Lyndon Johnson grew up on a farm in the Texas hill country. Farm life is busy and hectic, and a young Lyndon used to wander off without anyone noticing. Down the dirt road past the wildlife, near a stream, toward his grandparents’ house. A modern parent’s nightmare. A social services visit waiting to happen. They put together a search party on horseback and he was home in time for dinner.
My son made a similar trip to his grandmother’s.
Out the front door. My wife was upstairs in the shower with the baby monitor on. Down the front steps he went. The baby gates were closed. The dogs were downstairs. Across the little patch of field to go see his grammy.
Usually when we’re in the room he’s content with toys or singing along with the TV. His grandmother saw him coming and went out to meet him. We didn’t even know he knew how to open that door. It’s heavy. It sticks.
When they told me about it later I said, “You know Lyndon Johnson used to do this in the hill country.”
They didn’t find comfort in it. They didn’t find the humor either. They just stood there, in the kitchen, looking at me.
He was fine. It was fine. It’s a five-hundred-foot walk. There are no coyotes. There’s no river to sweep him away. There’s no eight-hundred-page book for Robert Caro to hide the detail in.
Reading offers me a change of perspective. Wisdom where there wasn’t any. Knowledge I didn’t know I’d need until I needed it. When people come to me with their thoughts and their problems, I’m reaching for a book. Or at least an anecdote.
Kurt Vonnegut described humans as huge rubbery test tubes with chemical reactions seething inside. Breakfast of Champions, 1973. I think about it when I lose control of my emotions. Or when I get sick for no reason I can name. I’ll go looking for the brain chemistry of anger. When does the amygdala take over? I’ll picture my immune system working an infection. How did that thing get in here? What makes the rubbery tube tick?
It doesn’t all have to be heavy. Tim Ferriss taught me to put the salad dressing on the side of the bowl for better coverage. The 4-Hour Chef. I still do it.
There isn’t enough time in the world to sit down with every physical book I want, so I’m grateful for earbuds and Audible. The more time I spend searching in books, the more satisfaction I find. Curiosity to explore. The peace that comes with it. A love for the craft that showed up somewhere along the way without announcing itself. Reading stopped being a hobby and became an identity a long time ago, and the change was smooth enough that I missed it happening.
A sick friend was ready for it to be over.
Troy. I texted him about steaks before I asked how he was doing, then caught myself and asked. He’d just gotten back to breathing right. Couldn’t swallow anything solid. Weighed 126 at the doctor’s office on Thursday. Headache going on a month.
NOY GOOD, he typed. Then: I’m ready for this to be over.
I told him I was sorry. Asked what I could do for him.
Fentenal pill.
I’d read Epictetus that morning. I open the Discourses to random lectures, because it’s a compilation of topics and that’s just how I read it.
I sent him:
There’s a bit from Diogenes the Cynic. A man comes to him sick and tired of being sick and tired, says he wants it all to be over. Diogenes hands him a knife. This should do it. The man wasn’t asking to die. He was asking to stop hurting. Diogenes just made him feel the difference.
Right now I’ll take either one, he typed back.
Same day I opened to that page. I asked him what the odds were on that. It had been a while since we’d talked. He came back with: three ways to die on the Eastern Shore. Homicide, suicide, Riverside. (The latter being the local hospital.)
I told him he hadn’t tried my mom’s cooking and to ask my dad, who’s been dead about ten years.
Then he took his pain meds and passed out. I told him I’d stop being a stranger.
That was the last time we texted. I went to see him. He died a few days later.
In the kitchen it landed on nobody. With Troy I had the right words to hand a sick man, because I’d opened to a page I didn’t pick six hours before.
The intrinsic value of reading can come from what the author has to say. What I’m learning or gaining straight off the page. It can also come from how it makes me feel. I find a deep, almost guilty pleasure in reading something that validates a viewpoint. When it proves me right.
Especially when I’m not looking for it.
Emerson says:
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Which reads to me as:
I don’t need the crowd to know I’m right.
I don’t need to follow the crowd to be right either.
I love reading and finding out I’ve been wrong. Not a little wrong. Wrong in a way that has me thinking I built something on top of that. There’s no standing up and no yelling. There’s the contemplative silence that comes after the jolt in your stomach subsides. There’s more value in that silence than in any of the rest of it.
Omar El Akkad wrote a book called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. I went into it already cynical about power. I thought I knew the shape of the argument. Governments and the people in them, the ones we hand our safety to, are not operating off some hidden greater good we’re too small to see. They’re willing to do whatever it takes to keep what they have, or to look away while somebody else does it. Common enough. Contemporary enough. I’d have told you that before I opened it.
Page 117. He’s describing a face.
Not proud support, and not the shock and horror people will claim to have felt later, once the verdict is in and it’s safe to have felt it. A smirk. The look of someone who has worked out exactly how ugly the thing is that they’ve gone along with, and who can’t find the nerve to leave it now.
He calls it the “half stance of the spineless.”
I opened that book looking for a story about them. Page 117 isn’t about them. It’s about the face of a person who knows and stays.
What he showed me is that I sit in it. I’m a part of it. When I look at something as ugly as what’s happening in Gaza, I can turn my head just as easily as anyone I’ve been busy blaming. Go back to my problems, my day, my life, and never give it another thought. When the subject comes up in front of me I’ll form the opinion and take the stance. Then I turn the switch off and go back to being comfortable.
The pleasure of being proved right is built on every time I got it wrong first. Those are the lessons that set the deepest. Hardest to forget. It’s the same problem staring at me, the same feeling coming up in my stomach, except this time I know what to do with it.
When reading I have to go through it more than once. The first pass carries me off. I try on their perceptions for a while. Writers hijack my thoughts, make me see it their way. Agreement or disagreement isn’t the point. The borrowed point of view is.
Then I read it again. I let it take me a few times, and then I start looking at where the adverbs sit. Sentence lengths. How they lead out of one paragraph and into the next, and how they thread the main subject through the whole thing without me noticing. I’ll start trying to find the craft. What technique was used to conjure this reaction from me.
I understand the language of life better now. There was a separate resource I hadn’t tapped, another layer that only opened when I started looking back at what was written. The direct changes from reading took shape slowly. I can feel the difference in how I move through the world.
I know what to do where I didn’t before. How to be. How to behave in the places I used to just react. Different choices from borrowed wisdom I never would have had.
Before I committed to reading. Before I learned to think for myself.
Reading took away the right to think of myself first.
Nobody in that kitchen needed Lyndon Johnson. I did.
Plain truth. Rough edges.
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