the other hand, seems to me a better fit for the current moment. That word has become something of a catch-all, used ruefully to term any group, from college students to church members, who act entitled to receive something without any effort.
I’d like for now, though, to take a look at it from the opposite end, the perspective of the consumers themselves. How could we theoretical readers be anything other than consumers when the lived experience (you see what I did there) of being a reader is like sitting at a vast banquet, being force-fed an endless array of dishes across cultures and cuisines, piled up on one another with no governing metaphor or ordering principle.
I realize now that I have buried the lede. What I mean is this: how do I—a middle-aged mother with a full-time job and a disabled husband who’s revising a book draft of her own—construct an intelligible reading life?
And how is this even possible with the flood of literary content (I am going to avoid the cliché of calling it a “firehose,” although I am apparently NOT above calling it that wretched word “content”) that daily comes my way. To pull up a word from my earnest Calvinist youth, how does one discern what’s actually worthwhile.
There are, of course, the newsletters and subscriptions I receive as an alumna of a creative writing program (the University of Houston), and as someone who has published in a bunch of small literary magazines. To follow that thread is to follow along with what passes for literary trends (fads?) in a country where most people do not read. There is, of course, all the attendant focus on niche identities and interests you would expect have become the subject of endless rear-guard “anti-woke” movements lampooning them, and urging a return to what they call The Great Tradition.
Both my children attended schools with “classical” curricula, and I even taught at a startup Great Books college (which failed rather apocalyptically) so I am in no way arguing against “the canon” or “The West.”
Increasingly, though, it has seemed to me that so much of the efforts at so-called Great Books restoration are as surface in their own ways as the kinds of literary trends they deplore. There are the same books on the same reading lists, amalgamations of the same references to writers like Lewis and Tolkien, conversations in which token phrases are traded back and forth like Poke-e-Mon cards. It’s all so domesticated, and tame.
It is, of course, the flattening of the internet algorithms that makes these dynamics all the more shallow. But if you were expecting me to turn this essay into a sermon on Get Rid of Your IPhone, I’m not going to. It’s actually not a bad idea, but I’ve found that self-consciously low-tech reading communities can be just as superficial as the online ones. (A kind of medium-is-the-message in reverse, perhaps.)
The key to hacking your way through the current thicket of literary noise—with its siloed fragments—is the same as the cultivation of other kinds of wisdom: paying attention to the disciplines of truthful friends, the embodied motions of prayer, the humility of the unexpected.
I don’t think it means abandoning the virtual—after all, that’s where you are reading this. But I do believe that perceptive engagement with the virtual will ultimately—must ultimately—lead back to the human person. We will find the road through others.
But it might also lead through Facebook! A few weeks ago, I was driving home from Long Island when I snapped a photo of a road sign on Maryland 301 that named the exit for “Dover Beaches.”
Matthew Arnold in the wild! But when I posted the sign to my story, I never expected that my friend Maria would add to the comments about how she could recite “Dover Beach” from memory. Her recollection, in turn, spurred a wave of memory that I could feel in my heart with a pang that was actually physical, of when I had first read the poem. And thenwhen the next Sunday I saw her at church, we had a connection, a resonance, that was entirely new.
“Dover Beach” may be one of those classical Romantic poems, but it was also a dispirited portrait of another exhausted technological age. Still, though, thinking about it—and preparing to memorize it myself, because of Maria—I am ebullient with hope.
Caroline Langston was a regular contributor to Image’s Good Letters blog, and is writing a memoir about the U.S. cultural divide. She has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, and aired several commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered, in addition to writing book reviews for Image, Books and Culture, and other outlets. She is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
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