You Want for Nothing, Yet Lack Everything

What is To Live actually about? Strip it down and it’s just this: a man watches his entire family die, one by one, and goes on living with an old ox. That’s all there is to it.

But here’s the problem. Hand the book to someone who isn’t ready for it, and all he’ll take away is that people died. He won’t see what those deaths are pointing at: the unpredictability of fate, the absurdity of the world.

Some finish the book and remember nothing but the body count. What I’m really asking is this: can reading pessimistic literature make you more optimistic? When life disappoints you, can you stop complaining long enough to recognize that this is simply how the world works? Can you accept that everything outside you is beyond your control — that the only things you truly govern are your own mind and how you choose to see the world? For what I cannot control, give me the courage to let it happen as it will; for what I can control, give me the strength to take it in hand; and then give me the wisdom to tell the two apart. Can reading get you there?

Why do some people read piles of books — tragedies included — and come away as if they’d just watched a movie? They’ve absorbed the plot and nothing else. Ask them what they learned and they’ll say: I learned that people die easily. Why do some people log a thousand hours of reading, a hundred books, and still end up hobbled by life’s everyday disappointments? Is it that they don’t know how to fend off pain and anxiety? They probably know perfectly well that pain comes from living in the past and anxiety from living in the future — that nothing matters more than living in the present. Then why can’t they do it? Is reading just a matter of stamping sentences into your brain and calling it done — never digging out the values and the way of seeing the world buried in them? Or digging them out and never once trying to make them your own?

That, I think, is the difference between a person who knows things and a person of real knowledge. One has merely understood; the other has internalized what they learned and lives out most of it with everything they have.

Why do school curricula keep pushing the so-called classics? The children haven’t grown up yet; they can’t possibly grasp the values those books are meant to pass on. They’re just watching a movie without the reflection. What children need is to be thrown into the world, with the smallest amount of help their parents can bear to give, and left to take their own hard knocks — to absorb the blows that society and fate hand out. The blows can’t be too light, or they teach nothing; they can’t be too heavy, or the child never gets back up. They have to land just right. As the saying goes, words don’t teach people — experience does. The surest way to make an obese man commit to losing weight isn’t to have ten thousand people recite the benefits to him every day. All it takes is one trip to the emergency room.