To A Young Reader: By Richard Sale

 
By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars.

The fact that you are reading is an indication that you have intelligence beyond the ordinary.  Books then are going to be absolutely essential to developing your talents, but you have to ask, what kinds of books are going to enrich your intelligence the most?

When I was 11 or 12, my farther and my mother didn’t read. We had shelves crammed full of wonderful books including “War and Peace,” but I never ever saw either of them touch a single one.  I was urged to read “Treasure Island” by Stephenson or “Ivanhoe,” by Scott but the writers of these books wrote in a way that was out of date and the books were boring.  Rather than use simple words effectively, they used big ones and used complicated sentences.  It was like gazing at a stone. The first books I ever read were eyewitness accounts of World War II by war correspondents – books about bloody Pacific battles like Tarawa. I loved them and still do.

So the basic rule for you is, read what interests you, not what someone has told you to read.  A very famous poet named Samuel Johnson used to read a book by paging through it and only started to read when he came across something interesting. That is a good rule to follow. (When a friend asked Johnson about his reading, Johnson replied, “So you really finish books?” He seemed surprised.)

You read a book for a reason. Knowledge from books is like a spot of dye.  It drips into water and it expands and spreads its color. That is what reading does for you – it is that spot of dye. It spreads. It stirs curiosity, helps you discover connections between what you are reading to what you haven’t read, and helps you determine what is true from what is false.

Some people feel reading isn’t practical – why are you outside doing something rather than read? Well, reading is an act, just like chopping wood. Don’t believe anyone who tells you differently.

The events of your own personal life will give you subjects to write about. There is something called “direct experience, and there is “indirect experience.”  Reading is an indirect experience. Most of your valued knowledge will come from indirect experience. A great statesman once said, “Any fool can learn from experience, but the real gift is to learn from others’ experience.” Determine not to be a fool.

Language in Your Life 

All sorts of things are going to happen to you – the unfairness of parents, the bored tyranny of bad teachers, the torments of bullies, death, the joy of friendship and love. But there is greater range of things in your life to which you should try and pay attention if you want to develop your mind. You are a creature of physical perceptions: You see. You hear, you feel. All knowledge comes from these. One of the most important is to train your eyes to see –see, not what other people say you saw or perhaps would have seen, but to learn to express in words what you actually saw. So begin by seeing.

Remember, the first word or expression that comes to your mind is not your own. The first words that occur when you try and describe your own life will come from your friends, neighbors, relatives, from parents, teachers, clergymen. Their words are not your words. You have to avoid their words.

Most ordinary people are mentally lazy. This does not mean they are not good people. It doesn’t mean they are not skilled at their jobs or faithful in attending church or they are not kind or thoughtful parents. It just means they have, over time, been reduced to saying whatever everyone else says. They say what they have been told to say without thinking about whether such words are truly accurate to what they are truly feeling.  Most people don’t ask if such words truly convey and depict the actual sight of the thing. 

 

 

Language is not personal. It becomes personal only by hard work. The same words used by a grocer, a mailman, policeman, a banker, a mobster or politicians aren’t going to give much enlightenment unless you work very hard to hammer impersonal words into intelligent, personal meaning. You can only describe personal things by learning to use words that you have made your own.

We just had a hurricane in North Carolina where I live. It may have rained rain but most of all it rained clichés. We heard nothing but “steady rain, pounding waves, or screaming winds.” To avoid this rubbish, keep thinking of what you have seen and try to express it in a way that no one else has. Instead of saying “screaming winds” why not say “the roar of foaming crests,” or “the wind swept from the sea into the darkness,” or “a wave toppled over, adding to the huge din,” or “There was a rush of great waters as if a dam had been blown up”? Why not describe the reaction of a person out in a storm as “badly shaken, half drowned, and partly choked”? Why not talk of empty boardwalks of being “blown way, swept clean, water boiling up and streaming off" of their surfaces? Or what about describing a tilting TV newscaster with a microphone in his hand as being “blown to rags by the wind”?

The origin of that language comes from a magnificent story by Joseph Conrad called, “Typhoon.”  Conrad was a Pole who spoke French and learned English as a second language. If we cannot write like Conrad, at least we can make efforts to do so.

Some people who feel an inner hesitation about using a common, outworn word or phrase have a good instinct. That kind of hesitation is a gift.  Let us take something simply like rain. It is easy to look out a window and say, “It’s raining.” Fine.  But what is really happening?  More importantly, what do you see?  Suppose you are standing near a window.  You feel the air darken outside. Then as you stare out through the glass, you see something. Something unexpected. You keep looking and you see it again. Suddenly you see something that looks like a needle appearing on the glass. It glistens. You continue to stare out. There’s nothing, but then, yes, you see another glass needle, then another one.  And suddenly the glass fills with a horde of these glistening needles and you turn and say to your neighbor, “It’s raining.” You have to be able to see, to be patient and calm, and rid your mind of commonplaces and then write something original and true. Always be faithful to what you have seen.

 Find a Supply of Words

To write well you have to have an adequate supply of words. Your reading will give you these; you must read writers who are more articulate than you are. You have to read William Hazlitt. He had a quick responsiveness and an ability to wrestle with a sensation until he could put it in his own words. His style -- the way he used words -- is simple. You can imitate him.

You have to read Montaigne.  The French author was the first to tell as an author what he felt as a man. He writes the story of what he has suffered, thought, felt in order to make clear to himself what he has experienced.  His essays are full of surprises.

Your mind should be at the tip of your senses, not buried under an avalanche of clichés and shopworn expressions. Emerson once said that in good writing, “Words become one with things.” He said good expressions result from the “clear, intense sight of the thing.”  Thoreau spoke of his “intense appetite for visual images.” It’s like the rain I was describing. The power of true description lies with the sight of the thing because that power lies in nature.  

Reading Literature

Reading a good book is a pleasure – it’s not a task like cleaning your room. Beware of big words like “Classics” or “Ancient Masterpieces.”They frighten people off and no one flees from them faster and farther than those who have never read them.

When my son asked me what to read I had him read “The Old Man and the Sea.” It is not the great Hemingway – it’s the late work of a very worn out writer. But it uses language effectively. The words are placed in such a way as to yield music, if you listen and listen carefully. It tells a story. Remember that sympathy is the soul of listening in conversation but especially when you read.

I also had my son read, “The Rea Pony,” by John Steinbeck. It is about life on a ranch where things die but new things are born. It is not always a pleasant story but it is true.

Then, when I asked my son to read a bestseller, he picked “Jaws.” I thought it was garbage but it seemed fair to give him a choice and he liked it.  When he was finished, I asked him what was the difference between literature and a best seller, and he replied, “The best seller is more exciting but literature is more real.”

My son is now 44 years old, but his definition still stands as excellent.

 Holding to Your Own View  (Or Keeping Your Head on Straight)

You are smack right in the middle of a very interesting time of your life.  

There are all sorts of occupations, jobs, business, and household chores. But an interest means at that point at which something or some subject engages your curiosity. The word “interest “is bound up with the activities we are involved in.  Everything depends on a person’s response to an interest, to the sympathy he has for it, the intensity of his reaction to it, and his dedication to expand it. To have an interest means you are absorbed, engrossed, carried away by it, and wrapped up in it. A brain without interests is like a boarded up house where no one ever visits,  and no one is ever seen coming out.

I’m sure you already have a number of interests and this means you have aims. Interest in a thing means improving it and that means that you will goals. Some childhood goals are common, like improving your foot speed for track or becoming a better baseball player -- means that you believe that these skills are things you can acquire only by repeated efforts. The same applies to your interest in history or art or literature. Every effort you make to realize the goal helps bring the goal within your reach. Your effort to realize the goal shows you how much you value it. 

The progress that occurs in the world is and has been, and will be dependent on people who perpetually and energetically do everything within their power to accomplish their aim. You want to be one of those people.

Reading and Creating Value

You will never waste time by reading a book. We live in a time where life is feverish, superficially full of perpetual shocks and surprise,

Certain people look up at a book, half think about it, put it down, perhaps think about it again or worse make a mental a note that they will think about it in the future and they never do. The knowledge glances off but it does not stick, and in they had no resolve, no truly real interest in it. It was, in the end, a distraction.  

Remember, things that we have mastered become a part of our blood, change the way we look at something, enrich us. When you reread a book, by the act of remembering what you have just read, you create a solid value for yourself. This in turn will enrich others – becoming a value for our lives in common.  Thanks to your new stores of knowledge, you will find new perspectives, new reference points, new discoveries.  You will judge things better, more acutely, more deliberately, more precisely.

Beware of Opinion

In America today there is a class of people who simply like to talk.  The most frequent and loudest talkers are often not deeply intelligent people.  They are like a fine book with the best pages torn out. Public opinion is the opinion of the average person. Never forget that. Today we are infested with TV hosts, commentators or the like who do not have anything significant to say. The voice of insight is not a loud, booming voice, it is a still, small voice.  Only intelligent people learn to listen for it and hear it.

Devices like TVs and cell phones make life easier but at a cost.  I know people who chat all day. But what do they say that is worth remembering? Time is not to be killed. It is to be accounted for. The amount of information spread about today surpasses any person’s ability to absorb it.  Just the act of publishing today usually means that something dumb has acquired a new popularity. The weight and volume of clichés, stale slogans, the real tyranny of commonplaces, means that opinions can’t be considered or rejected any more. If you think about it, most opinions are almost always a waste of time. We outgrow them. They become obsolete.  But today opinions have to be weighed, like sliced ham. They overwhelm us. The opinion has become a commodity, like pepper. The sheer mass of it has become a means of physical domination.  It has exchange value, it’s an article of trade, its force is proportional to the mass.  Just remember that reckless opinions debase culture and dull the mind.

.History

If you want to develop your curiosity about the past you have to study the past.

History is a vast subject.  Our democracy, for example, is very new in terms of history, not going further back than the 17^th century.  It was a phenomenon that arose from the area around the North Sea.  Is democracy really the best thing for countries like Arab countries, which have a different race, traditions, beliefs, superstitions, religions, rules?

To get an idea  of U.S. history, read “The Glory and the Dream” by Manchester. It paints a marvelous picture.

Rome.  The Empire of Rome is one of the most incredible cultural achievements of all time.  Most people get their idea of Rome from Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, They shouldn’t. The Roman Republic was full of slaughters and intrigues, and the Empire was a huge improvement.

GP Baker has written clear, simple and insightful books about certain Roman figures such as Sulla or Augustus or Hannibal. Remember that the characters of history were just as alive as you are.  They are not abstractions.

Good writing helps interest.  It is hard to learn anything, if a scholar or a historian is a poor writer.  To show what excellent historical writing is about, read Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey  It is extraordinary.  Pay attention to the way he uses language. The book is a huge assault on 19^th century religion in Britain but don’t pay attention to that. Pay attention to the way he uses description to bring the characters to live and make them move, think, feel, exist.

Pick a topic that interests you and start to investigate it. If it’s the U.S. Civil War, find a good book on it.  There is a lot of badly written history, and a lot of people don’t know enough to see how bad it is.  Find books on history by writers of genius. I would suggest you go to Bruce Catton’s book Stillness at Appomattox.” Even if you are not interested in that war, the final battle between Grant and Lee is a masterpiece of writing, of the setting of scenes, the description of action, the depiction of character. It is work of the first distinction.

Those elements should be a standard of whatever history you read whether it’s the Cold War or a biography of Kennedy or Reagan or the first Bush. Read well written biographies as much as you can. Don’t finish the bad ones.  You have better things to do. There are readable books to read to get a clear idea of the world’s history.  One is a “Short History of the World,” by Ernest Gombrich.   It is simple and clear.

Another is Blaine’s “Short History of the World.” Same title but a very different method.  Blaine depicts the geography, the climate, the human groups from the earliest times to today. I would definitely recommend it.

Reading has saved my life and improved and perfected my soul, and it will do the same yours. .

Philosophy and Psychological Thought

The first requirement of any system of abstractions is that it be true.

Edge your way into abstractions.  Read a great deal of history first. And remember

Samuel Johnson once said that good teachers should not instruct; they should remind.

That is what your reading should do.

It’s  all yours.

 

Comments

[JMH]

Sir,

I am thirty nine but will still take advantage of your wise words.

Thank you, JMH

[Kieran Wanduragala]

Hazlitt begins his discussion of Macbeth with a quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

Thanks for the reading list!