Reading Buddies

At school, our six-year-old has a reading buddy.  Last week, I got to see them in action.  Aside from being outrageously cute, this relationship serves multiple purposes.  Primarily, our son’s reading buddy offers near instant feedback on decoding and comprehension.  

For an adult, a worthy way to assess the value of our past education is to consider at the books we are reading 10, 20, and 30+ years after leaving school.  Saddling up a classic, complex text, though, can be daunting since few of us have access to the background or support to scaffold understanding of the great books.

I’ve struggled with this reality recently, and so have enlisted a reading buddy: a paid-for model of an AI service. (I use ChatGPT Plus, but other models are fantastic, if not better for the purpose I describe.)  For the same price as an Audible membership, I now can get shockingly thorough answers to basic comprehension and thematic questions to any book I open.  

Here are some examples:

While reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I recently asked: “What was Twain’s purpose in writing Huck Finn?”

Response (distilled for brevity): Well, a few things.  First, he challenged what literature *sounded* like, using at least seven (by his count) colloquial adaptations of English.  The book is also a satire. It does not have an express social mission, but does mean to hold up a mirror to his post-Civil War society and thereby subvert racial stereotypes.  Many regard that he both did and did not succeed.  Toni Morrison’s 1996 essay “This Amazing, Troubling Book” is a fine exploration of this.  Would you like me to summarize it for you and provide a link to the full text?

Wow.

Here is another.

While reading The Sound and the Fury, I asked clarity on some basic plot points: “I just finished and am still confused about a few points.  Where did X get all that money?  Who is Y’s father, actually?”

Response (again, distilled for brevity): You are not alone in this confusion!  Faulkner’s narration in this book is famously complex, and part of his purpose.  He wants you to work for the understanding… and see the decline of the family as if through a shattered lens of the four narrative styles.  Now, here is what we are meant to know and what Faulkner leaves intentionally ambiguous…

Again, WOW.

Now, nothing will ever replace the joy of unpacking a text with other human beings in real time.  This is one of life’s finest pleasures.  AI will never replace this.  Never never ever.

AI, though, offers a shockingly high-quality way to further our education.  There is no way that I would feel as comfortable as I do to saddle up complex books as I do with the resource.  I appreciate this support as I grow (and age) so that I might show up more robustly to in-person reading buddies.

Characters and Compassion

Like a totally normal person (😉), I’ve been thinking lately about one of the essay questions on an English exam my senior year of high school.

The internet helped me find the exact wording.  Here it is: 

Discuss the notion of morally ambiguous characters—those whose behavior doesn’t allow readers to categorize them as purely good or evil. Choose a novel or play where such a character plays a central role, and explain how that character’s ambiguity is significant to the work. 

For teaching the virtue of compassion, morally ambiguous characters in world class fiction is a fine tool.

The point is not to become morally ambiguous ourselves, but to see the ways in which we already are.  When we acknowledge our own capacity for deception, destruction, and the like, we can move more wholeheartedly toward a virtuous life and accompany others on the same journey.

(The six short stories that start A Table for Two have a fine cast of characters for this purpose.) 

Tracks in the Wrong Direction

Near the end of one of Wendell Berry’s finest poems comes the advice to

“…Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction.”

The status quo may expect us to seek to maximize our waking hours for pleasure and profit, to always think and speak like our tribe.

Life is richer (and more fun), though, when we are led by the Spirit to walk a perhaps unpredictable path, making tracks in the “wrong direction”.

The Edge of the Margin

Near our home is a building boasting a large-lettered sign with the name MarginEdge on top.

I assume this is an office of some sort and I have no experience with with them other than seeing their sign, but what a curious idea that sign calls to mind. 

The demands of life (both real and imagined) can lead us to the edge of the margin of our strength and our time.  This is not where the spiritual life thrives.

Our story is better written when we are not pushed to the very edge of the paper.

Adversary or Enemy?

So, consider for a moment that person one might disagree with… How we engage them and the story we tell about that interaction turns them into an adversary or an enemy.

An adversary is a sparing partner, a worthy rival.

An enemy is someone you behold with hostile contempt from whom nothing can be learned.  

Adversaries can work together to build a healthy community or nation.  I doubt that enemies can accomplish this.

A final point: It is difficult to behold someone as an adversary if they behold you as an enemy.  It is hard, but it is a grace that we can ask for.

Healthspan

I recently heard “heathspan” (how many years one is healthy) contrasted with “lifespan” (how many years one is alive). 

It’s a generative distinction, helping us focus on the health and quality of the years we live.

And what kind(s) of health are we talking about? Bodily, certainly. That is the assumed definition. But also spiritual health?  Relational health?  Mental health?

In each of these areas, do we yet want what we want to want?

The Confederacy of the Humbled

Count Rostov, the uniquely charming protagonist of A Gentleman in Moscow, experiences the loss of stature, influence, and the world he has known.  (Not a spoiler!  It begins on page 1.)  By way of recovery from this loss, he casts a new narrative and describes his inclusion in the “Confederacy of the Humbled”: 

“a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.”

When live’s losses come for us, we have a choice.  We can rehearse and resent them, living within their confines.  Or we can pray for the grace to acknowledge and integrate them, reengaging life as wisely as the Count. 

God Made That!

For me, one of life’s finest joys is to be so thrilled by the creation of a book that I can’t imagine how it did not exist before.  

With unique thoughtfulness and passion, Kat Hoenke and Bill Jacobs, both professional ecologists and lay Catholic leaders, invite young people on a journey with the saints and through the bioregions of North America, in God Made That!. 

(Oh, and they also lead St. Kateri Conservation Center, championing biodiversity on church land.)

Thank you, Kat and Bill, for this generous work.

Missing the Meaning

It is possible to have an experience that means to teach us – be it something wonderful or something difficult – and to miss its meaning.

Maybe our attention is fragmented or stretched too thin.  Maybe we willfully resist the lesson. 

We should not be surprised if life keeps offering us this lesson because we have, as yet, been unable or unwilling to learn it.