An Interview with Rebecca Goldstein
LEAH PRICE: How far back do your collections stretch? When were the first books that you still own acquired? At what age did you start buying books? Which ones have you kept, and shed, as you moved? At what phases of your existence has reading books—and owning books—been most important to you? Have there been periods of your life when you stopped reading?
REBECCA GOLDSTEIN: I grew up in a family that considered book buying a luxury for rich people. We used the public library. So I remember vividly when I started buying books, which was at age fourteen. I had a regular job babysitting and was also teaching Sunday school. My parents regarded my earnings as my own, and I was able to use the money to buy books. I even remember the very first book: Thoreau’s Walden. That memory jogs another: an interviewer asking me, when I’d gotten a MacArthur prize, what I would use the money for. The first thing I could think of was an edition of William Yeats’s Collected Works that I’d been longing for. I had had money worries at that time, and hadn’t felt prepared to buy it.
At this point in my life, I’m pretty lucky. I buy whatever books I want. But I’m still careful. I have all sorts of scruples connected with books and know that whatever I acquire I’ll probably never get rid of.
I still have those first acquisitions, bought with babysitting money. For example, there’s Radical Theology and the Death of God, by Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton. I think I bought that book for the shock value of its title. And the cover is bright red, too. I was going to an extremely religious all-girls high school, and I brought the book with me to read in the back of the classroom, just daring the teacher to find it and ask me about it. I was itching for a fight, but she had the good sense to ignore me.
There’s never been a time when I’d stopped reading, although sometimes I do stop reading fiction. For example, when I was completing my doctoral dissertation in philosophy, I forbade myself any distracting fiction. When I finished the dissertation, I went on a fiction feeding frenzy. I must have felt starved. I couldn’t stop gorging on big, fat, highly caloric nineteenth-century novels. I finished Jude the Obscure and immediately began The Golden Bowl.
Could you say something about the books you selected for our top ten? Which of your books are the most important to you? Which are the ones you miss the most when you’re away from home? Which are the ones you would grab first if a fire broke out? Why?
My copies of both Spinoza’s Ethics and David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature are the same ones I had in college. I’ve used them so much—taught from them, consulted them—that they are crumbling. And my translation of the Ethics is not the one that most scholars use now. There’s a superior one. So when I write scholarly articles and quote from my translation, the editors often object. But I can’t give it up. It’s those words, of that translation, whether inferior or not, that are, for me, Spinoza’s words. Those are the ones I’ve memorized. And both those books, the Spinoza and the Hume, are filled with my marginalia, going all the way back to college. There are passages that I’d marked with questions, and then, sometimes years later, there’s the answer I came to. I’ve never kept a diary. These books, with their marginalia, are the closest thing I have to a diary.
What books are not on the shelves you allowed us to photograph? Are there kinds of books you keep in places other than the bookshelf—cookbooks, phone books, pornography? What kinds of books do you keep in the kitchen, in the bathroom, on the bedside table? Conversely, what nonbook objects do you keep on the bookshelves?
We have some cookbooks—rarely consulted these days, I’m afraid—in the kitchen. (We live near Chinatown; takeout is too tempting.) My bedside table has the books I’m currently reading. I tend to be reading two or three at a time, though only one novel at a time. There was a time when we had some vases and candlesticks mixed in with the books, but I didn’t like that at all. It seemed to me to qualify as what philosophers call a “category mistake.” Books are really the only place in my life where I need rigorous order. My own writing is like that, too, I suppose. I have to be very clear in my mind on the internal structure. It must all be coherent.
Do you lend your books to friends?
I used to lend books to students all the time. I loved to ply them with books, but I lost a great number that way, some of them with marginalia that I regret losing. I lend books now, but mostly just to my two daughters. I rarely get those books back either, but somehow that’s different.
You remark in Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, that “the more sophisticated you are, the more annotated your mental life.” How does your reading feed into your writing, and vice versa? Do you take notes as you read—on a laptop, on Post-its, in a notebook …? Do you mark up your books, with pencil, pen, bookmarks, sticky notes …? Or are there some categories in which you do (working materials, cookbooks …) and others that you wouldn’t deface?
Sometimes I’m chasing after a rhythm in a sentence I’m writing, and I’ll hear, vaguely, a rhythm from some other sentence, something I’ve read but can’t immediately identify. That’s how intimately my reading enters into me. I’ve got the rhythm of sentences stored away. I’d never expected to be a novelist. The field for which I was trained is philosophy of science. That’s what my doctorate is in, and that’s what I taught. But I’ve always loved novels, loved them with a passion I couldn’t justify to myself, until it turned out that what I’d been preparing to be, all those years, sneaking those novels when I ought to have been boning up on journal articles, was a novelist. But I’m never aware, at the time of my reading, what’s going to be useful. I simply read attentively. If a book doesn’t capture my full attention, then it’s not for me. I never take notes on novels. I’m living in them. The same goes for poetry. Philosophy books are entirely different. There I’m carrying on a dialogue with them, and I’ll often jot my thoughts down in the margins. I feel a bit intimidated writing in leather-bound books, but otherwise I’ll mark up anything.
In that novel, there’s also a quip about a book as a “stepladder to enlightenment.” Do you feel comfortable using books to sit on, to prop up other objects, to serve as a coaster under a glass?
Kant tells us that a person can never be used as a means to an end, but must be viewed as an end in itself. This is one of the formulations of his famous categorical imperative. Well, that pretty much summarizes my attitude toward books. I would never use a book as a coaster or to prop up something else, any more than I’d use a person toward that end. Well, maybe a phone book, but not a book that was authored, into which some suffering writer—and all writers suffer—poured her heart and soul.
Temperamentally, are you a pack rat or a toss rat? Do you store other kinds of media—cassette tapes, LPs, CDs—or do you download and discard? How do you dispose of the books you don’t want—donating, recycling, putting out on the curb …? Do you have some taboo against throwing away books when you’re done reading them, or replacing books when they fall apart from wear and tear?
Because I’ve been a judge for quite a few book contests, including the National Book Award, which had us reading close to three hundred books that year, I do find myself in a position of forced disposal. But chances are if it’s a book I actually chose to acquire, I’ll never get rid of it. And that certainly includes any books that are falling apart from wear and tear. Sometimes, if the situation is dire, I’ll buy a second copy. So, for example, my first copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I’d bought in high school with those babysitting earnings, is in tatters. I’ve bought a second copy, which I consult, but only so that the original copy is preserved.
Have you seen your own reading (or writing) habits change as the medium changes? Do you use an e-reader (Kindle, iPad, et cetera)?
I find all the hand-wringing about how the new media is diminishing our intellectual capacities unconvincing. For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary.
I think it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. Some friend is making an argument, appealing to some dubious fact? Google is right at hand, to either verify or falsify.
Top Ten Books Rebecca Goldstein
Plato The Collected Dialogues
Isaac Bashevis Singer The Collected Stories
Henry James The Complete Notebooks of Henry James
Benedict de Spinoza The Ethics
Steven Pinker How the Mind Works
E. A. Burtt The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
George Eliot Middlemarch
Thomas Nagel The Possibility of Altruism
David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature
William James The Varieties of Religious Experience
An Interview with Steven Pinker
LEAH PRICE: How far back do your collections stretch? When were the first books that you still own acquired? At what age did you start buying books? Which ones have you kept, and shed, as you moved? Have there been periods of your life when you stopped reading?
STEVEN PINKER: I have some books going back to early adolescence, including One Two Three … Infinity, but I really started acquiring books when I graduated from high school and was awarded a ten-dollar gift certificate to a local bookstore. Ten dollars bought a lot of paperbacks in 1971, though you get what you pay for—many were printed on high-acid paper with glue bindings and are now disintegrating. I’ve been acquiring books ever since, though I am not squeamish about culling them. With every move (all eleven of them) or every three years, I scan my collection and give away the ones I know I will never open again. Even if I do make a mistake, it’s cheaper to rebuy a book than to own or rent a large enough apartment to house every book I have ever bought.
Could you say something about the books you selected for our top ten? Which of your books are the most important to you? Which are the ones you would grab first if a fire broke out?
I am not sentimental about books as physical objects—I don’t collect rare books, don’t mourn lost ones (unless they have marginalia), and alternate between paper and pixels depending on what’s convenient. I don’t have to have my favorite books near me, and would not take even a minuscule chance with my safety to grab a book in a fire. But then a concentration on information over physical media has been a constant in my life. In my research as a cognitive scientist, I privilege cognitive information processing over neural hardware, and as a boy in Hebrew school I remember challenging a rabbi as to why the Torah had to be written out in vegetable ink on parchment—if the ideas were paramount, why not IBM punch cards?
I do love the contents of books, of course. A common denominator in many of my nonfiction choices is their combination of clarity, rigor, accessibility, depth, and wit. The novels by Twain and Melville are gold mines for anyone interested in language and in human nature.
The bookshelf, literally: what are your shelves made of? How did you acquire them?
My shelving consists of an enormous matrix of white cubes. I discovered the joy of cubes about fifteen years ago. They make it easy to categorize and find books, and they do away with the need for those awful things called bookends. In my old condo I had a closet factory install them; here I ordered them over the Internet and assembled them myself. I reordered new modules so often that someone at the company was curious how I was using them. When I sent in a photo and the salesperson recognized me from my books, he asked if they could use the photo on their website (http://www.smartfurniture.com/smartshelves.html), and if I’d be willing to host a camera crew from the TV show I Want That and do a testimonial. I believe in the product, so I did a hammy sales pitch, which ended up on a new website that I was only dimly aware of at the time: YouTube.
Are there kinds of books you keep in places other than the bookshelf—cookbooks, phone books, pornography?
I own only one book that could be called pornographic: a French book of stereoscopic nude photos from the late nineteenth century (the heyday of stereophotography), bought when I wrote a section on stereo vision in How the Mind Works. It’s my equivalent of buying Playboy for the interviews.
You wrote recently, in a rebuttal of Nicholas Carr’s argument that digital media are making us stupider: “To encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at Power-Point or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research, and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism, and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.” Have you seen your own reading (or writing) habits change as the medium changes? Do you use an e-reader (Kindle, iPad, et cetera)? Do you read books on your phone? How much do you read online? Do you buy or subscribe to newspapers in hard copy? Do you listen to audiobooks? Do you prefer reading aloud or being read aloud to?
I sometimes flip between reading a single book in iPhone, iPad, and paper incarnations, depending on where I am at the time. I love the way that the iPhone allows me to steal back snatches of wasted time and enjoy a book—standing in line to board a plane, or on a crowded subway platform. Though I have read the morning paper as an obligatory ritual every day since I was sixteen, I recently switched to the iPad, largely because home delivery is spotty downtown where I live, complicated further by my frequent travel. I used to read the newspaper with a scissors—now I e-mail articles to myself.
What do you imagine your library looking like five, ten, twenty years from now? Do you think you’ll still own objects made of paper and glue?
Just as television didn’t put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don’t think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. For many purposes paper is an excellent technology. For example, it allows you to use your own spatial memory as a guide to how to locate a book (which is often faster than electronic searching), how far along in a book you are, and where in the book you remember seeing a passage (when you can’t remember a distinctive keyword).
Theodore M. Bernstein The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage
Noam Chomsky Reflections on Language
Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
Bernard DeVoto, ed. The Portable Mark Twain
Galileo Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
George Gamow One Two Three … Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
Thomas Hobbes Leviathan
William James Psychology
Isaac Bashevis Singer Enemies, A Love Story
