Here’s to summer reading

After a long and somewhat tumultuous semester—full of the usual obnoxious French theory, student protests, and lengthy papers—I’m excited for summer reading. Indeed, there are few things more marvelous than a warm summer day spent with iced tea and a good novel. I can go at my own pace—neither reading in a slow “hermeneutically suspicious” manner, nor skimming rapidly on a mad-dash before seminar starts. I can finish a relatively short Flannery O’Connor story in one sitting, or I can dog-ear it and come back a week later. The choice is liberating.

This feeling of soon-to-come summer liberation reminded me of an old Walker Percy essay. In his wonderful “Loss of the Creature,” Percy laments the staleness that pervades the way we moderns see the world. We never see the Grand Canyon anew. Everything beautiful, we assume, has already been photographed or is just about to be photographed. Regretting our “lack of sovereignty” in contemporary academic and aesthetic life, Percy writes:

[T]he citizen of Huxley’s Brave New World who stumbles across a volume of Shakespeare in some vine-grown ruins and squats on a potsherd to read it is in a fairer way of getting at a sonnet than the Harvard sophomore taking English Poetry II. The educator whose business it is to teach students biology or poetry is unaware of a whole ensemble of relations which exist between the student and the dogfish and between the student and the Shakespeare sonnet. To put it bluntly: A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented. The great difficulty is that he is not aware that there is a difficulty; surely, he thinks, in such a fine classroom, with such a fine textbook, the sonnet must come across! What’s wrong with me?

We slice and dice literature to the point that it’s beauty eludes us. We’re so quick to dissect that we forget to feel. Don’t get me wrong. I love academic discussion and debate. But sometimes the best way to read King Lear is to grab a paperback copy and head for the beach. At least, that’s my plan this June.

I started drafting a list of everything I want to read this summer before I felt terribly neurotic. The whole thing read like a compulsive catalog. Will I have failed if I don’t get to reread A Portrait of a Lady? What if I only read a little Faulkner? So I tossed out the list in favor of more spur-of-the-moment literary whims. Here’s to summer reading. I’m feeling lackadaisical already.