An Education by Reading

One of my subjects of alleged scholarly expertise, Christopher Columbus, poignantly exemplifies the feeble tendency of the human mind, when faced with what is unknown and unfamiliar, to attempt to force it into the categories of the known and the familiar. Columbus, making the first European inventory of the breathtaking natural history of the Indies, has two basic categories. Things are either "like they are in Castile" or "not like they are in Castile". He seems unable to imagine a reality that has absolutely bugger-all to do with Castile. Perhaps we all regard our own lives and experiences as normative; and I begin to wonder whether my complaints about Princeton undergraduate "intellectuality" may not be simply an elaborate realization that today's undergraduate experience is very different from my own.

Not that I had the advantages of Princeton education, of course. I went to a small liberal arts college in the South, a place with a huge campus and a tiny endowment, a place not without history, tradition or self-esteem, but without a famous professor within shouting distance. I suspect that about 75 percent of applicants were accepted, and that the average "board scores" were by Princeton standards below contempt. This place confirmed and made permanent the love of literature that has animated my life and "career"; but what I remember most clearly about my "education" is the intense conversations with my peers, often lasting all night over the beery bridge games that were their pretext, conversations about Faulk-ner and French existentialism, about the meaning of Sputnik and the meaning of life, about racial justice, the great moral crisis of that time and place — pretentious, adolescent, absolutely indispensable conversations.

If informal serious talk conducted in complete sentences with subjects and predicates is a cultural habit requiring cultivation and practice — and it is — so also is serious informal reading. One striking difference between the cultural climate of my undergraduate years and that of today's Princeton is the decline, if not the demise, of the personal library. Already in high school I had started a modest collection of "Modern Library" classics, when they cost seventy-five cents apiece, hardback, ordered from New York. All my college friends had a "library" of at least a few books intentionally sought out and chosen according to some examined thematic or bibliophilic principle.

Some time ago I stopped using the U-Store to handle the textbook orders for my courses, preferring for that purpose Micawber Books on Nassau Street. I probably share the common faculty prejudice against the U-Store, which strikes many of us chiefly as a warehouse of overpriced black and orange chachkas; but I was in this instance acting from principle, not prejudice. I actually think that it is an excellent idea to encourage students to get off the campus now and again, even 25 yards off campus; and it certainly is a good idea for them to see what a real bookstore looks like — insofar as there are any real bookstores any more. In the village of Cranbury, hardly five miles from here, is a quixotic and chaotic secondhand bookshop with an amazing inventory. There is such a thing as excess, and the frequency of my visits threatens to land me in the divorce courts, but I doubt whether that worry explains why I have never once seen a Princeton undergraduate in the place.

Chaucer describes a threadbare Oxford student who would rather have in his dormitory room: "Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophie Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie" — these last named, fiddle and guitar, being the moral equivalents of a sound system, Ipod, or tape collection. Fortunately, our vast increase in material wealth means you can have both; but here are some words to live by. If you are spending more money on clothes than on charitable donations you probably have a serious moral problem; if more than on books, a serious cultural problem.

To move my pontification toward the concrete, every Princeton graduate should have at least a few volumes of the Library of America, a not-for-profit publishing venture producing beautiful, durable, authoritative, and immensely readable editions of our great American writers — "greatness" having been established by a committee of impeccable political correctness. Check it out at www.loa.org. Note that this is a dot-org, not a dot-com. For the price of a couple of pizzas and a couple of beers, intestinal life two to twelve hours, you can own the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, or William Tecumseh Sherman, shelf life a hundred years, intellectual life immeasurable. I start with these guys, none of whom enjoyed the advantage of a Princeton writing seminar, for their shamingly brilliant use of American English. Learn how to do it the way they did — by reading.