Reading Matters

" . . . the world of sense-perception is a world of flux, and so not the right subject-matter for true and certain knowledge. That true and certain knowledge is attainable on the conceptual level . . . . "

A History of Philosophy by Fr. Frederick Copleston 
(page 128 of 5,344 pages)

I read this during my "15 Minutes of Philosophy" 1  this morning, and it gave me pause.

The opening proposition, that what our senses perceive is not necessarily true, is inarguable. What we perceive bears some passing relationship to reality, but is only rarely accurate and never completely reliable. I'm just going to regard that as axiomatic unless somebody wants to kick some sand in my face.

The second proposition, that true knowledge (or certain knowledge here) exists, is more a matter of faith, I suppose. It seems obvious to me, but I don't think there's any way to actually prove it. So no axiom there. But an assumption which I most heartily embrace.

And that leads to the conclusion, that in order (and I'm low-balling it here) to engage in a quest for true knowledge, one must journey via a conceptual trajectory . . . as opposed to journeying via a sensual trajectory. If you agree with the opening proposition, then even if you don't accept the second one, I think you'd have to agree on the truth of that conclusion. (That is, even if you don't think that there is True Knowledge, in order to journey towards True-r Knowledge . . . etc.)

And that got me to thinking about reading. 

It is common for people to ridicule reading as a waste of time, as an escape from life, as an avoidance of real life, and so forth. I can't help thinking ("again," if you're a long-time reader) of when I met up with a group of my friends from Ballard High School for lunch a few months after I'd retired and one of them asked me what I had been doing. I was very excited to tell them--primarily a group of English teachers, with a librarian thrown in for good measure, by the way)--that I had just finished reading Remembrance of Things Past, which had been one of my life goals ever since I was a teenager. Oh, the looks that they gave me. Pity, disdain, even disgust. I panicked, and in my cowardice I added that I had also taken my daughter to New York City, where we had climbed to the crown of The Statue of Liberty, seen the original Madeline paintings, ridden a carriage in Central Park, and gone to see The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. Their relief was palpable. Their shoulders unstiffened. Their lips unsnarled. Their nostrils undilated. 

I spent a great deal of my pre-teaching life . . . from the ages of As Young as I Can Remember until Age 33 . . . in a Deep Blue Collar World, and let me assure you that I am very familiar with the attitude I encountered from those teachers (and the librarian). 

And I understand it, too. I even participate in that attitude myself at times . . . primarily in the form of saying things to myself on the order of, "Are you just going to sit around the house and read or are you going to get off of your ass and DO something?"

But that would be scanned.

Because let's face it: traveling to New York City, climbing to the top(-ish) of The Statue of Liberty, seeing Ludwig Bemelman's paintings in a museum, riding in a carriage in Central Park, and maybe even seeing The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway . . . it's all pretty much just walking from one room and into another, isn't it? And after you've done any of those things . . . or any other thing either, for that matter . . . the memory of it is so brittle, so easily broken into little pieces and blown away by the slightest of winds   
. . . .  Is it any more real than something I've read in a book? At the risk of revealing myself to be even more depraved than you may have previously thought me, I'll have to say that there are many things that I've read in books that are more real to me than experiences I have lived. Especially with books that I taught pretty much every year for 23 years: Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, Romeo and Juliet, Waiting for Godot, Beowulf . . . there are scenes from those works that are much more real and important to me than the memory of rappelling  out of a Huey back in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. 

And I can't help thinking of my daughter Jacqueline here. She regularly converses with churches and dead saints. Her conversations with them are not only very real and important to her, they are actually a necessary part of her existence. When she comes home in the late afternoon after having volunteered at Hosparus for several hours and working out at the YMCA and having lunch with her friends, the first thing she wants to do is go into her room and converse with St. James Church and saint St. Lucy. (Occasionally Helen Keller and Judge Judy and Mickey Mouse show up . . . and many others as well, but Saints James and Lucy are the mainstays.) Those relationships are as real to her as the 25 year relationship I have had with my friend Craig . . . and I dare say that they are more rewarding to her than my "real" relationship with Craig is, as well.

And maybe you think that Jacqueline's behaviors are just manifestations of mental incompetency or even mental illness. It's possible. That's not how I see it, though. I think that her interactions are on a par with how I see reading. To me, reading is a chance to participate in a higher level of reality. A reality which exists on the conceptual level. A level which permits at least the possibility of accessing Truth.

I would like to do a little research to find out if there's evidence that the brain registers any difference between intense imaginative experiences and "real" experiences. If I were a betting man, I would put a bundle down on Not a Whit to win.

Now excuse, please--I have some reading to do.



1  Which often turns into more than 15 minutes. I have found that if I make sure to "schedule" a small amount of time per day for something that it is much easier for me to stick to it, that the time I spend on it regularly expands, and that I make a hell of a lot of progress on some pretty monumental tasks eventually. (E.g. reading Les Miserables and The Bible to Jacqueline.)