What are we doing here, anyway?
Books.
How, then?
Over the last couple of months I've asked you about that. Perhaps not you, specifically and personally, though maybe you are one of the people I quizzed in book shops and train stations, restaurants and libraries, here and there.
Collectively, you gave me two firm instructions:
(1) You want to know, very specifically, that writers who are assessing books for you have very solid credentials, in experience and knowledge.
("If I cared about the judgment of somebody with no more nTC authority than 'a writer from Towson,'" one Sun reader told me, "I'd leave my decisions to the checkout girl at the Giant. She writes receipts.")
(2) You want our reviews to be short, clearly stated and firmly judgmental. ("I haven't actually read an entire book review in years," another reader confessed. "They all seem to fall asleep in the sixth paragraph. Sometimes I'll look at the ending to see if it's woken up.")
You said a lot of other things. Many of them, I am delighted to report, were totally contradictory. More of that as time rolls on. Meanwhile, I will do my very best to follow your orders on points 1 and 2.
In doing that, I will try to choose books, writers and ideas that will excite the thoughtful and incite the complacent. That began with the restructuring of these pages two weeks ago. Right off, I got into trouble.
An irate reader called last Monday. (The call snuck through; I don't do telephone calls, psychiatry or front stoops, though I do read letters, eagerly.) She demanded justification of how I could possibly:
(1) In one week celebrate rapturously the latest work of William S. Burroughs, a notorious dissolute, a drug-wallowing railer against society's every rule, both civil and criminal; and
(2) on the following week bellow the praises of Harold Bloom, High Protector of the Faith of the Western Canon, defender of deeply traditional literary and artistic values and, presumably, the blood enemy of the very essence of Burroughs' message and model.
There is no conflict. What these pages are here for is to ogle ideas.
There are many well-qualified applicants for compassion on this brute planet. I know of few more pitiful than a citizen who is bereft of the experience of flirting with ideas.
A reasonable life deserves disputes of more energy, substance -- yes, even anger -- than what commercial sports team thrashes which other, or whether the owner of that wan life makes a bit more money or a bit less.
A simple fact: Each of us gets, free at birth, a mind. We can kill it only by repeated, savage bludgeoning with blunt instruments. (Stone axes, arguments about the weather, television soap operas all qualify.)
What are we doing here, anyway?
Dancing with ideas: The works of the mind. The fruits of the exercised conscious processes of the human brain are immense and limitless. If they bubble up at random and disappear at bedtime, fine. Better that than insistent mindlessness. But when the mind's products become cumulative, they begin to constitute a culture, or a piece of one.
To do so, they have to be recorded. And most of that recording must be writing down - or painting paintings, building objects, notating music. The capacity to contain words and ideas, structures and methods within a single mind and then pass all that on to others by word of mouth is very limited, the legends of blind Homer notwithstanding.
And so the written word. In this sense, the written word - with all due respect to newspapers and those of us who live for, with and by them - finally is books. They are, at best, eternal. They preserve, and are preserved as nothing else.
Let's look at them on these pages. In ways, perhaps, that neither you nor I have done before.
Books that exercise the mind do something that nothing else can. This is not in any way to denigrate country, love, family, painting, dance, sex, writing or enforcing laws, sailing around the world, honor or fly fishing to suggest that books " at their best" are incomparable to any other experience.
What's this "at their best" ?
The answer must be almost totally personal, individual and to a significant degree mysterious.
Sure, one may say, certain books can easily be written off: Software manuals, bodice-ripping romances, self-help pepper-ups, hard-core porn, airport distractions, beach-reading bromides.
But no. In every one of those reviled categories, somewhere there lurks a sleeper, a book that somehow challenges convention or general presumptions, that brings to the table of ideas something fresh, new, energizing. That engages the mind, enriches the consciousness, dances with ideas.
So there has got to be a lot of messy groping. To make an examination of books exciting and inciting, it is necessary to engage and endure a lot of firm, fervent - and sometimes absolutely rotten - judgments. It's vital to raise Hell, invoke Heaven and challenge the existence of both. And then to go at it again.
Hang around.