I know this information will likely tarnish the image that I have so carefully cultivated with many of you, but I need to go jogging just to keep up with the other players on my basketball team, and I need to confess it now in order to comment on a phenomenon that is making me a little crazy.

The reason that I rarely admit to my jogging is that other people who jog or run, the people who self-identify as runners or joggers, always seem to assume that I must be as passionate about this activity as they are.  “What shoes do you wear?” they ask.  “What club do you belong to?” they demand.  “What distance are you training for?” they want to know.  “What are your best times?” they query.  They are always disappointed and then dismissive when I tell them that I wear an old pair of basketball hightops, that I try to avoid belonging to clubs of any kind, and that I never keep track of how far or how fast I go.  I jog, they soon realize, but I am not a jogger, not really.  What I do and what real joggers do might casually be called by the same name, but I have not actually joined the club.

This kind of behaviour, and it is by no means restricted to joggers, always annoys me.  It is yet one more example of how much people are generally interested in the signs of the thing rather than the thing itself.  They are more interested in owning the right accessories and in belonging to the right clubs and in achieving the right goals than they are with just doing whatever it is that needs to be done.  They are more interested in being called something than in actually doing something.  Even when they are doing the thing as well, they are really more interested in making sure that they look the part so that everyone will know them for what they are.

I run into this everywhere.  I know countless people who want very much to be writers but who are not so very interested in doing any writing.  I know others who want to be musicians or artists or philosophers or whatever.  They cultivate the right look and the right talk and the right friends, but they seldom spend much time doing what they say they want to be.  They just want to be part of the club.

Well, in jogging as in everything else, I want to do the thing rather than merely to join a club.  I will not likely ever wear the right shoes or run with the right people or achieve the right times.  I will just jog, whenever and however I feel like it.  The real joggers are welcome to the rest of it.

Many of those who know me best, my wife among them, responded to the list of beliefs that I posted by suggesting that it was misrepresentative in its brevity, that it did not include many of the other things that I do sincerely believe. There is some truth in this.  My aim was not to list exhaustively the things that I believe, but only to list the things that I felt I could defend experientially, apart from a particular religious tradition.  Though this list of beliefs would, of course, be heavily influenced by the Christian tradition in which I was raised and in which I still practise my faith, I was hoping to isolate the kinds of beliefs that I could maintain apart from the apparatus of this tradition.

If I lay these restrictions aside, however, I certainly do believe a good deal more than my previous post would seem to indicate.  I do count myself as a Christian.  I can cheerfully subscribe to all of the old Christian creeds, though I would question the biblical evidence for a strict doctrine of the trinity.  I can even grudgingly subscribe to most contemporary Christian “statements of faith”, though I object very much to their deeply and ironically unbiblical bibliolatry.  In short, the list of beliefs that I made in my previous post is certainly not exhaustive.

It was not my intention to obscure these beliefs.  I hold them very closely and very deeply.  Rather, I was trying to distinguish between these kinds of beliefs, which are entirely dependent on a particular tradition and a particular set of scriptures, and which are therefore impossible for me to verify even to myself,  from a second set of beliefs that I can verify through my own experience, even if only to myself, even if only to some limited degree.  It is not that I hold the one kind of belief more deeply than the other.  It is that I hold them very differently.  I arrive at them differently.  They are two different ways of believing.

On the other hand, many of those who know me less well, who know me solely in a more academic capacity, questioned my list of beliefs from the other direction entirely, challenging the validity of any beliefs that are based entirely on unverifiable experience.  There is some truth in this too.  I readily admit that my experience can guarantee nothing about God, but it was not my intention to guarantee anything about God.  I would even go so far as to say that nothing about God can ever be guaranteed by anything that is human.  To ask for such guarantees is to misunderstand the nature of belief.

The nature of belief is not to guarantee but to bear witness.  It must not say, “Look here, this must be believed,” because it always lacks this authority.  It can only say, “Look here, this is what I have tasted and seen and found to be good, perhaps you might taste and see also.”  Any belief that seeks to promise more runs the risk of becoming a fundamentalism in the worst sense of this word.

This is what I also believe.  To this much I bear witness.

What follows is a first attempt.  It is not adequate for more reasons than I can list here, but I hope that it might be a place where I can begin thinking through these kinds of ideas with others who are like-minded.  Though the following statements are very influenced by my Christian upbringing, they are only those that I feel that I can defend experientially, apart from any specific text or tradition.

1. I believe in a God who loves us, though I confess that I do not understand this love.

2. I believe in a God who comes to us because we are unable to come to God, though I confess that I do not understand how this  is accomplished.

3. I believe that the only proper response to God’s love is to love God in return, and that it is only possible to love God through loving one another.

4. I believe that all true religion, in whatever faith it arises, leads to an increase of love, and that any religion leading to anything else, in whatever faith it arises, is false, absolutely.

5. I believe that God appears through the Christian tradition, through its scriptures and sacraments, though I suspect that this appearance is neither exclusive nor absolute.

6. I believe that the only essential theology is this:  “God loves us, so we must love God through loving one another.”

I was very interested in botany and entomology in my early teens.  During the summers that I spent with my father and brothers at the hunting camp on Manitoulin Island, I used to go for long walks, taking specimens of anything that seemed interesting.  I would dissect, pin, arrange, bottle, and collect things.  I would grind them and make infusions out of them and even paint with them as  pigments.  It was amateur science mixed with some strange instinct to herbalism and alchemy, all born out of months spent in the midst of nature without much else by way of distraction.

I was also fascinated by some of the more or less philosophical questions that mathematics raises.  I can remember pondering for hours about what zero was, for example.  If it was not a number, then I wanted to know what it was precisely, and this was my first flirtation with the idea that nothingness is actually necessary to thingness, not just as a placeholder, but in essence.

Unfortunately, as I have recounted to many people over the years, these kinds of interests were soundly beaten out of me by the very people who were supposed to be teaching me about them.  One mathematics teacher, for example, came by my desk one day to ask what exactly I was doing.  I showed her my notebook and explained that I was trying to work out the nature of zero.  She told me to stop fooling around and start doing my homework.  I never did any kind of mathematics again except under compulsion, and I dropped the subject entirely as soon as I was able.

A whole semester of memorizing the parts of a cell, for reasons that were never explained to me in any way, had a similar effect on my interest in biology, and my chemistry teacher the following semester actually told me, only two weeks into the course, that I should drop it because I was most likely to fail it anyway.  I ended up taking Science in Society instead, where we baked bread and wrote poems about scientific principles and mostly did very little of anything.

Since that time, however, I have found any number of books that have appealed to the initial interest that I had in science and mathematics, as rudimentary and uninformed as that interest was.  Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings was the first such book I can remember.  Its story engaged me so thoroughly that it inspired me to read further about dopamine and to learn more about chemistry than I ever did in any class. Its attraction for me was that it situates a particular scientific problem in its narrative context.  The reader is invited to identify with the scientist and with the patients and with the story.  The science becomes meaningful because it is a part of a story, and it was this story and that caused me to go beyond Sack’s book to some of the more technical details of his work.

This is one of the reasons why I encourage my students to read Robert Adams’ The Land and Literature of England if they are interested in the history of English literature.  As opposed to most history textbooks, it employs an interested narrative rather than trying to achieve some kind of disinterested objectivity.  It revels in the anecdotal and the tangential, even when it admits that some of these things are a little suspect historically.  It makes the historical study of literature into a series of tales that could be shared over a few pints, assuming that you are the sort of person who would share literary stories of any kind over a few pints, which I must assuredly am.  I find, invariably, that this narrative of English literature not only entertains and informs the students who bother to read it, but that it also encourages them to go to the historical documents themselves.  The story not only helps them to learn the basics.  It also creates the desire to learn more deeply.

I am writing about all this now because I have just finished another of these books:  Colin Tudge’s The Secret of Trees.  The front cover of my edition proclaims that it is “a love-letter to trees,” but it is more accurately a love story about trees, a story that goes back millions of years and is by no means finished yet.  Tudge does not at all shy away from the technical details of his subject, giving introductions to plant biology, natural history, and botanical classification, among other things, but neither does he dwell on them.  They are simply included as elements of his larger narrative, and this narrative, written as only a lover can write, inspires its readers to love trees too.  More than that, it gave meaning and interest to some of the mere facts of biology that were inflicted on me in highschool.

If some teacher, any teacher, had thought to tell me the story of how mitochondria, and other organelles as well, probably originated as independent simple cells and then invaded other single cells in order to form complex cells, this would have lent a whole lot more meaning to the apparently random shapes that I was labeling in my notes.  If anybody had taken the time to explain how plants use hormones to respond to their environment, I would have had a meaningful point of entry into chemistry.  Yet everyone was so busy trying to transmit information that they failed to make the information meaningful.  Everyone was too busy, too scientific, too objective, and too educated to tell a story.

Yet stories are how we learn, certainly as children, and also, if we are willing to admit it, as adults.  I understand that scientific papers and mathematical proofs serve their purpose, and I am not suggesting that we do without them.  I am only arguing that these things remain mostly meaningless without the context of their stories, and I am also perhaps suggesting that the increasing irrelevance of academia for many people has to do with its inability to remember and recount the stories that give its work meaning. It is these stories that inspire people to learn more, inspire them to love what they learn, and so these stories need to be shared more often.

Now, my juvenile writing is certainly as horrible as Lauren’s, but it is horrible for all different reasons.  Mine is horrible because I was reading far too much Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Shakespearean romance, and because I desperately wanted to be a Romantic poet, more than anything, which produced poetry of only the most painfully maudlin sort.  Let me give an example from a poem called “The Prayer of Sir Gawain”.  I am particularly fond of the affected archaisms and the constantly inverted, yoda-like, sentence structure:

A solemn vow to Knight of Green
I made before my King and Queen
That, if my stroke did fail to part
His mighty head and stop his heart,
Then when a year and day had gone
Should I my fullest armor don
And ride from Camelot away
To where that Knight doth hold his sway.
So reaching that unwelcome place
There give myself unto his grace.

So now I kneel ‘neath awesome fear
As quick the payment stroke draws near.
My mind does see the chapel there
That fearsome Knight’s most dreadful lair.
And in his hands an axe of steel
which on my neck I soon shall feel.
I see that helmless head before
My eyes, and here his roar
Forever ringing in my ears,
Forever playing on my fears.

Unfortunately, the melodrama of Sir Gawain seems almost restrained in comparison to these lines from the fabulously titled “I Hamlet Unto Thee Ophelia”:

These tears, great sobbing tears, adorn my cheeks.
Why did I stay away so long a time?
For Fate did take within those absent weeks
Your mind, soul, heart and very life betime,
Forever stole from me, your grace sublime.

Now my lament must seek to cleanse my soul
Of grief, deep seeded guilt which rends it now.
My inaction, only mine, made this bell toll
Which now decries dread Death upon your brow,
The icy grip of hell I did allow.

Now Death alone can give me my desire.
This life can never show to me your grace.
Right gladly will I face Death’s fearful fire,
For only in that dark and unknown place
May I look once again upon your face.

I could go on, but you get the point, or I hope you do, because I would be very pleased to have people share their own such youthful secrets with me in turn.

To read according to desire is to read without regard for anything but the pleasure of the text.  It is to approach the text like a lover, to seek it out wherever it is and wherever it might be.  Those who read like this, who desire like this, who love like this, are always looking, through libraries and bookstores, through the bookshelves of friends, through the recommendations of others, through yardsales and thrift stores and fleamarkets.  When they find what they are seeking, they hunger and lust for it, seize and possess it.  They do not read it, but throw themselves into it, immerse themselves in it, like a madness or a desperation, and they find that they themselves have becomes seized and possessed.

This kind of reading does not remain distinct from the reader, does not leave the reader unaltered.  It permeates the reader’s being, marks it and changes it, leaves the signs of love on it, leaves the scratches and bites of a ferocious love.  The reader bears these scars with a wild and terrified joy, with a fearful pride, hoping and dreading that others will see the wounds and guess what has made them.

At night, lying in bed, the one who desires reading, the one who loves reading, wakes, haunted by the dream of the text, and rises and goes about the house, through the city, into the streets, and seeks, though it does not always find, and yet finds and embraces and does not let go and returns to the house and to the room and to the bed.  The reader who desires is always going and seeking and finding and returning.  The reader who loves is always loving again, and once more, and yet another time, but is never satisfied.  This is the desire without which any practise of reading, any discipline of reading, will be empty and void.

So, since I feel capable of speaking for nobody else, let me share my own reading practise as an example of what I mean:

First, I read with sticky notes, many sticky notes, an unhealthy number of sticky notes.  In fact, my biggest question about readers of the past has to do with how they managed to cope without sticky notes.  I use them to flag quotations that I want to take, passages that I want to engage, ideas that I want to consider, connections with other texts, possible ideas for my own writing, and anything that might relate to the rather broad set of themes and images that I track through everything that I read.

Second, I read with a commonplace book, a hardbound notebook that I use to keep track of the books that I read.  Each book gets a place on a titlepage that indicates where it can be found within the notebook.  Each book’s own section begins with the date and a full bibliographic notation.  The notes consist mostly of quotations and my own responses to them, with the relevant page numbers in the margin.

Third, I read with a scribble book, a hardbound notebook that I use to write whatever else needs to be written.  This book has no premeditated form.  It includes everything from sketches for the composter I am building for the garden or the blocks that I am making for my kids, to notes from the conversations I am having with a friend over coffee or a coworker in a meeting, to drafts of things that I am writing for this blog or for my other projects, and to just about anything else that needs a place.

Fourth, I read with a whole range of computer files.  Usually these files are about a certain topic, or theme, or image, and I copy quotations or write my own notes into them toward future projects that will probably not, but just may, achieve a polished form at some point in the future.

Fifth, I read with this blog and with letters to friends.  When something strikes my imagination, I open a new post or a new email, and I jot the beginnings of something there that might eventually become something that I send.  I often use these media for the things that I would not otherwise know where to place: an interesting but academically insignificant literary connection, a personal or emotive response to a text, or a random piece of paper that I find in a used book.

Fifth, I read most books at least twice.  On the first reading, I read the whole book, thoroughly, stopping only long enough to mark the things that I may want to read or consider or write later.  On the second reading, I return to the most significant portions of the book, copying out quotations, writing responses, scribbling, thinking, pausing, reflecting.

Sixth, I read books with friends.  This is not usually a formal process where I read a book with a friend for the purpose of sharing it, though I sometimes do this also.  It is most often a process of sharing and recommending and discussing the books that I read as they naturally become relevant in the conversations that I have every day.  It is a process of making my reading a part of my living.

This is how I read.  There is nothing essential about the techniques themselves, only about the attention and the concern that requires such techniques in order to express itself.  My practise of reading is essential only insofar as it is the form that passion for reading has come to take in my life.  Your practise will be different, of course, but I would insist on this much: that you do find for yourself some practise of reading, something that forms your reading, in order for you to read well, and so that you can say also, “This is how I read.”

Reservation the First: Though I have become more aware of the art of the list since I read Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, this list will have no art whatsoever.  It will be alphabetical by author’s surname, without specific commentary of any kind.

Reservation the Second: I have not yet read very much in my life, and I can obviously draw my list only from those books that I have read, so this list will be hopelessly deficient.

Reservation the Third: I cannot possibly compare literary works with philosophical works, so I have divided the one list of fifty books into two lists of twenty-five, one for literature and one for philosophy.  I know this is arbitrary, but will do it anyway.

Reservation the Forth and Most Serious: I am still completely uncertain of the criteria that one would use to determine which books are relevant to our times or any other times, so I am not sure how useful any list of mine will actually be.

However, for Dave’s sake and for the sake of anyone else who might conceivably care, these are the fifty books that I would say are relevant to our times.

Literature
Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot
Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones
Albert Camus The Fall
Albert Camus The Plague
J. M. Coetzee Foe
Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers
Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
Simone de Beavoir The Blood of Others
Daniel DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe
Fydor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment
Fydor Dostoevsky The Idiot
Alaxandre Dumas The Count of Monte Christo
William Faulkner As I Lay Dying
William Golding Pincher Martin
William Golding The Spire
Franz Kafka Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka The Trial
Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano
Dow Mossman The Stones of Summer
Gabriel Garcia Marquez A Hundred Years of Solitude
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia
Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

Philosophy
Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space
Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse
Roland Barthes Mythologies
Jean Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project
Maurice Blanchot The Instant of my Death
Dietrich Bonhoeffer The Cost of Discipleship
Martin Buber I and Thou
Michel de Certeau The Practise of Everyday Life
Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle
Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death
Jacques Derrida The Politics of Friendship
Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault The Archaeology of Knowledge
Rene Girard Violence and the Sacred
George Grant Philosophy in the Mass Age
Martin Heidegger On the Way to Language
Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought
Ivan Illich Deschooling Society
Ivan Illich Tools for Conviviality
Soren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling
Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity
Jean-Luc Marion God Without Being
Georges Perec The Species of Spaces
Desmond Tutu No Future Without Forgiveness