Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (8 page)

But this is rare indeed. And ours is what sociologists call ‘a low-affect society’, interested in excitement, but wary of expressed feeling. Literature offers an alternative place to recover such lost feelings; and a shared-reading group offers the community in which to do that together. Since Pat’s reading of John Clare’s poem, over the past twenty-five years, I have often seen or felt the bolt ‘shot back in the breast’ when part of a group of people is reading together.

Another example: I went to pitch the idea of a Reader in Residence to a group of managers at an NHS specialist mental-health Trust. A man sitting at the table was introduced to me as John, a service-user rather than a manager.

John said to me, ‘I’ve brought a poem with me and I’d like you to read it at some point.’ I uncharitably assumed that John had brought me a poem of his own, and I agreed in a half-hearted way, and hoped we would run out of time before the moment came up. (You’ll think this is cruel, perhaps, but I have been the editor of a literary magazine for ten years and have read more execrably bad poetry than most people have read newspapers.) The meeting proceeded, a meeting in an NHS meeting room: institutional furnishings, institutional carpet, even some institutional art on the wall. I spoke about what the Reader in Residence would do: the value of reading, the depth of poetry. It is hard to convey in the abstract what we really do at The Reader Organisation, but I have to try to do so. Some of the managers asked practical questions, outcomes, logistics, budgets. The meeting wore on.

‘Would you read the poem now?’ said John, and pushed a piece of paper towards me. It was a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, one of the so-called
‘terrible
sonnets’. John told us he had been an English teacher, but that life in a failing comprehensive school had brought on a nervous breakdown. He said, ‘I’ll never get over it. I’ll never be able to … go back to it.’ This was a man of perhaps fifty. His sense of being unutterably broken looked very real. He told us that the poem helped him hold himself together when things were very bad. He showed us that he had a copy of the poem taped to the back of his diary. He said, ‘Sometimes, if things are very hard, I can take it out and read it.’ And he added, ‘I can see that Hopkins managed to get it down, what I feel, in the lines. He got it all in an order: it’s not the chaos. And that helps. Could you read it out?’

I read:

I read the poem with seven pairs of eyes on me, and felt my voice crack as if I would cry at the lines ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’. Such powerful, revealing language to be using at a meeting table in this NHS building; such true, painful thoughts to be putting to senior mental-health practitioners and managers: ‘Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there’. And to be reading it to John, whose eyes were locked onto
my
face as I read, the eyes of a man awaiting, what …? The public exposure of some customarily unadmitted truth. As when Pat read ‘I Am’, it seemed almost dangerous, as if the air again were cracking with human electricity, or John had handed me some sad powerful magic, and I’d set it off by reading it aloud, a sort of spell. Despite the institutional furniture, we are primitive creatures in a cave. We have the magic of language. It is frightening and good. When I look up again some people around the table have tears in their eyes.

I don’t expect many NHS meetings go like that. But we got the contract, and still work in that innovative NHS Trust, where many clinicians, nurses, service users, occupational therapists and NHS administrators now run weekly shared-reading groups – thirty-eight reading groups every week, at the last count. Should we keep it light? John would say we should keep it truthful.

Over the last 100 or so years the loss of the religious as a reputable discourse in common life has led to a poverty of language, and thus to a poverty of contemplative thought and feeling about what we are, and what we need. We need some inner stuff, scaffolding to help us get
around
our inside space, something to help us map, explore and even settle those places where we are still primitive. Beliefs help in the so-called well-being indices: people who are members of faith-groups are more likely to flourish than those who are not. For the rest of us, what are we to do with that unnamed place, space, sense? What is that part of being human which is touched by silence, which recognises an intense atmosphere when people are moved, which gets scared or exhilarated when alone in a big space, or when faced with a newborn baby? Science may gradually work this out: that is our mainstream model these days for accredited seriousness, for what we can be confident in believing. But literature – too often now dismissed or misplaced – has always known that buried part, and in thousands of ways.

It is not the medics or the psychologists who refuse to see this – on the contrary, the problem is that the best literature has been for too long (affluently) ghettoised on courses and in high culture, with too little human meaning actually acknowledged. One example: a well-known broadcaster can say this, of all things, in the
Observer
:

Being brutally honest, the only thing reading literary fiction qualifies you for is dinner-party conversation. Despite this, children who read early are seen as mini-geniuses. We’re told that once we digest the classics we unlock the secrets of the universe, but there are days when I wish I’d learned to fix a boiler or basic electrics. Literature may be revered in high places, but most writers I’ve met are pretty useless at anything else. So we should be grateful there are intelligent children and adults out there for whom books don’t appeal and whose skills lie elsewhere.

It may be honest, but it is brutal, even when trying to sound cute. In the face of this rather representative treason, I conclude, unashamedly, on behalf of a reading revolution.

We must reposition literature in settings – such as workplaces, mental-health services, dementia care homes, looked-after children services – where its profound worth will be seen for what it really is: the holder of human value, human meaning, and, yes, even the secrets of the universe. The growth of materialism over the past 200 years, and the development of a sense of entitlement to
happiness
, has created the misapprehension that if you are not happy there must be something – medically, physically – wrong with you. Many ordinary people who don’t go to the GP for a diagnosis of depression are unhappy, ill at ease, at a loss, sad. This is what we used to call the human condition. But what people instinctively know, and science is beginning to understand,
³
is that what makes people happy, above all, is a network of supportive fellow creatures, a sense of purpose, challenge and meaningful occupation. Shared reading can provide all this. Get a few people together, pick up a good book and try it.

1
http://bestpractice.bmj.com

2
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
, Richard Layard (Penguin);
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
, Martin Seligman (Nicholas Brealey)

3
Seligman argues that well-being is a construct with five measurable elements: positive emotion; engagement; relationships; meaning; and achievement.

I AM LYING
in bed reading Nan Shepherd’s
The Living Mountain
. This is a kind of geo-poetic exploration of the Cairngorms – a mountain range in north-east Scotland. The book was written in the 1940s, and lay unpublished until the 1970s. Now it has been reissued by Canongate.

Reading it seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else.

There is no substitute for reading.

To go back to the book.

Nan Shepherd never married and never lived anywhere but her native Scotland in a village at the foot of the Cairngorms. She was well educated and well travelled but she always came home. She loved the Cairngorms. She wrote, ‘The mind
cannot
carry away all it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’

I am not a mountain climber or even a hill walker. I know nothing about the Cairngorms. The book was sent to me and because books and doors both need to be opened, I opened it. A book is a door; on the other side is somewhere else.

I found myself wandering the mountain range in the company of Nan Shepherd. She is dead but that doesn’t make any difference. Her voice is as clear and fast-flowing as the streams she follows to their source, only to find that the source always points inwards, further. There is always further to go.

I like it that I can lie in bed and read a book about mountain climbing. There are two dominant modes of experience offered to us at present – actual (hence our appetite for reality TV, documentaries and ‘true-life’ drama) and virtual – the Web. Sometimes these come together as in the bizarre concept of Facebook: relationships without the relating.

Reading offers something else: an imaginative world.

I don’t want to confuse this with fantasy or escapism. For me, the imaginative world is the
total
world, not a world shredded and packed into compartments. For the poet Wordsworth, the job of the poet and the poem is to ‘see into the life of things’.

This cannot be done if we are only separating. Imagination allows us to experience ourselves and our world as something that is relational and interdependent. Everything exists in relation to everything else. The reason that
The Living Mountain
is a ‘good’ book is that it takes a very particular and tiny subject and finds in it, or pulls out of it, a story about how we can understand the world.

The book is a metaphor, yes, but it is also specifically about the Cairngorms. The opening it makes in the mind is its capacity to connect the specific and the local with the universal (and as Robert Macfarlane points out in his lovely introduction, the universal is not the same as the general).

A medium other than the book could not achieve the effect of this book nearly so well. A book lets you follow a writer’s mind. Reading does not move in linear time in the way that a movie or even a radio piece does. Of course there is a beginning, a middle and an end, but in ‘good’ books that is irrelevant. We don’t remember the
books
that have mattered to us by the chronology of their story-telling, but by the impression and effect of the story and of the language used to tell it. Memory is talismanic. We hold on to what we need and let the rest go. Just as in our own lives events separated in time sit side by side in memory, so the effect of a book is to let us live nearer to total time than linear time allows.

Linear time is exhausting. Life has never been more rushed. This present way of being is not a truth about life or a truth about time; it is propositional. We can disagree.

Part of Nan Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the mountain is to stop rushing to the top of the various plateaus of the Cairngorms. At first it is all about the exhilaration of the ascent. How far can she go? How fast? Then she starts circling like a dog with a good nose. She finds that she wants to be in the mountains. ‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain, as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’

To cross the threshold of a book is to make a journey in total time. I don’t think of reading as leisure time or wasted time and especially not as downtime. The total time of a book is more
like
uptime than downtime, in the way that salmon swim upstream to get home.

We have lost all sense of home – whether it’s the natural world, our only planet, or our bodies, now sites of anxiety and dissatisfaction, or our scrabble for property in vast alienated cities where few can afford safety, peace, quiet, even a garden.

How can a book get me home? It reminds me of where home is – by which I mean I am remapped by the book. My internal geography shifts, my values shift. I remember myself, my world, my body, who I am.

The remapping is sometimes overwhelming – the wow factor of those books that we know have changed our territory – but usually it is much more subtle, and more of a reorienting. I feel settled in myself. To put it another way, I am a settler in myself. I inhabit my own space.

I had a rough childhood. I left home at sixteen and for the next ten years physical home was a provisional space, not permanent, rarely secure. During that time I discovered that books gave me a way of being at home in myself. They provided a shining centre – and if that sounds a bit mystical, I suppose it is, but we all have to find a way of
being
, a way of living, and as far as I am concerned, life has an inside as well as an outside. Most, if not all, of our time and energy goes into life on the outside – jobs, money, status, getting and spending – and this is disorientating. And it means that if life on the outside is a mess, as it often is, or unsatisfactory, we have no inner resources to help us through.

Books work from the inside out. They are a private conversation happening somewhere in the soul.

Often then, still, now, always, if I can use the book as a compass I can right my way. Reading calms me and it clears my head. In the company of a book my mind expands and I find myself less anxious and more aware.

This happens in the interaction between me and any, every encounter with a book that has being. And a book that has being is a book where the writer has found something essential and can communicate it to me.

It really doesn’t matter
what
. The Cairngorms or
Wuthering Heights. Cloud Atlas
or
Moby-Dick. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
or a Carol Ann Duffy poem. Poetry is all about being, and because we are much less concerned with the subject matter or the story of a poem, it is easier
to
understand Susan’s Sontag’s remark, ‘A work of art is not just
about
something; it
is
something.’

The is-ness of art, its being, is vital. What it is about may be interesting and absorbing, may be topical, may be urgent, but over time what comes back to us, sustains us, is none of that. Art, and that includes writing, is not an end in itself; it is a medium for the soul.

You need not believe in the gods to believe in your own soul. It is that part of you that feels not obliged to materiality. I do not know if the soul survives physical death – and I do not care – but I know that to lose your soul while you are alive is worse than death.

I want to protect my soul.

Reading isn’t the only way to protect your soul, or to live in total time, or to find your own way home – but we’re talking about reading here, and my most intense experience is with and through language. I am like Adam and I need to name things. This is not taxonomy and it’s not reductive, rather it’s trying to find a language that fits. Fits what? Not only the object or the experience but also the feeling.

It is impossible to have a thought without a feeling. Impossible not to feel. You can suppress
and
distort your feelings, you can displace them and be dishonest about them, but like it or don’t like it, you are feeling something every second. Nothing mystical here. In the economy of the body the limbic pathway takes precedence over the neural highway. We are designed and built to feel.

When I can find a language for my feelings I can own them and not be owned by them. I can be enriched as mind and emotion work together instead of against each other. Art, all art, is good at this essential relationship, but literature finds us the words we need. And we need words. Not empty information. Not babble. Not data. We need a language capable of simple, beautiful expression yet containing complex thought that yields up our feelings instead of depriving us of them.

You only get that kind of language-possibility through reading at a high level; that doesn’t mean difficult or abstruse – quite the contrary. What we think of as difficult is often only unfamiliar, so it can take a bit of time to get into a book. Reading is becoming a casualty of the surf-syndrome of the Web. Reading is not skimming for information. Reading is a deeper dive.

Or a high climb.

Nan Shepherd talks about the exhilaration of
altitude
. The air is thinner. The body is lighter. But you have to acclimatise. You have to acclimatise yourself to books.

I am aware that reading is new. Mass literacy doesn’t really start until the mid-nineteenth century, and we have had an uneasy relationship with reading ever since. Lots of people don’t really read and don’t want to read.

I think that is to do with education and cultural expectation. There is a wonderful group called The Reader Organisation, run by Jane Davis, who is a cross between Bob Geldof and Florence Nightingale, with a bit of Nanny McPhee thrown in. Her reason for living is to take reading into places where reading does not go – prisons, housing estates, children’s homes, etc. She works in Liverpool with people who have often had no real schooling. Her results are incredible. Kids calm down, guys grow up, harassed mothers find themselves mirrored in Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare. There is no dumbing down offered. Against received wisdom, by which I mean received stupidity, her crazy project works. The Reader has no direct government funding.

When I left home I didn’t find hope in realistic docu-drama narratives of deprived kids with no
choices
or chances. I found myself in Aladdin, Huck Finn, Heathcliff, the Little Prince, Henry IV. I identified with Hotspur because of course I identify with the outsider. And soon enough I found Albert Camus.
L’Etranger
.

I should add that my father could not read without running his finger along the line and saying the words out loud very slowly. My mother was very bright but had left school at fourteen. We had no books at home, and anyway I tried not to be at home. I was always in the Pennines, where we lived.

So it is not quite true that I am not a hill walker.

Reading was not so important to my working-class community, unless it was the Bible. Reading the Bible means that you can read anything else – and it makes Shakespeare easy because the language of the King James Version is also the language of Shakespeare. We had a strong oral tradition in the north of England, and people often forget that not being able to read, or not reading, even fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago, was very different from not reading now.

We live under 24/7 saturation bombing from an enervated mass media and a bogus manufactured popular culture. If you don’t read you will likely be watching telly, or on the computer, or
listening
to fake music from puppet-show bands.

When the families I knew in my northern textile town didn’t read – and they didn’t – they were in the brass band, or in the choir, telling their own stories down the pub or on the greyhound track, finding the quiet pleasure of mending kit or working the allotment, or walking for miles in the Pennines. I am not glamorising this working-class life; it was hard and short, and I could not stay there and I would not want it back. But it had a genuine culture of its own – roots up – and it was not force-fed adverts, consumerism and
The X Factor
.

The consequences of homogenised mass culture plus the failure of our education system and our contempt for books and art (it’s either entertainment or elitist, never vital and democratic), mean that not reading cuts off the possibility of private thinking, or of a trained mind, or of a sense of self not dependent on external factors.

A trained mind is a mind that can concentrate. Attention Deficit Disorder is not a disease; it is a consequence of not reading. Teach a child to read and keep that child reading and you will change everything. And yes, I mean everything.

Back to the mountain.

Powerfully argued in
The Living Mountain
is the need to be physical, to be in the body, and to let the senses and the soul work in harmony with the mind. This seems a long way from lying in bed and reading a book. But it isn’t far at all.

Reading stills the body for a while, allowing rest without torpor and quiet without passivity. Reading is not a passive act. Engaged in the book, in company with the writer, the mind can roam where it will. Such freedom to roam reminds us that body and mind both need exercise and activity, and that neither the mind nor the body can cope with confinement. And if the body has to cope with confinement, then all the more reason to have developed a mind that knows how to roam.

In the last months of her long life Nan Shepherd was in hospital unable to climb her beloved mountains. But her mind went on climbing. She could not be trapped.

Reading is a way through, a way in, a way out. It is a way of life. The rewards are immense.