My hope for you all is that you graduate with a desire to cultivate what Jacques Barzun calls an ‘educated mind’. The educated person engages in certain activities that prioritize the Word: thinking, conversing, writing, and READING. It is no secret that the key element to education — and I mean ‘education’ not learning; they are different — is reading for enlightenment rather than reading for information alone. In the environment of an advanced history course, you are expected to do both, but you are also asked to step up your reading skills overall. So a few suggestions are in order.
Firstly, ‘multitasking’ is a myth. It is now proven that your performance degrades for every new mental task you add to your plate. You simply MUST wean yourself away from the cell phone and computer screen if you wish to read with any degree of focus necessary to engage with great literature.
Secondly, you should read documents, especially those such as ‘One Day’ that have achieved special status in the Western canon, differently from the way you approach a history textbook. Active reading MUST be cultivated; that means stay awake, ask questions, and write.
Finally, to paraphrase Mortimer Adler, one of the founders of the Great Books Program, great ideas seek truth and must be discussed seriously. They demand more than idle chit-chat. Reading for enlightenment demands your full attention and engagement. Good readers carry on a dialogue with their books and will have a collection of written notes (reactions, ideas, and questions) afterward. (This is why I encourage you all to begin reading journals of your own, something that is separate, and entirely different, from class notes that generally record information.) Spark Notes or a Wiki article WILL NOT lead to an enlightened understanding of a text; effective reading requires work and skill.
Here are a few ‘big’ questions to consider while you read:
- What is the text about? Can you summarize it in your own words (if yes, WRITE that summary in your notes or in the book)?
- What are the author’s propositions (theses)? How much of the author’s arguments/ideas/propositions are below the surface of the text, that is, buried within the narrative?
- How does the text relate to the period in which it was written? How does the language describe the situation within the Soviet Union during Solzhenitsyn’s time?
- What problem/issue is the author addressing or trying to solve?
- How universal are the ideas during the 1960s and beyond?
And a few things I’d like you to note as you read (yes, that means write them in your notes – or better yet, your personal reading journal):
- What got a person sent to the GULAG? How many different reasons can you find as you read?
- What passages stand out to you as emblematic of Solzhenitsyn’s view of man’s condition?
Only books worth reading this way are the books over your head. The Great Books are the books that are worth everybody’s reading because they are over everybody’s head all the time. (M. Adler)
The Global 1960s 