Books for Living Read online

  So I spend my life collecting books and sentences from them: books I’ve sought alongside ones I’ve stumbled across, and sentences I’ve forced into my brain through rote memorization alongside ones that just found their way in by themselves.

  At home, I’m a librarian, forever curating my collection. Outside of my apartment, I’m a bookseller—hand-selling my favorite books to everyone I encounter.

  There’s a name for someone who behaves the way I do: Reader.

  This book you are now reading is a manifesto of sorts—my manifesto, a manifesto for readers. Because I think we need to read and to be readers now more than ever.

  We overschedule our days and complain constantly about being too busy; we shop endlessly for stuff we don’t need and then feel oppressed by the clutter that surrounds us; we rarely sleep well or enough; we compare our bodies to the artificial ones we see in magazines and our lives to the exaggerated ones we see on television; we watch cooking shows and then eat fast food; we worry ourselves sick and join gyms we don’t visit; we keep up with hundreds of acquaintances but rarely see our best friends; we bombard ourselves with video clips and emails and instant messages; we even interrupt our interruptions.

  When it comes time for us to decide what we should buy and how we should spend our free time, we expect ever more choice. And in order to try to make our way through all of the options we’ve created for ourselves, we’ve turned the whole world into an endless catalog of “picks and pans,” in which anything that isn’t deemed to be mind-blowing is regarded as useless. We no longer damn things with faint praise—we damn them with any praise that is less than ecstatic. Loving or loathing are the defaults—five stars or one.

  And at the heart of it, for so many, is fear—fear that we are missing out on something. Wherever we are, there’s someone somewhere doing or seeing or eating or listening to something better.

  I’m eager to escape from this way of living. And I think if enough of us escape this, the world will be better for it. Connectivity is one of the great blessings of the Internet era, and it makes extraordinary things possible. I have a world of information keystrokes away; I can buy and sell and trade and share online; and when I drive in a foreign place I have a knowledgeable voice to guide me and to “recalculate my route” when I’ve gone astray. It would be impossible to list all the ways our lives have been transformed.

  But connectivity is one thing; constant connectivity is another. I alert others when I am going to go “off the grid” for a few days or even, sometimes, for a couple of hours; the implication is that unless you are notified otherwise, you can assume I am always on it. Constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature. None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names Impatience or Distraction.

  Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can’t interrupt them; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them. They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness. They speak to us, thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s. You can rant against a book, scribble in the margin, or even chuck it out the window. Still, you won’t change the words on the page.

  The technology of a book is genius: the order of the words is fixed, whether on the page or on-screen, but the speed at which you read them is entirely up to you. Sure, this allows you to skip ahead and jump around. But it also allows you to slow down, savor, and ponder.

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  We all ask each other a lot of questions: “Where did you go for vacation?” “How did you sleep?” Or, my favorite, as I eye the last bites of chocolate cake on a friend’s dessert plate, “Are you going to finish that?” (A question memorably featured in the 1982 movie Diner.) But there’s one question I think we should ask of one another a lot more often, and that’s “What are you reading?”

  It’s a simple question but a powerful one, and it can change lives, creating a shared universe for people who are otherwise separated by culture and age and by time and space.

  I remember a woman who told me that she was delighted to be a grandmother but was feeling sadly out of touch with her grandson. She lived in Florida. He and his parents lived elsewhere. She would call him and ask him about school or about his day. He would respond in one-word answers: Fine. Nothing. Nope.

  And then one day she asked him what he was reading. And he had just started The Hunger Games, a series of dystopian young adult novels by Suzanne Collins. The grandmother I met decided to read the first volume, so she could talk about it with her grandson the next time they chatted on the phone. She didn’t know what to expect, but found herself hooked from the first pages when Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister’s place in the annual battle-to-the-death among a select group of teens.

  The book helped this grandmother cut through the superficialities of phone chat and engage her grandson on the most important questions humans face about survival and destruction and loyalty and betrayal and good and evil, and about politics as well. And it helped her grandson engage with his grandmother on these same issues—not as a child in need of a lecture, but as a fellow seeker. It gave him a language for discussing issues that he was pondering, without having to explain exactly why these themes spoke to him.

  When they talked about The Hunger Games, they were no longer just grandmother and grandson: they were two readers embarked on a journey together. Now her grandson couldn’t wait to talk to her when she called—to tell her where he was, to find out where she was, and to speculate about what would happen next.

  The Hunger Games gave them inspiration for deeper discussions than they had ever had, and it provided them a wealth of prompts for their conversations. The book even led them to talk about topics that included economic inequality, war, privacy, and the media. As they continued reading and talking about other books, they discovered they had an ever-expanding common language: their “vocabulary” was made up of all the characters and actions and descriptions in all the books they’d read, and they could employ these to convey their thoughts and feelings.

  Other than the accident of family, they had never had much in common. Now they did. The conduit was reading.

  When we ask one another “What are you reading?” sometimes we discover the ways that we are similar; sometimes the ways that we are different. Sometimes we discover things we never knew we shared; other times we open ourselves up to exploring new worlds and ideas. “What are you reading?” isn’t a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it’s really a way of asking, “Who are you now and who are you becoming?”

  What follows are stories of books I’ve discovered that have helped me and others in ways big and small with some of the specific challenges of living in our modern world, with all its noise and distractions. Some are undoubtedly among the great works of our time. Others almost certainly are not. Many of the books I write about are books I first read when I was young. I’m not just a fifty-something-year-old reader; I’m the reader I was at every age I’ve ever been, with all the books I’ve ever read and all the experiences I’ve ever had constantly shifting and recombining in my brain. Often I remember exactly where I was when I first read a book that became important to me and also recall concurrent events, significant or not; other times I remember nothing else but how that book made me feel, and those same feelings come back whenever I think of that title.

  Just as a Freudian psychiatrist might look to your childhood to help you interpret your desires and motivations, so I feel we need to look to the books we read as children to help us understand why we read the way we do. But it’s not just childhood books that loom especially large in my life. Sometimes the last book I’ve read is the most important book I’ve ever read—but only until the next very important book I read. What is fresh in
itially can seem more profound; over time, though, my brain will discount newness in favor of resonance.

  Some of these are not works I would list among my favorite books, but they are all books that I found (or that found me) when I needed them, or that prompted me to remember something, realize something, or see my life and the world differently. Every reader can construct a list like this; and that list may change from year to year or even week to week. Compiling and constantly revising this kind of book list is an exercise I highly recommend: it’s a path to creating your own practical philosophy.

  Some people have one book that they turn to again and again, one book that has all the answers. Most commonly, it is a book central to a particular faith: perhaps the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, or the like. I’m skeptical about finding any one book that will give me the answer to every question I have. Instead, I’m more likely to look to all sorts of different books to help me answer a multitude of questions. I doubt I will ever find a single book that’s the literary equivalent of a Ginsu knife (that piece of cutlery catapulted to fame by an infomercial in my youth: it slices, it dices, it cuts cans and wood, and it never loses its edge). Both when cooking and reading, I enjoy a wide array of special tools and implements—whether I use them as intended or not. (A melon baller lends itself to all sorts of uses in addition to balling melons: making butter curls; apportioning cookie dough; separating artichoke flesh from choke.)

  There’s a particular kind of hope I sometimes have when I start a book. It’s that maybe, just maybe—even though it goes against all my experience to date—I might be starting the one book that gives me all the answers I’ll ever need. It could happen. My Ginsu knife. My Holy Grail.

  Perhaps it might even be the book I frantically grab, unsure if I’ll be interested or not, in the few seconds I have at an airport bookstore as I’m racing to the gate to board a flight.

  I do believe that my Holy Grail of books could be out there—and I intend to keep reading until I find it. Of course, I’ll keep reading after I do, too, because—well, because I love to read. I also believe that the Holy Grail of books won’t be the greatest book ever written—I am certain there isn’t such a thing. I think it will simply be a book that speaks perfectly to me at the moment I most need it and continues to speak to me for the rest of my life.

  No book has ever done that for me, but one has come close: The Importance of Living by a scholar named Lin Yutang, a book about Chinese culture and the “noble art of leaving things undone.”

  There is no book I turn to more often, which is why I begin this book with it and return to it again and again.

  The Importance of Living

  Slowing Down

  EVERY NOW AND THEN the universe tells you what book you need to read; it does this by placing the name of that book and author in front of you in various contexts, until you can’t help but take note. You ignore book recommendations from the universe at your peril. So after a decade of sporadically encountering the name Lin Yutang but still knowing almost nothing about him, I decided to investigate.

  Starting in my teens, I had become obsessed with the writers of the 1930s, prompted initially by my fascination with the 1972 movie Cabaret and its boyishly handsome star, Michael York. Cabaret was based on two short novels by Christopher Isherwood, thinly fictionalizing his life in pre-Nazi Berlin. I read everything I could by Isherwood and about Berlin and about that decade and its writers; and the more I read, the more I came across the name Lin Yutang, alongside mentions of his second book, The Importance of Living.

  Finally, when I was in my twenties, off to the library I went to learn more about Lin Yutang. This was all, of course, pre-Internet.

  I found out that The Importance of Living had been published by John Day publishers in 1937. Lin had become a friend of author Pearl Buck in Shanghai—and she had helped arrange for his books to be published. Buck was by then one of the world’s bestselling authors. Her novel The Good Earth, set in a Chinese village, had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and she would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938. She was also married to the founder of John Day publishers. Pearl Buck introduced Lin to her husband, who promptly offered him a contract.

  By the time I went to investigate, The Importance of Living had been out of print for decades. But my local library had a well-worn copy ready for loan. It took some time to adjust to the chattiness of the book and its meandering digressions. When I first began to read it, it seemed charming but dated, a bit precious, verbose, contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, scattered, and peculiar. But soon I realized that beneath the chatter was profound wisdom and a radical rejection of the philosophy of ambition, which is so much a part of our culture.

  The Importance of Living is a book that makes a case for loafing, for savoring food and drink, for not striving too much. Lin wanted an antidote to the raw competitiveness and frenetic activity he saw all around him in the early 1930s—not just in China, where he had grown up, but also in France and Germany, where he had worked and studied, and in the United States, where he had briefly attended college as a young man and where he was living when he wrote this book. Lin was eager to give people a framework for enjoying life, and he built it using the wisdom of ancient Chinese literature as well as a large helping of common sense.

  Lin’s book quickly became a success of epic proportions in the 1930s—one of those books read seemingly by everyone all over the world, translated into multiple languages, and one of the biggest bestsellers of its time.

  Lin described his book as “a personal testimony, a testimony of my own experience of thought and life.” He proudly proclaimed that he was not original and that the ideas he expressed “have been thought and expressed by many thinkers of the East and West over and over again.” As for his methods, he wrote, “It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can discover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jeweler’s window.” It’s a manifesto, but also a commonplace book, of sorts.

  He made clear that he was not a philosopher nor well read in philosophy and that, “technically speaking,” his method and training were totally wrong. As for the sources for his philosophy? He credits his “cook’s wife; a lion cub in the zoo; a squirrel in Central Park in New York; a deck steward who made one good remark,” among several others.

  Lin claimed to present “the Chinese point of view,” which he described as “an idle philosophy born of an idle life, evolved in a different age.” This is the wisdom of a thousand years of scholar-poet-artists. And while he made no claim for its applicability outside of China, he wrote that he is “quite sure that amidst the hustle and bustle of American life, there is a great deal of wistfulness, of the divine desire to lie on a plot of grass under tall beautiful trees of an idle afternoon and just do nothing.” The quote from Lin that at first seems to sum up his philosophy is this: “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”

  This book is encyclopedic. Lin has opinions on how to dress (he favors the loose, comfortable light robes of the Chinese scholar that don’t cinch you at your stomach, the way Western pants with their tight belts do, particularly for men); how to decorate your home; what drinking games are best. His detours cover celibacy (which he proclaims unnatural) and include an apology, of sorts, for cannibalism. (“The difference between cannibals and civilized men seems to be that cannibals kill their enemies and eat them, while civilized men kill their foes and bury them, put a cross over their bodies and offer up prayers for their souls.”)

  Lin sought to inspire the reader toward idleness, contemplation, enjoyment of friends and tea and wine, reading, and nature. But he’s quite exacting and specific. You can’t just do these things—you have to do them with the correct form and spirit. One of the most pers
uasive chapters in the book is in the section called “The Enjoyment of Living,” and that is an essay on lying in bed.

  “Now what is the significance of lying in bed, physically and spiritually? Physically, it means a retreat to oneself, shut up from the outside world, when one assumes the posture most conducive to rest and peace and contemplation. There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, [said that he] ‘never lay straight’ in bed ‘like a corpse,’ but always curled up on one side.”

  Lin continues:

  I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one’s legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one’s head. In this posture any poet can write immortal poetry, any philosopher can revolutionize human thought, and any scientist can make epoch-making discoveries.

  It is amazing how few people are aware of the value of solitude and contemplation. The art of lying in bed means more than physical rest for you, after you have gone through a strenuous day, and complete relaxation, after all the people you have met and interviewed, all the friends who have tried to crack silly jokes, and all your brothers and sisters who have tried to rectify your behavior and sponsor you into heaven have thoroughly got on your nerves. It is all that, I admit. But it is something more. If properly cultivated, it should mean a mental house-cleaning.