Books for Living
We buy self-help books and read them because they encourage us to believe that we can change—that we can become slimmer, healthier, richer, better versions of ourselves. Books can help us figure out who we want to be. And that’s not a small thing. But this habit changing is a tough business. And I suppose that if any of these books could work magic without considerable effort, then that would be the end of that category of book. The foolproof diet book would be the last diet book anyone would ever need to publish.
To further complicate matters, most of us read for escape and instruction. And yet when we wander into the self-help, business, psychology, and diet sections of the bookstore, we generally tell ourselves we are interested only in instruction. But is this really true? Perhaps simply flipping through a book advocating a grapefruit diet (and gazing at its glossy grapefruit pictures) will make me feel thinner—if only for the subway ride home. Viewed in that light, was my annual pilgrimage to buy diet books really something to regret? The only thing wrong with this habit was that I didn’t examine my motives closely enough; I mistook escape for a desire to change.
At the same time, some of us also look to the fiction section to feel inspired to do better. I read novels in part because they help me figure out who I want to be. In a standard-issue police procedural, say, I want to be more like the detective and less like the killer. In a subtler work, though, I may find myself comparing my behavior with that of a number of different characters simultaneously or being drawn to a certain aspect of someone’s character while remaining wary of another. Rereading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I want to mirror Elizabeth Bennet’s strength and sense of duty, but I hope I’m not quite so quick to judge those around me as she is throughout most of the novel.
But much of fiction’s effect is, I think, subliminal. It changes us even though we don’t know we are being changed. Studies have shown that reading fiction makes us more empathetic. I would like to think that even with inconsistent effort on my part, I’m now less proud and prejudiced than I was when I first met Lizzy Bennet, even though I’m still plenty proud and prone to prejudice. (Must read again.)
There’s the maxim that you can’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his or her shoes (or moccasins). Certainly, fiction is one of the best ways to accomplish this. How else could you be on the front lines of revolution in eighteenth-century France and marooned on a Pacific island on a single flight home to JFK? I burned a lot of shoe leather with Jean Valjean fleeing Javert while reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I was also racing alongside the heroic Ralph in William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies, as he was running for his life through the burning jungle to escape his antagonist Jack and the other boys.
Still, if diet books tend to fill me with an unrealistic sense of hope about my ability to change, I find that fiction works in the opposite way; I often wonder whether, amid the chaos of revolution, I would behave the way Jean Valjean did or be much more like the relentless Javert—whether, if marooned, I would stand apart with Ralph and his tiny band or follow Jack and his feral crew.
Reading challenges you to figure out what kind of person you want to be. I’m going to call this the Wonder challenge, named for the book I mentioned and for the act of pondering this kind of question.
If you find the need to categorize books, you would consider Wonder a middle-grade reader; it was published and marketed for fourth- to sixth-graders who have graduated from simple chapter books but aren’t ready for the darker themes of young adult. Written under the pseudonym R. J. Palacio by a successful book publisher and art director, the story is told from multiple perspectives, in a variety of voices. It centers on a young boy named August (Auggie), the first narrator, who has a craniofacial deformity. For years, Auggie has been tutored at home. Now, at the age of ten, he is about to start school for the first time.
I had picked it up to see if it might be good to recommend to my niece and nephews. Once I started, I couldn’t stop reading. I desperately wanted Auggie to fit in at school, to be happy, to find friends—to have a place in his life other than his home where people could see him and not react in horror to his face.
At first, all goes much better for Auggie than I would have expected. But soon he encounters real cruelty and, what’s worse, betrayal. The book’s use of many narrators performs a double function: it both allows us to see what motivates people to behave the way that they do and also gives voice to our own fears and anxieties. It helps us reckon with how we might behave when faced with the same situation by coming at it in different ways. The author even followed Wonder with a book that includes the perspective of the classmate who bullies Auggie, the kid who calls him a freak and who tells other children that if they touch him they’ll get the plague.
Much of the wisdom in the book comes from Auggie’s teacher Mr. Browne, who is in the habit of sharing precepts with the class to help them learn how to deal with life’s challenges and dilemmas. But it’s the school’s principal, Mr. Tushman, who, in his middle-school commencement address, sums up best the most important lesson of the year. His instruction to his students is both simple and arduous: Choose kindness. I was surprised and pleased to note that he explains kindness to the fifth- and sixth-graders with references to books. First, he cites a book by J. M. Barrie (not, he tells them, Peter Pan, but a book called The Little White Bird). He reads the sentence “ ‘Shall we make a new rule of life…always to try to be a little kinder than is necessary?’ ” He explains: “What a marvelous line, isn’t it? Kinder than is necessary. Because it’s not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed. Why I love that line, that concept, is that it reminds me that we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness.”
Mr. Tushman then continues with a passage from a second book, Christopher Nolan’s Under the Eye of the Clock. In this creatively structured memoir, Nolan tells in effervescent prose the story of his childhood and his education as a poet and writer. Born in Ireland in 1965 with cerebral palsy, Nolan was only able to control his eyes and his head. With the help of his father (who read to him great works of Irish and world literature) and his mother (who taught him the alphabet and talked to him constantly) and his sister, he first learned to communicate by signaling with his eyes and then began to use a pointer strapped onto his forehead like a unicorn horn to hit letters one at a time on a special computer keyboard. Nolan tells us that, with this setup and starting at age eleven, “he gimleted his words onto white sheets of life. Hands hanging loose by his side, electric pulses shooting through his body, he just nodded and nodded, typing numb-lost language” that had been trapped inside him for all his childhood years. Nolan would go on to compose remarkable and acclaimed poems, stories, plays, and a novel, and also to graduate from Trinity College, Dublin. He died at age forty-three in 2009.
Nolan’s memoir was published in 1987, when he was twenty-two. He writes in the third person and calls himself Joseph.
Here’s what Mr. Tushman says to the fifth- and sixth-graders:
“…Ah, here we go. In Under the Eye of the Clock, by Christopher Nolan, the main character is a young man who is facing some extraordinary challenges. There’s this one part where someone helps him: a kid in his class. On the surface, it’s a small gesture. But to this young man, whose name is Joseph, it’s…well, if you’ll permit me…”
He cleared his throat and read from the book: “ ‘It was at moments such as these that Joseph recognized the face of God in human form. It glimmered in their kindness to him, it glowed in their keenness, it hinted in their caring, indeed it caressed in their gaze.’ ”
He paused and took off his reading glasses again.
“It glimmered in their kindness to him,” he repeated, smiling. “Such a simple thing, kindness. Such a simple thing. A nice word of encouragement given when needed. An act of friendship. A passing smile.”
What he wants them to understand is this: “If every single person in
this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary—the world really would be a better place. And if you do this, if you act just a little kinder than is necessary, someone else, somewhere, someday, may recognize in you, in every single one of you, the face of God.”
Mr. Tushman is careful to add that his listeners can replace “God” with “whatever politically correct spiritual representation of universal goodness you happen to believe in,” which earns him smiles, laughter, and applause.
By the time we get to this portion of the book, so close to the end, we have seen terrible viciousness. But we’ve also seen the face of God (or whatever we call it) in Auggie, in the friends who stuck with him, in his family, and in some of the teachers at the school.
Choose kindness. Whenever there’s a choice—and we are faced with such choices almost every minute of every day—this is what the book would have us remember.
Of course, no book can reform human nature, with all its flaws, just as no book will ever cause pounds to melt magically from our bodies. Even a book like The Importance of Living, with its advice that we need to be lazier and more sybaritic versions of our current selves, isn’t so easy to follow. It takes discipline to try to relax and enjoy life a bit more.
Still, the union of imagination and action can be a powerful force. In fact, one of the lovely things about Wonder is that it sprang from the author’s challenging herself to be kinder. In an interview with Michele Norris on National Public Radio, the author explained Wonder’s genesis: She was in an ice-cream store with her own children when one of them, then just three, burst into tears after he saw the face of a little girl with a facial deformity who was eating ice cream nearby. Palacio was so mortified that she grabbed her children and raced out the door. Afterward, she was furious that she hadn’t managed the situation better: “What I should have done is simply turned to the little girl and started up a conversation and shown my kids that there was nothing to be afraid of,” she told Norris. “And that got me thinking a lot about what it must be like to…have to face a world every day that doesn’t know how to face you back.”
Wonder’s popularity spread in that most magical of ways: by word of mouth. Readers, booksellers, and librarians all started to recommend it to one another. Schools began to introduce it into the curriculum, and it became one of those books that a whole community decides to read together. In other words, it envisioned a possibility so intensely that it galvanized people to reproduce it in their lives and communities. Today it is well on its way to becoming one of the most beloved children’s books of all time.
So the Wonder challenge after reading this book is to wonder if, in fact, we are choosing kindness—and to try to challenge ourselves to live more kindly.
Because clearly people can read this book, profess to love it, and then immediately and blatantly choose not to be kind. At the same time, I do hope that if we are inclined to be kind, a book like Wonder reminds us of that inclination. And if we aren’t, then maybe it nudges us a bit in that direction. Certainly, as this book has already proven, it can begin a conversation that helps us create safer communities for children and encourages us to hold one another to a slightly higher standard. Fiction doesn’t exist to change us for the better; but I believe it almost always does. Fiction opens us up.
As for my annual flirtation with diet books and diets, I did finally manage to lose some of the weight I had been trying to lose for more than a decade, and I’ve kept most of it off for two years as of the time of this writing. It was a lot of work, and it involved a great deal more than simply reading a book; I had to create new habits and tangible rewards, just as Charles Duhigg had predicted I would. I had to get much more serious about the gym. I had to learn how to eat a lot better (and a lot less) and remember to walk a lot more. And I have to think about it every single day.
I’m still working on the kindness, and it’s not as easily measured as weight and body fat. But I like to think that I’m getting a bit kinder every year and staying that way. And when I fall short, I often think of Auggie.
Lateral Thinking
Solving Problems
Lateral Thinking: An Introduction by Edward de Bono was first published in 1967, before the dawn of the personal computer revolution. This book does something more powerful than any computer: it helps you figure out solutions when you have the questions all wrong. There’s no computer in the world that can give you the right output if you are giving it the wrong input.
The first computer I ever used was called the Kaypro II. It was a funny machine: one slice of it unclipped and exposed a keyboard within, leaving the main body of the computer exposed, displaying its floppy ports. You would stick in two floppy disks, and then it would do a mysterious activity it called “swapping.” You typed a bit; it swapped a bit. You typed a bit more; it swapped a bit more. You had to wait for it. There was a little screen that glowed green and made you feel as if you were monitoring some wonky piece of equipment on a Cold War submarine.
But in the mid-1980s it was still amazing. You wrote and it saved what you wrote. And you could change it. And then, when you were really ready, you hooked it up to your dot-matrix printer, and magic would happen as—line by laborious line—it reproduced whatever it was you had so carefully written and revised.
Soon, however, frustration set in. Sometimes you could get in only a few words before the endless swapping began. There was nothing you could do while it was performing this mysterious procedure. You just had to wait for it to do its thing.
Often, it wouldn’t stop, and you were faced with a dilemma—sit there and watch it endlessly swap, hoping it would finish; or reboot. To reboot, you had to kill the power. You either turned it off and then back on or unplugged it from the wall, waited, and plugged it back in. Rebooting was always a gamble. It gave you the immediate satisfaction of bringing the swapping to a close, but you didn’t know what you would find when power was restored. At best, everything you had written to date was there with all the latest revisions. At worst, it was all gone. But often you found yourself in purgatory—after the reboot, the machine was still swapping.
I often think of that Kaypro in relation to a bad habit I have. It’s my inability to disengage from a topic that is causing me anxiety. A friend told me that there’s a psychological term for this—“perseverating.” I thought she’d made it up, but then I discovered that there really is such a word.
My talent for perseverating is epic and usually fixes on a choice I’ve made that it’s too late to change. The intensity of my perseveration has no connection to what’s at stake. Should I take a 6:00 a.m. flight or an 8:00 a.m. flight? I’ll choose the 6:00 a.m. (because it assures me of being at my destination in plenty of time), but then I’ll perseverate for days over whether I’ve made an error. Will I be exhausted when I get there? I should have gone at 8:00 a.m. But then again, what if the 8:00 a.m. was delayed? Then I’d miss the event. But what if I oversleep and miss the 6:00 a.m.?
I have certain tricks to stop myself from perseverating. As I did with the Kaypro, I can attempt a reboot. This usually involves a sleeping pill. The hope is that if I go to sleep in the middle of a fit of perseveration, I’ll wake up knowing the right choice or reconciled to the decision I’ve made or no longer concerned at all. Often this works. But often I’m like the purgatory version of the Kaypro—as soon as I’m awake I’m right back into the mental swapping, this or that, this or that.
Lateral Thinking often helps me snap out of it. I just need to remind myself to reread it.
Edward de Bono is a medical doctor, a psychologist, and a writer. Among his constant topics are creativity, language, and logic.
De Bono begins the book with the story of a merchant in debt. The banker who holds the debt wants to marry the merchant’s daughter, against her will. He suggests a game of chance to determine her fate. They are standing on a “pebble-strewn path,” pebbles everywhere, so the banker proposes that he
place into a bag two pebbles: a white one and a black one. If the merchant’s daughter draws the white one, she doesn’t have to marry the banker and the debt is relieved. But if she draws the black one, then she must marry him. If she refuses to draw, then the merchant will go to debtor’s prison.
They all agree. But the daughter notices that the banker has actually slipped two black pebbles into the bag, not a black and a white. If she draws, she can only get a black pebble and she will have to marry the banker. If she refuses, her father goes to jail. And if she tries to reveal the situation, she’ll be accusing the banker of lying. He’ll probably then cancel the whole idea of the game and send the father to debtor’s prison, as is his right.
If you are a vertical thinker, Edward de Bono points out, those are the only choices.
Lateral thinkers, however, see other paths. They don’t just work with the tools they are given, assuming that no other options exist. They challenge assumptions and find new tools.
The merchant’s daughter is a lateral thinker. She draws a pebble, but before anyone can see what color it is, she drops it on the pebble-strewn path. Clumsy her. But by showing everyone that the pebble left in the bag is the black one, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that she chose the white. For the banker to dispute this, he would have to admit that he cheated. So the debt is discharged, and she’s free to marry whomever she likes.
Another example comes from a parable in The Jātaka (Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births). Written originally in Pali, the sacred language of Buddhism, the parable tells the story of a young man with a golden complexion who has grown up in a forest hermitage, looking after his poor, blind parents. Over the course of his childhood, he has become friends with all the animals, but especially a golden deer, who helps him find streams so he can fetch water. One day, a king is out on a hunt and sees the golden boy with the golden deer and accidentally shoots the boy and not the deer with a poison arrow. The poisoned young man, slipping into a coma, asks the king to bring his parents so they can say goodbye to their dying son. Whe