In November, a crowd of 200 gathered in Goldwin Smith to hear former Cornell President Hunter Rawlings deliver his "Last Lecture," a trend in academia in which professors give a talk as if it were their final chance to address an audience. The classics professor described the love of "close reading" he gained in his own student days, in contrast to the current penchant for Googling and other superficial modes of research.
I am honored to be selected for this occasion, but find myself unnerved by the title. My “last lecture” sounds like one of three things: my retirement is near; I am leaving Cornell for another university; or, worst of all, I have only a few days left on this earth. After receiving the email announcement of this lecture, several friends and colleagues have asked me nervous questions in the past few days along those lines.
I tried to explain to them the nature of this series. A professor is supposed to compose a talk on the assumption that it is the last chance to say all the important things on your mind. I have decided to take that premise seriously and to offer a few thoughts on just one thing, a subject that has been at the heart of my academic career for some 45 years: reading, specifically, close reading.
I mean by “close reading” not the kind of reading you do every day, on the web, in the newspaper, or even in most of your courses at Cornell: rapid, superficial skimming of material for information. I mean slow, painstaking, critical reading of complex texts of historical or literary value and significance. This kind of reading has fallen out of favor in the modern era, particularly after the takeover of most media by digital forms of communication. I don’t want to spend a lot of time this afternoon lamenting the decline of learning, something we classicists, especially my age and older, are fond of doing.
Instead, I want to give you three case histories, all my own, of what close reading does. I offer them to you in order to give you a way to think about reading after this lecture is over.
In 1968 I was a graduate student in Classics at Princeton. The Vietnam War was in full swing. It was a difficult time for people of my generation to be pursuing advanced, technical work in Greek and Latin. My friends were being drafted, the rest of us were protesting against the War, and American society was being torn apart. How do you concentrate on ancient Greek and Roman cultures under those conditions? I found the answer in a class I took at Princeton on the Greek historian Thucydides, who is known to us for one thing: he wrote the history of a 27- year-long war between Athens and Sparta.
Thucydides lived through that entire war, fought in it, was exiled from Athens because of it, and wrote a history of it to try to understand and present to others how Greece, particularly democratic Athens, tore itself apart. Thucydides’ history is subtle, sophisticated, and difficult to read, especially in ancient Greek, and is therefore a challenge to interpret. It spoke to me, however, as no other text then did, for two reasons: it confronted directly what I was seeing every day, a brutal, divisive and destructive war; and it did so by raising moral and ethical issues in rhetorically challenging ways.
Above all, I found that Thucydides presented hard questions and offered no easy answers. Most of us want easy answers: in class, in our careers, and in life. I found, however, that the harder it was to read Thucydides, the more I liked it. I liked it because it was hard. What I saw around me was hard, war was hard, and so Thucydides was hard. It made sense. Today, I still read Thucydides, slowly, painstakingly, because it still has a lot to say to me: it is deep, it is moving, it has meaning. But only if I work at it, if I bring something to the table. Last week my class debated a famous and horrifying passage in Thucydides’ history, the Melian Dialogue. My students found it as telling and as challenging as I did 40 years ago. Neither side “won” the debate. Both sides deepened their understanding of a tough question: to what extent is foreign policy a matter of self interest, and to what extent should ethical considerations play a role.
My second case history concerns my favorite fellow Virginian, James Madison. Unlike all our other Presidents, Madison was a scholar, a bookworm, a careful reader of difficult texts. Let me give you an example of Madison as critical reader and critical writer: In 1789, the first year of the new American Republic, in whose creation he had a large share, Madison happened to be visiting George Washington at his home Mount Vernon. Washington was preparing to enter office as the new nation’s first President, and had decided to give an Inaugural Address to the first Congress. He hired a top speechwriter to draft it. Fortunately for Washington, and for all Americans, he showed the draft to Madison, who promptly told Washington that the 70-page speech was completely inappropriate. Like a good CEO, Washington then asked Madison to draft a better one. Madison rewrote Washington’s speech, then the reply to the speech by Congress, then Washington’s response to the reply, in fact, two responses, one to the Senate, one to the House. The opening act of our Republic consisted of James Madison talking to himself!
That’s a good example of Madison as the intellect behind our government. As many of you know, Madison was also the principal author of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution, and of many of the Federalist Papers, still considered the best political science ever written in America. In the past few weeks another class of mine has been reading certain selected Federalist Papers, particularly, of course, several composed by Madison. What I have discovered in these weeks has surprised me: many of my students have considerable difficulty reading Madison’s prose, that is, understanding what it says. Now it’s true that Madison can write in maddeningly complex prose, but it was prose quite common to late 18th century America, based in part upon the style of Latin authors like Cicero. Madison and his fellow Founders studied Latin from an early age and read it well and often. They also read Locke and Hume and Hobbes and Adam Smith, often.
The reason Madison’s prose is hard for students to read, however, is not so much its old-fashioned style as the complexity of thought it expresses. Complex ideas, argued honestly and clearly, require complex language. Students today rarely confront complex language; when they do, they are mostly at a loss. Here is a short piece of particularly effective Madisonian prose, written to win a debate on religious freedom in Virginia. Madison wrote a petition to protest a bill offered by Patrick Henry to tax Virginia citizens in order to support Christian ministers. Why should Virginians oppose the bill?
“Because the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”
Here, in a nutshell, is the most forceful argument against President Bush’s, and possibly President Obama’s “faith-based initiative.” But to grasp its significance one needs to ponder the thought behind Madison’s language. It’s not easy, but it is rewarding. It would be particularly rewarding if all Americans pondered it. I predict they won’t.
My third case history concerns Abraham Lincoln, one of this country’s best readers, and, largely as a result, its greatest speechmaker. Like most Americans, I pretty much took Lincoln for granted throughout my adulthood, until one day I found myself in Washington D.C. with two hours to kill between lobbying appointments. I wandered down the Mall and decided, on a whim, to walk into the Lincoln Memorial, which I had not visited since I was a school kid bused up from Virginia. When I ascended the steps and entered the Memorial, I noticed the lines from Lincoln’s best-known speeches incised high on the interior walls. I have to tell you, I stopped in my tracks, I felt some sort of shock of recognition, of perception, of memory of long-lost words. I thought to myself, how could anyone write such powerful words? How did Lincoln do it? To pursue the question, I went to the bookstore in the Memorial and bought a copy of Lincoln’s speeches, arranged in chronological order.
On the flight home, I started reading Lincoln’s speeches, in order. What I found was remarkable: Lincoln’s style just kept getting better and more powerful as he got older, as he took phrases and rhythms from the Bible, which he read every day, and shaped them eventually to the point of complete rhetorical mastery. Lincoln read not only the Old and New Testaments, but ancient Greek speeches like Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as reported by Thucydides, and Shakespeare, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George Bancroft, and the preacher Theodore Parker. From these written sources Lincoln developed a style of his own, one well fitted to the political and moral demands placed upon him by the Civil War. That war had no easy answers either, only hard truths, hard to understand and, even when understood, hard to take.
This fall Cornell freshmen read Garry Wills’ book Lincoln at Gettysburg, a study of the Gettysburg Address. I turn to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural for my example of his prose:
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Note the difference between Lincoln’s use of God and that of all his successor-presidents: God is not blessing America, nor is he to be found “on America’s side.” God is instead punishing America for its original sin.
I conclude this “last lecture” with a last quotation, from Lincoln’s contemporary Walt Whitman:
Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in the highest sense, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start of the frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves and not on a few coteries of writers.
If we could all follow that advice, we would indeed be “a nation of supple and athletic minds.”