Close-in day at the library. It feels more like last call. A few people were straggling up until 11:30 but they've pretty much stopped now. The piles of books on the counter that I remember from years past aren't there. There's no chaos, no noise, no stressed student workers, no people carrying in fifty books to return at once. The library is shutting down with a whimper. The only witness is the crazy-looking old woman who's started coming in this year, with gray hair like a decaying beehive or, perhaps even better, like a cloud of dirty smoke that follows wherever she goes. She has a face that has been flattened by life, every last bit of life and hope squeezed out. She walks like a Romero zombie in her loose-fitting early 20th century clothes and gigantic plastic glasses, shambling like a lost soul at a bus station that closed down years ago. And now I blow out the candle, and the semester is over.

Every so often I come face to face with the fact that I'm not all that fond of literature, at least not most of what is considered high literature. Case in point:

I read an essay that made me rethink my distaste for audio books. Previously, it had occurred to me that all my driving was just killing my reading time. I took classes at UNM for the 2009 fall semester, so for the last few months I've been driving to Albuquerque three mornings a week. Until now I had been listening to my poor overlooked CDs, but I was starting to feel the loss of time more acutely, and audio books are an obvious way to try using the down-time that driving requires. The essay convinced me to give it a try. "The audio book performance will influence my interpretation, but I can abstract from the performance interpretation to form my own interpretation, i.e., understanding and appreciation, of the work." So I decided to try it out, but the only audio books available to me easily were those in the St. John's library. As you can imagine, these aren't the kind you'd typically want to listen to during a drive. I passed up Herodotus, Dostoyevsky, Homer, etc. and decided on Dubliners. At least it's fiction and was written in English, the earliest story not much more than a hundred years ago.

I have read Dubliners, but long enough ago that I didn't remember almost any of the stories. Back then I had a sense that it was simply important to read. I don't really feel that now, but I have a generally positive opinion of Joyce.

And so I started. I felt distaste for the reader's voice, but as the essay suggested, it was a relatively trivial matter without much influence on my ultimate interpretation.

And that brings me back to the point with which I began: I don't like interpreting literature. The reasons are made more apparent than usual with Dubliners. I have nearly no aptitude for figuring out stories, on every level. I don't know what part of a story is supposed to be vague; I don't feel at all secure guessing at what I'm supposed to understand from things that are left vague; and I just don't enjoy trying. I have a hard time supplying what is missing, in literature and in life. I can't read between the lines any better than I can read Navajo. I find almost any level of vagueness displeasing and unsettling.

I feel quite the opposite when I read criticism of literature, summaries, and other people's interpretations (as long as they seem plausible). It makes no difference to me if it's Wikipedia entries, short essays intended to help students, or scholarly interpretations, I like it all even if I like some better than others. Reading literature itself is unnerving and often baffling experience. Reading about literature: now that I find fun.

Dubliners is anything but straightforward, and is carefully constructed to require interpretation, as are almost all modern texts. They are generally praised for this feature, and praised the more for being especially hard to understand (or "ambiguous" or "open to interpretation"). Whenever I read something like that I realize that I just don't like it.

In short, I am a philistine when it comes to literature. I am also, unfortunately, unable to accept this as saying anything but bad things about me.

There are perhaps two ways of describing teaching and learning in an appropriate
manner. The one is that of begetting and conceiving. The word of the teacher
acts as the form which in-forms the material of the learner's soul, in-forms the
capability this soul has, and transforms it into a knowing soul. This is, on the
whole, the Aristotelian view. The process of learning and teaching is a
generative one, and a great deal depends not only on the activity and
effectiveness of the teacher's word, but also on the receptivity and
potentiality of the learner's soul. The other way of describing teaching and
learning is that of soliciting and gaining insight from within. Through
questioning and arguing the teacher compels the learner to pull out of himself,
as it were, something slumbering in him at all times. This is, on the whole, the
Socratic and Platonic view. Here again a great deal depends on the quality of
the teacher's questions and on the quality of the learner's soul. But just as
questioning has its place in the Aristotelian scheme, begetting is an important
element in Socrates' practice. Learning from books, by images, through
associations, and whatever other ways of learning may be mentioned, falls easily
into the patterns of those two fundamental views. I doubt whether modern
psychologies of learning have added anything to them.

-Jacob Klein, On Liberal Education, a lecture delivered March 25, 1965

If I've ever read anything more tragically stupid, I'm sure I read it in another St. John's lecture.