When I was growing up, Mortimer J. Adler championed “The Great Books of the Western World,” Clifton Fadiman promoted “The Lifetime Reading Plan” and every thrift store worth its salt carried a broken set of the Harvard Classics. All these enterprises were energized by one basic assumption: Civilization was on the ropes because fewer and fewer people engaged with the literature and intellectual achievements of the past. Instead, Americans — especially young Americans — were wallowing in ephemeral, popular amusements, which in the mid-20th century largely meant movies and television. Wouldn’t we all be better off devoting our evenings to Aristotle and Emily Dickinson?
Probably. Yet these well-intentioned literacy campaigns usually made reading sound like schoolwork. Far better, I now think, to emphasize that acquiring familiarity with humankind’s greatest cultural achievements, besides increasing one’s store of knowledge, lends an additional pleasure to life. After all, we read because it’s exciting. Metaphorically speaking, books are always taking us to the big city, opening our eyes to the world’s plenitude and diversity. By contrast, those who ban or censor them want to keep us down on the farm, restricting our experience to some safe or approved orthodoxy.
An elegant way to understand Poincaré’s conclusion, and bring some order to chaos, came some 70 years later. Shortly after the brilliant young topologist (and future Fields medalist) Stephen Smale wrote his first article on dynamical systems, he received a letter that led him to discover a relatively simple and ubiquitous function that explains the chaos Poincaré observed in the three-body problem. Smale called it the horseshoe.
Loosely summarized, “Checkout 19” is about a writer’s fervid encounters with writing, her own and others’. If you have grown weary of similar summaries on the covers of new books — that is, if you’ve had your fill of autofiction, thanks — don’t lose interest just yet. If much of the genre can be fairly criticized for its narrowness, “Checkout 19” suggests it perhaps hasn’t yet been fully explored.
One morning in the fall of 2017, Frank Bruni woke up unable to see out of his right eye. During the night, the journalist, then 52, had suffered a rare kind of stroke that ravaged one of his optic nerves and left him with a thick fog across the right side of his vision. A few days later, a neuro-ophthalmologist warned him, “You know that this could happen in your other eye.” Bruni asked what that risk might be. “About a forty percent chance,” came the frightening answer.
A flood unzips a graveyard.
Cadavers sluice down Main St.
It’s my job to find the dead,
chauffeur them back to their plots.