Worldviews and Reading

When you open the covers of a novel, you open the door or a gate or a window onto a different world view.

That's how I was going to begin this post, except I realized that this is also true when you read the first few lines of a poem or story.  Then I had to widen my scope even further to say that's what happens when you look at a painting or listen to a piece of music or go to a movie.  Maybe that's one of the sources of art's enduring power, the reason we seek it out, or even part of a workable definition of art, which eludes us still:  we seek a new perspective on our world. My aged scholarly roots in New Criticism and my own taste urge me to add that art is not dictatorial; it requires my participation or even collusion in the process of meaning-making. The work of art cannot say "You must agree with my vision. It's inarguable." If all a writer is willing to give the reader is certainty or a one-dimensional world view, the result is what Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning psychologist, called confirmation bias: "See. That view you already held?  You're right." That's propaganda.  

Yes, the artist puts his or her finger on the scale in the sense that they offer you this world view and not that one.  The writer may believe in hard-won hope or in demonstrable despair. The writer of historical fiction, for example, may hope that we gain knowledge from understanding historical events.  The writer of satire may think the best thing for the human psyche is to have its ego deflated regularly.  And as I spool out examples, it's clear to me that one of the uses of generic categories is that they narrow down our sense of the writer's world view, maybe so it rubs up against our own.  Writers of speculative fiction can create grimdark or hope punk.  Writers of realistic fiction can have the bitter bite of Kesey's Catch-22 or the gentle illuminations of human complexity in Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything, which I finished reading last night. So when I say "I don't really like satire," I'm just acknowledging that there's an obvious mis-match between the satirists' world-view and my own.

But what I want to acknowledge and explore here is that my tastes have changed in ways I find uncomfortable.  When I was young, I could read great draughts of Dostoevsky.  I once taught an entire class on Thomas Hardy, though that was because the prof who was supposed to teach it couldn't.  That was 1997:  I had no difficulty spending a term reading and teaching Hardy, though I couldn't do it now. Hardy's vision of a laughingly brutal universe in which anything that could go wrong would go wrong feels foreign to me--God knows why.  Hasn't that been the tenor of the last handful of years?  Except, hang on, it isn't fate that has caused the genocide in Gaza--let's call it what it is, though let's also be careful not to blame every Jew.  Nor is fate responsible for what Russians are doing to Ukrainians in the territory they capture.  It's us.  It's human beings.  It's the rapaciousness of certain leaders and the willingness--fearful willingness, probably--of others who follow orders.  Greed is the besetting sin of the early twentieth century.  Insatiable hunger for power. It's behind our failure to address climate change and behind the handful of wars that fill me with despair every morning. 

And Hardy knew that.  He was relentless about the damage social structures did to human lives.  But he had this thing about fate that's not consonant with my world view now.  I'm 74.  Fate is right around the corner in the shape of my mortality.  So I need to believe in my agency, my ability to navigate, with a modicum of grace and curiosity, what life is going to throw at me.

In the face of these fucked-up months and years, I can't open yet another gate or door that leads to disaster and brutality and cruelty.  I honestly can't.  So I find myself turning to nonfiction, to books about what we're learning about our world, about the sensory umwelt of bats and about how bats colonies have dialects and how batmothers talk baby-talk to their babies.  Or about how human beings have used notebooks to explore themselves and record their world.  How the very availability of paper bound into notebooks changed the world.  (I'll include a bibliography of my nonfiction delights below.)  Da Vinci's notebooks allowed him to practice drawing in a way that earlier painters couldn't, and so there's a new liveliness to his paintings--not to mention a sense of perspective. 

Jarod K. Anderson wrote Something in the Woods Loves You, a memoir of his hand-over-hand climb out of deep depression and about how nature comforts and illuminates and guides him through that.  I should write a post about it:  it's a beautiful book, honest and inspiring about human self-knowledge--and agency--but not unrealistic about depression. It's organized by seasons, and toward the end, as fall deepens, he can feel something of the darkness descending on him, but knows that he's not helpless in the face of it.  He says "I like to think of the ups and downs of my mental illness as 'brain weather.'" That phrase "brain weather" stuck with me.  Weather is so elemental.  We don't ignore it.  If it's raining, we grab an umbrella as we go out the door.  If it's thirty below, we suit up.

The contemporary moment creates a kind of reading brain weather for me. I find I'm drawn to gentler books, to Elizabeth Strout or Matt Haig or an old Graham Swift.  I want to know how it is with being human in those little daily ways we perhaps no longer take for granted but realize that they are the startling expression our freedom and kindness and generosity and self-reflection, qualities that, in the face of the horror in our newspapers, we suddenly value. And we need to keep them alive.

And maybe the idea of "reading brain weather" explains why we need so many genres and world views in our art.

My current nonfiction favourites include The Notebook:  A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, The Light Eaters:  How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (the title should really allude to plants, animals, and language) by Karen Bakker, and An Immense World:  How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. And of course, Jared K. Anderson, Something in these Woods Loves You.