That Disorienting Feeling You Get From A Good Education

Student: What exactly is a strong reading of a book? 

Teacher: A clearly articulated understanding of the spirit of a book. It’s a reader’s ability to delve below appearances and describe how all the disparate elements of a book coalesce into a singular moral vision. A strong reading is an interpretation of all the characters, arguments, images, and themes that brings the moral and spiritual weight of a book to bear on the audience. It is an act of deference to reality. It translates the substance of a text into the light by which we can view our own lives clearly.   

Student: In other words, a strong reading explains the author’s purpose.  

Teacher: No. A strong reading may reference the biography of the author, the historical era in which the author lived, and numerous facts or data points about the tradition in which the author worked—but the strong reading of a text sits well beyond all that. A strong reading isn’t fundamentally grounded in science, but in wisdom, charity, and gratitude for life itself. Weak writing cannot produce strong reading. A strong reading only emerges as a response to strong writing, but this is because a strong reader co-creates the meaning of a strong writer’s work. Very few of the books you’ve read can support a strong reading, which is why a strong reading seems strange to you.  

Student: What do you mean “co-creates”?  

Teacher: I mean that a book which goes uninterpreted isn’t really a book. It’s just an object, a doorstop. A reader plays a role in making a book a book. Likewise, a good reader is part of what makes a good book a good book.  

Student: Prove it.  

Teacher: Nah. Look, a little while ago, you suggested that anyone who had lived in the modern world “for more than ten minutes” would understand that a store which represented itself with a pink ice cream cone might sell many things that weren’t pink ice cream cones. In other words, understanding the range of meanings suggested by a pink ice cream cone doesn’t come through linear rational proofs. It comes from living in the world that respects such a sign and learning “how they do things here.” Of course, some of the reasons a people “do things that way” can be reasonably explained, but some can’t. Your world—the world that primarily informs the way you think, feel, assign meaning; the world that dictates what you want, what you fear—is the modern world. The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. Frankenstein is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.  

Student: Why? 

Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.  

Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.

-my latest for The Classical Teaching Institute blog can be read in full here