In a long life I have become accustomed to the usefulness of reading. Useful not simply in the sense of getting information for students hoping to pass exams or people trying to do their jobs better. Nor useful in the general sense of broadening one’s mind and comforting one’s soul. Nor useful even in the sense of entertainment for the passing hour.
All these uses, yes, but reading is also useful in the sense of giving insights on a daily basis about what is going on around you in your life so that you recognize clearly the larger context in which to place events and people in your everyday life.
Let me illustrate what I mean by giving a few examples recalled from my own, rather haphazard, reading this last week. See if the examples I give do not give insights about what is happening right now, right here in Guyana and the world.
I was browsing in an anthology of essays and stopped to read William Hazlitt’s great piece on prize-fighting which I remembered from years and years ago. Hazlitt, among other distinctions, was the first great sports journalist. How I would love in this day and age to read him on the current sporting scene and its heroes and villains.
But it was not only the Hazlitt essay that caught my eye. Browsing in another piece on Alexander Pope’s marvellous poem ‘An Essay on Man’ I happened upon these words:
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
It is a depressing, terrible thing to say – but, now more and more, looking around us, de we not at first exclaim with disgust then turn away and shrug our shoulders?
- There have been at least three articles this week alone I have read about the growing threat of national “home security” agencies encroaching on personal privacy in the cause of securing public safety. An astonishing fact is that the majority of people seem not to be too alarmed at the increasing invasion of their private spaces – even with the certainty that in the future this will slip inexorably into abrogating their very basic freedoms.
How can this be so? Well, the reason was set out very clearly in 1787-88 by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist, which he co-authored with James Madison to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution of the United States which had recently been drafted. Hamilton pointed out that the general populace, even in those countries most attached to liberty and democracy, when faced by the threat of violence and continuous public alarms willingly “resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights.” So it was then, so it is now, so it will be forever. “To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.”
- We are being thrown by our at-daggers-drawn political parties into a before-term, very expensive general election campaign. On all sides the parties will be strutting their stuff and claiming the certainty of decisive success for themselves. The boastfulness will become almost unendurable.
But, of course, the truth is that success will by no means go to the most vociferously boastful but rather to the best prepared and hardest working – in other words to those who are most like the old Russian general Kutuzov, vanquisher of the great Napoleon, about whom I have been reading this week. Here is Tolstoy describing the old general in War and Peace, waiting patiently for firm evidence that Napoleon’s army, immured in winter-bound Moscow, is in fact finished:
“He knew how much weight to attach to favourable reports. He knew how ready men are when they desire anything to manipulate all evidence so as to confirm what they desire. He knew how readily in that case they let everything of an opposite significance pass unheeded. And the more Kutuzov desired this supposition to be correct the less he permitted himself to believe it and the harder he worked and prepared.”
Czeslaw Milosz’s poems are a glory of the modern age. In a week when repellent racism has again raised its ugly head in the case of black Mr Garner choked to death by white police in New York and finding no justice – and at a time when Guyana may yet again be gearing up for an election campaign based on race – I read to soothe my soul the great poet’s ‘Incantation’ which contains the fundamental beliefs on which the never-ending fight against racism must be based:
Human reason is beautiful and
invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no
pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can
prevail against it.
It puts what should be above things
as they are.
It does not know Jew from Greek
nor slave from master.
