On Being Well Read...
Professionals are often haunted by books.
“Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs…I am haunted by waters.” – A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean, 1976
I am haunted by books. Let me explain. Several years ago someone on old Twitter asked a question a few years back. The question was, “When do you know when you are done reading a book?” Among all the books on my shelf there was one whose content is written within me now, more than others. It made me think. Perhaps the question you should be asking yourself is not when you are done reading a book, but rather you should ask, “When is the book done reading you?”
The book may or may not be specifically related to your profession. It may be nonfiction or fiction. Whatever its form it encourages transfer of learning; the carrying over of past learning and experiences to new situations. The insights from your accumulated knowledge reconnect in new ways with that book. It may seem like the Swiss Army Knife of your bookshelf. All those connections you make with the unfolding propensity of change, that’s what knowledge and insight really are. You are shaped by the book and at the same time you shape your experience with the book. It makes you more adaptable. In this sense, being well read may be more important to PME (Professional Military Education) than other fields because more than others the military/martial profession must think abductively to find unique responses to probable and uncertain situations and unfolding shifts in the very curve of change itself. All of which occurs under conditions of extreme stress where there is nothing wrong with winning and a great deal wrong with losing. Where not only those around you, but your country’s very existence may well depend upon how well read you’ve become.
When I teach and when I work with people even today, I’ll ask in concluding with them, “Everyday has a lesson. What is the lesson for today?” When you’re well read by a book, it will ask you the same question. Being well read also tells you about your individual limits and human qualities. It may be that being well read by a book means you get better questions and not better answers. It may mean you don’t discover the truth, but only what is worthy and ennobling to be of human consideration. It may mean freeing your mind of a current model and a mature acceptance of the world. It may mean to see the world, always with a bit of humor. Reading one book or being well read by it is like the story of the Master of One Technique. A man began to study Tai Chi. He just learned the first opening technique when he was arrested for a crime on trumped up charges by an enemy. The man practiced this one technique over and over for ten years. The injustice of the case was brought to the attention of the Emperor who brought the man before him to officially release him and pay a financial restitution. “What did you do in prison for ten years?” asked the Emperor. “I had just learned the first technique in Tai Chi so I practiced that technique.” The Emperor asked if the man would be willing to test his technique and he agreed. The man has so thoroughly mastered the one technique that no matter how the Emperor’s best warriors attacked the man was unbeatable. Being read by the same book over and over can provide a similar outcome. Masters do not mind practicing even the most basic techniques of their arts, because they acquire new insights from practicing the same thing, but at a different level. I call this spiral learning, because it is like climbing a spiral staircase. When you read and return to the same book, you are in the same place, but at a different level.
I first began to grasp what it meant to be well read by a book while an undergraduate taking a course from Sr. Mary Michael Spangler. Back then the Dominican professors were all about “the life of the mind” and “contemplate and share the fruits of your contemplation.” All classes, even statistics, were taught using elenchus, i.e. the Socratic method of questioning. Sr. Mary Michael had a particular habit, that when someone claimed to be quoting from the Summa Theologica of Aquinas or the Rhetoric of Aristotle, she would stare straight forward with he defocused eyes as if at an invisible page. Her index finger would sweep gently back and forth at her side as if running over something on a page. She could easily correct even the smallest misquote and she was invariably right. I finally asked, “Sister have you memorized the Summa and the Rhetoric?” She modestly blushed and replied, “Only parts.” She went on to tell me that she had acquired her reading habit from a professor she’d studied with in the Netherlands. The Nazis had seized his entire library except for a Bible and the five volume Summa Theologica which were not on his shelves at the time. Over the next five years he read the Summa so often that he found he’d memorized it—all 5 volumes, over 3000 pages. Her next words were an epiphany about what it is to be well read. In comparing herself to her professor she said, “I’m not as well read by the book as he was,” adding, “You go ponder that for a while.” I’ve been pondering it for over fifty years over a myriad of books.
Books can inform and entertains as well as provide us with surface learning of a technical nature. But the books that are most valued for their ability to perfect us in whatever we turn our hand to, are the books that have the inextricable ability to free our minds; to help facilitate the greatness within us. They constantly challenge you. They are the titles that shout at you from the shelf when you are mulling through a problem.
Being well read by a book is a marriage of mind and text. You find yourself in a long term committed and evolving relationship that is not easily set aside for a fling with every glossy new cover and flashy title that comes along. Even when that pile of new reading seems grow, you don’t feel guilty about rereading that one book that keeps calling you back…for just a moment. Often your new reading is enhanced by that one line that completely reframes your reading. Alternately your new reading may now infuse well-read lines with a new perspective you had not seen before.
The long term relationship between book and reader that leads to being well read is not always “love at first sight.” First readings are like all learning, somewhat painful. We’d all rather sit under a palm tree and drink an adult beverage rather than stretch our minds to a new shape. Like a first date, a first reading can be a bit awkward and uncomfortable. You don’t quite know the best way to interact. You’re not sure where the book is coming from. Like the father who tells you while cleaning his gun, to have his daughter home by 11p.m. there is often time pressure in a first reading. The professor expects you to have the entire book read by the next class and that book is in competition with so many others. The pressures can make the first reading about as enjoyable as a mosquito bite on your poison ivy. “Never again,” you tell yourself. Then life experience makes you realize, “Now where was that idea?” This time you’re familiar with the book and you go looking for the relevant section or quote and that’s when you pick up on something you hadn’t noticed on the first reading. You jot a note in the margin or in a notebook and date it. The relationship between you and being well read by the book is like the quote alleged to be from Mark Twain’s about his father, “When I was 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” Like Twain’s father, the book hasn’t changed; but you have and so your adventure with that book unfolds. You become aware of the unfamiliarity of the familiar. Like the martial master who never tires of practicing the basics because the person practicing the same thing is not the same person. The book is like a mirror that reflects the person you have become. That affects your mind’s direction and both inspires and aspires your next evolution in your profession.
When you pick up the book now, instead of the old reluctance of your first experience, you pick up the book with humility and modesty. You assess whether you were adequate to the task of grasping what the book was teaching on your most recent reading. You may need to revise your previous model not only of the book but your model of the world. This is one of the great values of being well read by a book. Repeated exposure reshapes your mind as your model of the world changes. Great books challenge you to cultivate and master yourself; to be a little better the next time you read them.
Five years ago, you read On War and you thought, “Uh huh…” Now you read the same lines and your response is “AHA!” The book hasn’t changed, but your experience has altered the narrative inventory in your mind. You are literally not the same person who read it before. In aikijujutsu this is what we mean when we say, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” As I tell students,
“First you know the path.
Next you walk the path.
Then the path walks you.
Finally you free your mind.”
The same thing applies to that one book. Eventually the book reads you and new revelations free your mind. Reading is the college you should attend every day. Reading is the easiest way to arm yourself with a liberated mind. The book keeps reading you and reconnecting your total experiences with its content. The book reveals new levels of knowledge and cultivates new levels of self-mastery within yourself. It allows you to transfer learning to new engagement with people and interactions with new experiences.
Many books have influenced me in different ways but the one book I keep returning to the Book of Five Scrolls (Gorin no sho) by Miyamoto Musashi. I remember reading it for the first time in my 20’s in about an hour and thinking to myself, “What a dull and impractical book. How could this be considered a “timeless classic?” I was so unimpressed that I culled the original copy from my library. At the time the Gorin no sho was just an instruction manual for using a samurai sword and I didn’t know anybody walking around carrying a yard long knife that could spilt you from head to crotch. I’ve never been in a combat zone, unless you count teaching public school, but I’ve had my close encounters with tire irons, knives, and firearms in the hands of unsavory people where you’re close enough to smell what they had for dinner. I’ve been nearly killed a half dozen times that I know of, so I share that daily feeling of amazement with life that only those who have felt death close by can feel. As my martial practice developed over the years, the Gorin no sho read me more intensely. I wonder how I could have missed so much with each successive reading. What I have learned from it continues to inform every aspect of my life whether it’s my approach to investing, the study of military history, relations with others, or my own self cultivation. It is the manual that informs my school, the Muhyoshi Ryu Aikijujutsu. Now I’ve turned my hand to my own translation and commentary on it and it’s changing me still. I always have a copy at hand.
I’ve asked others in my professional connections about the books that continue to read them. You might want to do the same thing. You may find another book that’s been waiting to read you:
Tyrone Mayfield: Man’s Search for Meaning “Because it changed my life and continues to.”
Steve Sears (Who writes the “Striking Point” for Barron’s) War and Peace “I read it at least once a decade for what it reveals to me about the human condition.”
David Retherferd: Sturcture of Scienctific Revolutions “New insights into the organization of knowledge”
Franklin Annis: On War “The military genius is a man of infinite empathy to conform his soldiers and bring fear to the hearts of his enemies.”
Travis Eifurt: Gulliver’s Travels “The commentary on how people act is interesting and just as fresh today.”
Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson: “Kim by Rudyard Kipling, tells a tale of ‘the Great Game’, the struggle between the British and Russian empires for control of the Punjab, the breadbasket of the Indian Subcontinent. In doing so, it teaches many lessons in geography, espionage, and the art of living in various sorts of borderlands. On a more personal level, it brings backs memories of the model of the great bronze cannon of Lahore that stood on my father’s desk for decades and the music of the Urdu I heard as a child.”
Eric R: “One that comes to mind is The Outsider by Colin Wilson. It speaks to a sense of alienation from the wider culture combined with artistic and intellectual excellence. Through it, it discovered people like Nietszche, Camus, Gurdjieff, and others. Rereading it takes me back to moments of discovery.”
Eric M. Murphy: “But the only book I own that I’d choose over every other is a copy of Shakespeare’s collected works given to me by my grandmother when I was twelve. There isn’t a story he didn’t tell, an emotion he didn’t tap, or a part of the human experience he didn’t make more human and more real. Without fail, I can open to a random page and find something that resonates today and connects me to people everywhere, living and dead. When we were packing to evacuate in front of a fire in Colorado Springs, it was the only book I put in the car.” (I have a collection of poetry my Dad used to read to us from that would also make my go bag.)
James Ross: “Virtual Light, the first of the Bridge Trilogy by William Gibson. For me, the key questions with a story is, do I wish I was there, where the story is set? Do I wish I was friends with these people? For Virtual Light, that’s an emphatic yes.”
Amelia Adams: (I should note Amelia and I are “nerds of a feather”— We both grew up enjoying a good in the Encyclopedia Britannica.) “His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman. I read it every single year in the spring when I’m depressed. It reminds me of the beauty and joy of the flesh and all the parts of me that will go on in different forms after I die. Not to fear death or separation or loss but to face them. My FAVORITE book is a Roget’s thesaurus with the tab index by topic and separate by alphabet. I love that my book and I return to its cracked 4” spine over and over again because it gives suggestions the internet doesn’t provide. I’d say they’re equal in their influence on my life and writing: young adult sacrilegious fiction and a reference book.”
Liza Libes: “There’s one book I always keep coming back to, and it’s Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. I first read the book in the 10th grade for a European history seminar, reread it again in college, and then came back to it again last year. On all three reads it absolutely changed my life. The World of Yesterday is Zweig’s memoir and farewell to well—the world of yesterday—and to European civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Zweig does a masterful job of tracing the downfall of Western Europe and the rise of fascism through a firsthand account of his life both in Vienna and abroad. Along the way, he meets the epoch’s most celebrated intellectuals and reflects on the meaning of art, culture, society, freedom, and ideas. If you want to understand the importance of art, literature, music, and culture to the development of a free society, then this book is for you.” (Read a review on this some time ago. Its moving up to my buy list.)
A book is like an oracle. You can have a question in your mind and in letting the book read you, yet again, answers or more liking new questions will shape and direct your mind to new places. I want people to be haunted by books as much as I have. In my work with people I’ve learned that if you want to change a person’s mind, you don’t tell them what to think. You give them a tool and wonder how their mind will be changed by figuring out what to do with it. A book is a tool for the mind that provides clarity in the face of uncertainty and change. Whatever your book is, keep it handy, because you never know if the book is done reading you. Are you well read? Are you to be haunted by books? You go ponder that for a while…