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Thoreau & Postman on why books rule
The following is adapted from notes I gave to one of my English classes, in response to class discussion.
One student raised an interesting point, that not everyone can benefit from the classics, suggesting that Thoreau doesn’t take into account—in modern terms—different learning styles. I think this is both true and false. Of course, he doesn’t think of things in these terms because they are very modern ideas and he also has something of a universalist bent to him, so in that sense you’re right. However, consider for a moment the quote with which another student started off the discussion: “The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times, and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.” His suggestion here is that most of us can’t understand these works basically because we aren’t interested in the same concerns. Epics about heroism, we can’t understand because we’re not interested in being truly heroic in that way. Apply that to anything: in an age where we’re not interested in “being virtuous,” how well can we understand a book concerned with “higher laws” of morality? So that’s one point he’s making, that the spirit of his age is so far removed from the spirit of the age of the classics that most people won’t understand.
He’s also saying, though, that people are lousy readers, at least when it comes to deeper things. See the quote in the corner of my room: "To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written." Thoreau acknowledges that reading is difficult, and elsewhere notes that most people are only good enough at it to read what they have to, or to read trashy entertainment. He’s saying that we are better off, though, if we can read like this. Some of you have suggested that Thoreau sees the written word—poetry and books—as better than art or music, and while I don’t know that he’s explicit in that claim, I think if you pushed Thoreau he would probably agree, at least with some qualifications, and I will try to sketch out why this might be so.
I’m drawing here, by the way, on the work of a guy named Neil Postman, though it’s been long enough since I read Postman that I may be inadvertently mixing what he says with what other people have said. The basic premise of Postman is that books are fundamentally better than TV, but I think this argument could be applied backward to Thoreau in relation to other arts too. The fundamental insight here is this: “the medium is the message.” That is, the way ideas are conveyed has certain inherent biases and limitations. For instance, with television, it is very good at showing action and moving pictures, but they're lousy with words, in part because TV has to keep moving forward, so any words have to be able to be instantly understood. So TV is good for fires and riots, but not necessarily for understanding either of those phenomena more deeply.
Lets look at the possibilities of some different art forms. Take visual art. Human beings are very visual creatures, so we tend to have a very immediate response to visual art. A painting—and perhaps still more a photograph—can really affect us strongly. We see a picture of dying children, for instance, and it elicits sympathy and sadness from us. It has a very definite object (children who are dying), but there’s a lot that a picture itself can’t tell us. Who are these children? Why are they dying? What’s the context? We need, at the very least, some kind of caption even to get this basic information. Does visual art have meaning? Sure, of course it does, but it’s inherently a rather limited meaning. Still, it’s powerful stuff, and much more easily accessible than a book, I’ll grant that. Or take music. Music, by its basic properties, can give us a strong impression of emotion—sadness, for instance. I could go into why this works, but I think most of you can accept on a basic level that music is tied to our emotions. At the same time, music is very abstract. While the composer might be writing a piece and thinking about his dying mother or dead child or nothing at all, just wanting to write a sad piece, when you hear it you might think of a friend who died or a puppy you lost or how bummed out you are that you lost to me in ping-pong. Part of the power of music is that it’s universal—we can relate to it because it doesn’t have the definite content of the picture. We don’t have to know anything about the composer’s actual experience to get the mood, and because of that we can apply the feelings that the music creates to our own lives, our own experience. They’re powerful because of their openness to interpretation. Ultimately, though, what we’re getting is a fairly personal meaning, a fairly subjective meaning. It’s powerful and it’s important, but it’s very limited in what it can do.
The written word, Postman and Thoreau would argue, is far more versatile and capable of far more depth of meaning. For instance, because it’s written on a page—as opposed to passing in real time, being spoken like the news, for instance—the reader can go back and re-read something that wasn’t understood in the first place. A book can be more complicated in what it’s saying than spoken word can be, because it gives you the space to take time to understand it (as Thoreau suggested in the quote in the corner). Written language can offer more in terms of explanation and insight than the other arts can do. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those words are all describing only the surface. Music can give us a strong, powerful sense of meaning and is wonderfully universal, but it’s lousy when it comes to specifics. These are the sorts of things that books can do well, and why they ultimately are more valuable to Thoreau and Postman, and some of the rest of us. Books are not as easily accessible (going back to the beginning of this discussion), but Thoreau and Postman would argue that the strength of what the written word can do compared to any other medium makes it worthwhile, because understanding and meaning are some of their highest values.
Your thoughts are always welcome.
