How Ignorant Rural Republicans Forced Me on a Quest for Books

Don’t take food off your table, but if you can afford to sponsor my newsletter it would mean the world to me. Here’s a 50% off coupon!Yesterday I stumbled across my old copy of Thomas More’s Utopia. I read it when I was in high school. It wasn’t assigned, I read it on my own. The margins were filled with my scrawling, illegible notes.I remembered the principal walking by as I sat in the hallway reading quietly to myself. I wasn’t doing anything wrong or bothering anybody, but the sight of him made me tense in readiness for whatever abuse he had planned.Mr. Hank carried himself like one of those guys who got kicked off the wrestling team and who spent the rest of his life feeling bitter about it. He tried to occupy space like an athlete. Part of his persona included leering at the girls as if being the principal entitled him to all the rights and privileges of an “alpha male.”I buried my nose in my book, hoping he’d go away, but reading is considered an act of aggression in a community that worships ignorance.I didn’t have the context to know that he was already at fault. He’d already disturbed me. I thought if he left without an interaction that would constitute a win. Today I know you only score a win when you completely free yourself from the unwelcome intrusions of toxic people.It took a lot of reading and a lot of travel and a lot of quiet contemplation to arrive at that conclusion.Mr. Hank’s footfalls echoed with a “stomp, stomp, stomp.” I felt rather than saw him swerve at me. His head tilted to read the cover.“Thomas More,” he said through a smirk. “He was beheaded.”Then, blissfully, he left me alone, skipping down the hall, laughing at his own cleverness.I still remember the sense of shock I felt at Mr. Hank’s words. Utopia was first published in 1516. It’s a piece of literature that has endured for centuries and the only comment my high school principal could make was that the author had been beheaded?There are moments in life when people and institutions are exposed. That was one of those moments. Mr. Hank’s comment confirmed my impression that he was apathetic about the concept of personal growth.My community regarded education with suspicion. I had aspirations for a better life, so I resolved to put my head down, ignore the local perspective, and endure.At the start of my senior year, I realized I’d fallen into a trap.By then I’d cultivated a sense of contempt over how little I was being taught during the interminable days of high school. As the reality of graduation approached, I awakened to the realization that the joke was on me.A school that doesn’t prepare a student for life doesn’t bear the consequences for its incompetence, the student does.Too late, I realized why I’d never been punished for my haughty attitude. The administrators knew the future would take care of that.I felt a crushing sense of anxiety. I’d seen my friends who were seniors graduate and struggle. So, I resolved to use the little time that remained to educate myself as well as possible.I adopted a plan that was both innocent and futile, but it gave me hope.Hope has power even when it’s drawn from nothing.Somehow I got my hands on a list of the 100 greatest novels ever written. It was a two-page printout on standard office paper. By the time I was done with it, the pages were torn, crinkled and covered in my sprawling notes. I scratched out the titles as I read them.It was an odd list, and I suspect that 30 years later, many of the titles would change. But it was something, and for me, it provided a foundation.Utopia was on the list as were the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. There were relatively modern writers like Hemingway and Salinger. There were also older titles like The Decameron (1620), Canterbury tales (c. 1400), Beowulf (c. 1000), and The Iliad (c. 700s BC).I admit that most of the works on the list were beyond me, but I diligently stared at every page with only occasional skimming. I felt that even if I didn’t fully grasp the information before me, it would provide some skeletal framework of knowledge.All my life I’d read books with words I didn’t understand. You figure it out as you go.By the end of the year, I’d read most of them.Getting through my list of books provided me with a focal point to help manage my anxiety, but the truth is that I was lost in the wilderness. My advantage was that I didn’t fully comprehend the hopelessness of my position.The books on the list were not easily available. This was before the internet, so I couldn’t just buy them used off of Amazon. I had to go on a scavenger hunt of knowledge. I looked at it as sort of a personal quest.I set parameters that made the undertaking more complicated than it needed to be. I’d grown mistrustful of my teachers, so I didn’t bother to ask them. I didn’t want them to know what I was reading. I made a mistake in extending this mistrust to librarians as well. They could have helped me.I didn’t want any adult help of any kind. The people in my community felt like obstacles to knowledge rather than allies. I suspected they’d only let me find what I was looking for if it was ultimately harmful.My objectives didn’t feel pure unless I found them on my own.I remember sitting in the hall grinding my way through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The economics teacher noticed and wrinkled his nose in disgust. “What are you reading that for?” he asked.No teacher in my high school ever complimented me for working with these books.“Walter, you can’t sit there reading Leaves of Grass until your assignments are done!”“They’re done.”“Are you sure?”“Yes. Haven’t you learned by now? My assignments are always done.”“Come and speak with me after class.”I had to go to the public library in St. Paul to checkout a copy of Vicente Ibanez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916). Of all the books on the list, that one was the hardest to find, and obtaining it was a quest unto itself.I still remember approaching the library. It was one of those ancient looking buildings with soaring ceilings and fancy stonework. I remember fog and darkness and an ominous set of stairs. How did I end up there? I must have gotten the information from some form of inter library search that was called up in shimmering green letters on a black screen.What an odd thing for an 18 year old boy to become fixated on. First there was the two hour drive to the city. Then I had to find a place to park, which isn’t easy for a country boy. It’s a relief when the journey goes from the chaos and noise of the highway to the calm of the stacks. The final step is to squint and read titles printed on very old books in near darkness that nobody had touched in who knows how long?I had a girlfriend at the time, but I remember being lonely.Chasing down books turned out to be a source of information beyond the contents of the text. The checkout card from the titles I found in the high school library had the names of all the students who had taken the copy home for a night or twenty.There were familiar names on there, names of students who had recently graduated. I’d had classes with some of them, and it was interesting to think I was on the verge of downloading information into my mind that had already been transferred into theirs.Sometimes while reading a book, you discover the origin of a comment you remember somebody making in class. “Ah, so this is where that came from.” You end up knowing those people better even if it’s only in your memories.I wonder if there are still cards in my high school library that contain my signature? Perhaps many of the books that were available to me have since been banned.Passages from Utopia have stayed with me all these years. More was among the first to realize that an equal distribution of resources was the only hope for humanity. He spoke out about preventing oppressive individuals to acquire vast holdings of wealth.There are many thoughts in Utopia that could be implemented in our society today that would be beneficial to all.That brought me hope when I was 18. Today it makes me both frustrated and sad.The truth is, we’ve had a blueprint for prosperity and equality at our fingertips since 1500. It’s not that our leaders haven’t known how to treat the general population with basic human dignity, it’s that they’ve made a deliberate choice to go in a different direction.“He was beheaded.”Had it been Mr. Hank’s intention to convey a sense of futility? Anyone who dares to question comes face-to-face with a threat eventually. “This way lies death! Go back! Go back!”I’ve heard the warning too. I just don’t think it makes any sense. We’re mortal. We can’t escape death. We do, however, have a chance of escaping misery. But most people are so terrified of inescapable consequences that they huddle meekly beneath a shroud of preventable oppression.Throw it off!I didn’t understand those books when I read them, but maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe it was simply enough to follow my curiosity, and take time for myself, and contemplate everything I didn’t understand away from toxic people.I found fragments of understanding in paragraphs, sometimes they came from a single sentence.We spend our childhood navigating a fog that’s sporadically illuminated by brilliant flashes of clarity. Those instances expose false narratives, but the revelations are as quick as a blink. The first steps of finding your way in the world are like watching a lighting storm at midnight.Manipulative people maintain their power by encouraging us to disregard our own intuition. They know that they are exposed. Every insight is like a seed. If you cultivate those seeds, they’ll grow.Truth isn’t hidden from us, it’s written out in the open for anyone to see. The problem is that it’s inscribed in a language we don’t understand. You gain words through quiet contemplation. One day, after years of diligent study, fluency descends upon you like a lighting bolt.The fog, once impenetrable becomes itself reduced to infrequent flashes. But in the early days, when you’re most in need of guidance, you’re vulnerable to falling for the lie that there is no safe passage through.It once seemed impossible, but these days reality has inverted. I’m more surrounded by light interrupted by flashes of fog than vice versa. Perhaps just as the flashes became more frequent when I began to pay attention, one day, too, the fog will recede and maybe, just maybe, it will disappear entirely.It is, I think, possible. Imagine what we could achieve with a shared commitment to that objective?You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! 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