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Page 12 text:
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-?n [- raise of r eadina Speech Day Address, June, 1954 by Roderick L. Haig-Brown, LL.D. It has been suggested to me that I might talk to you today about the advantages of reading good literature. It has even been suggested to me that not all of you absorb, willingly and happily, regular doses of the stuff. This, of course, is a hideous libel. I am sure all of you are planning summers of steady and profitable reading, fitted neatly in between those unavoidable interruptions when you are called upon to go sailing or fishing or swimming, or perform some other tiresome activity of this general nature. But in spite of this conviction of mine, I am going to talk to you about books and reading. It is, after all, too good a chance for me to miss. Books are my business, and you can hardly expect me not to put in a plug for them. I can think of only two good reasons to read — one is for pleasure and the other is to learn something. These may or may not be the same thing, but they nearly always can be if you get any kind of a kick out of having a mind as well as a body. Reading for pleasure is the important thing. Reading is not a natural pleasure, like fighting and eating and making love; the chances are most of our ancestors five or ten generations back couldn ' t read or, if they could, didn ' t read very much. Good literature is not a natural taste, it is an acquired taste, like good whiskey and fly fishing and modern art and most other worthwhile things. You have to develop certain standards and go to a little effort to acquire it. But it is a taste you had better acquire if you are going to get the most out of your lives, because the meaning of man and the meaning of civilization is written in good literature. You will not find it so easily or so fully, if you find it at all, anywhere else. The printed page and the spoken word are the onlv real means of communicating ideas. You can skirt around ideas, play with them, point them up a little, emphasize them, perhaps even clarify them, with such means as painting and music, radio, film and television. But from none of these will you get the precision and thoroughness you can expect from the printed page, or the words spoken in discussion. And the spoken word is ephemeral unless someone writes it down; the discussion is limited and impermanent unless it is recorded and spread beyond its group by some means. You will find the world ' s wisdom, the only possible means you can ever have of beginning to understand yourselves and your time and your world, waiting quietly for you between the covers of a great many rather dull-looking books. And there is no other place you can find it. The books only wait. Except in school, and not very much even there, they won ' t run after you and try to bite. You have to go to them and bring something with you — an intention to read well and a willingness to make a little effort about it. Perhaps this sounds like rather formidable and forbidding pleasure. But I doubt if you have any real pleasures now except those you have learned, with some little output of effort, to enjoy — you did not come naturally to the full pleasures of swimming or sailing or skiing, cricket or football or baseball or anything else you enjoy. To read well, you need a skeleton framework of knowledge, which you constantly reshape by fitting other knowledge into it. Some of this you learn at home, some in school, some in university, more by living, and more again by reading more, as the whole develops and expands. You know far more than you think already. You know, for instance, that North American civilization is not an isolated thing, but a part of western civilization. You know that western civilization has followed a direct line from the Mediterranean civilizations of Egypt and Syria, Greece and Rome, through Spain and France and Britain to the present. You know that it has been powerfully influenced through 2,000 years by Christianity. You know, perhaps less certainly, how its flame was hidden in the dark ages that preceded mediaeval civilization, then burst out in glory with the Renaissance. This is one aspect of the framework. On it hang the developments of morality, philosophy, science, the arts, law and government. Into it, or into a frame of your own something like it, can be fitted everything you know or will learn of life and of wisdom. And so you become educated; you become civilized men instead of merely two-legged creatures with a power of reasoning. Perhaps this has suggested to you one of the keenest pleasures of reading — the pleasure of pursuit, of hunting something down to its sources until you understand just Page Ten
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Page 13 text:
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where it fits. If you would read well and with lively pleasure, you must let your curiosity arouse easily and stride out mightily, and you must follow it to its limits — or your limits. There are many frames within the framework, and in each is a broad highway for the strides of curiosity. You may want to follow philosophy from Plato to Whitehead, or medicine from Hippocrates to Banting, or the novel from Bocaccio to Hemingway, or even the gentle art of angling from Dame Juliana to Halford and Hewitt. When you feel that kind of curiosity stirring ahead of you and take steps, however hesitant, to follow it, then you will begin to know some of the sharpest pleasures of reading, and of life. Those are vertical associations, down through the ages. There are others, equally important and equally satisfying, across the ages — who lived when and with whom. The two together yield a sense of period. And a sence of period strengthens the framework of knowledge and understanding as almost nothing else does. It brings evervthing alive and gives a depth to the past that will delight you as keenly as anything you will ever find. Perhaps you will think I am being unnecessarily difficult about all this. Why not just read a book, get something out of it and let it go at that? Simply because you won ' t, and can ' t do it. Without reference to the rest of your knowledge, no book could have any meaning whatsoever for you. You are going to refer it and understand it and judge it by whatever standards you have. The better your standards, the more solid your framework; the better you know your way around it, the greater your pleasure will surely be. Nor is the pursuit of relationships in any way difficult. True, it can become difficult if you follow it far enough. But for a start you need hardly go beyond a good encyclopaedia. Read in it the brief life of a writer who has interested you, note the names of famous men whose lives touched his, and almost inevitably your curiosity will start vou turning the pages to find their lives, perhaps hunting the libraries for their books. At once your first man and his book take on a new dimension. You see them in relationship to their times, to their friends and contemporaries, to the living, active thought that was going on about them. You will feel immensely richer, and you will be exactly that. Suppose you are a bird enthusiast, interested in Audubon. You will learn very easily that there was another North American birdman of about the same time, Alexander Wilson, a Scot who had hoped to be a poet to rival Burns. Through him you will find another early American naturalist, William Bartram. And you will find that Thomas Jefferson, president of the United States, took an interest in all of them and even made the mistake of refusing to send Alexander Wilson with the Lewis and Clark expedition. Out of that the whole picture of the opening continent should come to you with a freshness and keenness of perception that wipes out a hundred and fifty years. Or perhaps you are a fisherman, reading old Izaac Walton for the first time. If you check on his friends you will find they were all royalists, sc holars and divines and poets for the most part. Yet Walton lived quietly and safely through the turbulence of the protectorate and the restoration, and his gentle, kindly Christianity was a living force in the hearts of many men while Judge Jeffries was practising his horrors. I have spoken so far of the past, not because I value it more than the present, but because it is essential to the present. You cannot, even in your daily lives, escape the language and influence of the King James ' Bible, of Shakespeare and of Milton. No one can, least of all any practicing writer. So the past is with you and you need it to place yourselves and anyone you read in the present. But read boldly and abundantly in the present. Don ' t let anyone tell you the advanced writers, the experimentalists, are faddists and insignificant. Some of them are, but find out for yourselves which are phonies and which have meaning for you. Watch the little magazines of your day, where the newest writing of the youngest writers is most likely to appear. Try their pleasant modern substitutes, the pocket books you can buy for fifty cents, like New World Writing and Discovery and Stories in the Modern Manner. Don ' t be afraid to try James Joyce; go at him easily at first, with The Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so that you are sure he can write sense before you try to unravel what looks like nonsense. And don ' t disregard the poets of your day. They have something for you or they would not be of your day. Read Spencer, Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Frost, Millay, Birney, Pratt and all their successors. Compare them with the advanced prose-writers, the composers and artists of your time, and you will come near understanding the temper of your day. I have spoken to you of a long past, of a framework of knowledge, of a sense of period, and now I have said Compare. Perhaps this last word is the whole message I have for you. You will find good literature in many places — in newspapers and Page Eleven
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