Chapter 15

Heft and Comfort

As a writer, you bestow the pleasure and balm of reading. You provide the incalculable value of communication by the cheap and accessible means of the written word.

In the Vonnegut house, with its charge-account deadbeats, and in the Goldstein house next door, with its bankruptcy, there were many books. As luck would have it, the Goldstein children and I, and the Marks children three doors down, whose father would soon die quite suddenly, could all read about as easily as we could eat chocolate ice cream. Thus, at a very tender age and in utter silence, disturbing no one, being children as good as gold, we were comforted and nourished by human minds which were calmer and more patient and amusing and unafraid than our parents could afford to be.199

If you ever wonder what in hell you think you’re doing with your life, let me remind you that you are telling people as reasonable and humane as yourself what they desperately need to hear, that others feel as they do.200

My favorite New Yorker cartoon depicts, in the first panel, a woman sitting alone in a room reading a book. In the second, she puts down her book, rises from her chair, and crosses the room. In the third, she returns to her chair with a pencil in hand. And in the last, she writes in the margin of the book she’s been reading, “How true.”

Late in his life, Vonnegut wrote:

Do you realize that all great literature… [is] all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?)201

Dear cranky funny-valentine Kurt, I disagree that all great lit boils down to that. I disagree that it’s such a bummer to be human. But it’s a huge relief for somebody that you said it, and it would’ve been for me when I was much younger. Maybe it will be again, who knows?

If you’re a writer or an artist of any kind, your self-expression will ring a bell with some other self. You can count on that.

If you can [read], you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris.202

Whatever the future may hold for literature in classrooms, uncounted millions of Americans will continue to meditate with books in perfect privacy, escaping from their own weary minds for at least a little while.203

“I’m not a drug salesman. I’m a writer.”

“What makes you think a writer isn’t a drug salesman?”

“I’ll accept that. Guilty as charged.”204

A plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.205

Vonnegut wove his staunch belief in the freedom to read, and consequently his fear and loathing of censorship, into his first novel, Player Piano. Readers as well as writers in that novel’s society are constricted.

When the writer’s wife in the novel explains that her husband has been “classified” and has submitted a manuscript to one of the book clubs, Halyard from the State Department clarifies the state’s book clubs for a foreign guest:

“There are twelve of them,” Halyard interrupted. “Each one selects books for a specific type of reader.”

“There are twelve types of readers?” said Khashdrahr.

“There is now talk of a thirteenth and fourteenth,” said Halyard.206

Vonnegut tried Transcendental Meditation in the late ’60s. Everyone was trying it then, including his wife and daughter. He wrote about it in Fates Worse than Death:

My own impression was that TM was a nice little nap, but that not much happened, whether for good or ill. It was like scuba diving in lukewarm bouillon. A pink silk scarf might drift slowly by.…

… I realized that I had done the same sort of thing thousands of times before.

I had done it while reading books!

Since I was eight or so, I had been internalizing the written words of persons who had seen and felt things new to me.… The world dropped away when I did it. When I read an absorbing book, my pulse and respiration rate slowed down perceptibly, just as though I were doing TM.

I was already a veteran meditator. When I awoke from my Western-style meditation I was often a wiser human being.

He endorses printed books as the preferred delivery system for the elixir of reading.

So many people nowadays regard printed pages as nothing more than obsolescent technology, first developed by the Chinese two thousand years ago. Books came into being, surely, as practical schemes for transmitting or storing information, no more romantic in Gutenberg’s time than a computer in ours. It so happens, though—a wholly unforeseen accident—that the feel and appearance of a book when combined with a literate person in a straight chair can create a spiritual condition of priceless depth and meaning.

This form of meditation, an accident, as I say, may be the greatest treasure at the core of our civilization.

He concludes that we should surrender “only crass and earthly matters to the printout and the cathode tube.”207

Don’t give up on books. They feel so good—their friendly heft. The sweet reluctance of their pages when you turn them with your sensitive fingertips. A large part of our brains is devoted to deciding what our hands are touching is good or bad for us.Any brain worth a nickel knows books are good for us.208

In the introduction to the short fiction collection Bagombo Snuff Box, Vonnegut describes perfectly marvelously the way families read short stories in the heyday of magazines, the ’40s and ’50s. I was a kid during that time, and his description makes me nostalgic for that era of the short story—that quieter, gentler, more private form of communal entertainment.

A short story, because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment. What you have in this volume, then, and in every other collection of short stories, is a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.

Meditators may disagree with Vonnegut’s equation: the reading state equals the meditative. Similar, no doubt. But does reading affect the brain the same way meditating does? That would have to be put to a scientific test.

Controlled experiments prove Vonnegut right on this most important count: Our brains do know reading is good for us. Especially literary fiction. That’s what the scientific journals NeuroImage, Brain and Language, and the Annual Review of Psychology report.

One study found that “after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence.” Literary fiction improves social skills. Why? Because it leaves more to the imagination, activating inferences about characters and sensitivity “to emotional nuance and complexity.”209

Researchers discovered other particulars.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.

Fiction—with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions—offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality… : the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.210

For five years I led seminars for health care professionals at two hospitals under the auspices of a program called “Literature and Medicine, Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare,” founded on such premises about the impact of literature. Begun in Maine in 1996, the mission is to encourage “health care professionals to… reflect on their professional roles and relationships through reading plays, short stories, poetry, fiction and personal narratives, and [to] share those reflections with colleagues.”211

Though not scientific, there was plenty of anecdotal evidence of the positive effects of participants’ literary reading: a social worker at a VA hospital said, after I’d assigned a novel about a female soldier in Iraq and her civilian Iraqi counterpart, that she would never again be impatient with the healing process of the women vets she dealt with in the hospital’s rape victim unit. A nurse announced that she’d cared for comatose patients and patients unable to communicate, but reading one written by such a patient and seeing the film based on it jarred her into deeper consideration of those patients’ consciousness and humanity. A short-short story about female nurses assisting an inebriated surgeon called up an amazing chorus of responses. The issue of a literary journal dedicated to the theme of war elicited a flood of their own and their patients’ experiences. And on and on.212

Narrative Medicine is fast becoming a component in medical school curriculums, and literature and writing are increasingly recognized as avenues to sensitize future doctors and enhance their interpersonal skills. Writing and literature serve across the spectrum of populations, from prisoners to veterans to at-risk youth, for the same purposes. They are good for us all.

Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a report made over a decade ago by the National Endowment for the Arts, found literary reading in America is declining rapidly, especially among the young. The census bureau conducted this survey of 17,000 across a broad swath of the population, at the NEA’s request. “For the first time in modern history, less than half the adult population now reads literature.”213

As a result of their findings, the NEA created “The Big Read,” providing “citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their community.”214

Here’s some of Vonnegut’s “circuitous tribute to the art of reading,” as he called his speech for Connecticut College, dedicating a library.

Our ability to read, when combined with libraries like this one, makes us the freest of women and men—and children.…

… Because we are readers, we don’t have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of night or day.

Even more magically, perhaps, we readers can communicate with each other across space and time so cheaply. Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper—at a cost of less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.

Think of that.

Compare that with the budgets of Cecil B. DeMille.…

Reading exercises the imagination—tempts it to go from strength to strength.…

The language is holy to me.…

Literature is holy to me.…

Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a rare privilege not only on this planet, but throughout the universe, I suspect. And it is not something somebody gave us. It is a thing we give to ourselves.215

Winding up a commencement speech, Kurt Vonnegut asked graduates a question and gave them a task. He transposed it into a poem too. In homage to his tribute to reading, consider naming a book as well as naming a teacher.

baccalaureate

A show of hands, please:

How many of you have had a teacher

at any stage of your education,

from the first grade until this day in May,

who made you happier to be alive,

prouder to be alive,

than you had previously believed

possible?

Good!

Now say the name of that teacher

to someone

sitting or standing near you.

All done?

Thank you, and drive home safely,

and God bless you all.216