Plato, My Neighbor

In the chapter on reading in Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote:

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him--my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.

A little bit later, Mark Twain wrote:

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

I have a lot of books.

No, seriously. A lot. I gave a couple truck-loads of them to charity before moving to central Florida, but I still have a half dozen bookshelves at home that are nearly full, along with a smattering of rare or old books and the assortment of books I keep in my classroom at school.

But let me tell you about a student of mine. A couple of months ago, she decided to make a list of the books that she ought to read. She asked friends, parents, teachers, the librarian, and she wrote all the titles in a spiral notebook. Literally hundreds of titles.

But when she came to me for a second time, looking for a list of books for college-bound students I'd told her about from the College Board, I refused to give it to her. The point, I told her, is not to accumulate a list of books, but to read them. And until she had actually read all the titles on her list (or at the very least, on the list I had given her), I wasn't going to give her anything else. When she had finished, I told her, I would stop whatever I was doing and give her the list immediately, but until then, no more.

Which brings me back to my own shelves, which seem in many ways to be a list I've made, organized largely by writer and occupying the walls of our study.

There's something I enjoy about the physical presence of these books, and I suppose that this student feels something similar about her list. At times, I feel like I'm in the presence of greatness, in the presence of the greatest thoughts of some of the greatest minds. I enjoy the feeling that comes with sitting in the room with Foucault, Homer, Derrida, Plato, Emerson, Coetzee, Aristotle, Lacan, with this group of some of the most articulate thinkers to have put pen to page.

But what does any of this mean if I'm not reading these books? The feeling of awe and comfort that comes from surrounding myself with these means nothing--or at least, means almost nothing--if I don't read them.

Thoreau's point about Plato being his neighbor is a good one. What would it mean if I lived next door to Wendy Brown but never met her? Or in the same city as Plato but never made his acquaintance?

Metaphorically, of course, these people are my neighbors, and more. They stand ready to be intimate friends, to share their best ideas with me, to give freely of things they have spent lifetimes considering.

I read one of Dan Brown's books over the Christmas break--Angels and Demons. And I'll say about it what I said after reading The DaVinci Code: Dan Brown is good with suspense and plot, but he's not much of a craftsman when it comes to prose. But now, I want to add this: Did reading either of these books improve my life in any way? Did they inspire me to greatness? Did they show me any truth about my life, or about the human condition? Did they help me to understand anything about myself and my relationship to the world?

Of course, the answer to all of these questions is no.

And of course, the answer to this problem is to choose your friends wisely, and to spend time (and effort) developing the relationships in your life that matter.