A PECULIARLY HUMAN ART:
ESTHER RAUCH ON READING AND DISCUSSION
This article is the text of a speech delivered by Esther Nettles Rauch at the Deborah Morton Award Convocation on September 23, 2008. The Deborah Morton Awards are presented each year by the trustees of the University of New England to outstanding women who have achieved high distinction in their careers and public service or whose leadership in civic, cultural, or social causes has been exceptional. Since 1961, more than 150 distinguished women have been honored with the award.
2008 Morton honoree Esther Rauch is a former vice president of the Bangor Theological Seminary and professor of English at the University of Maine. She inaugurated the Constance H. Carlson Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Husson College in Bangor, where she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters. Prior to her academic career, she was the manager of professional staffing at the Center for Naval Analyses, a private research center in Arlington, Virginia.
Rauch has served on numerous boards—the University of Maine System, Eastern Maine Medical Center, and the Farnsworth Museum, to name just a few-but in this speech, she focused on her service to the Maine Humanities Council. A board member in the early nineties, Rauch has also been a scholar/discussion leader for Let’s Talk About It and Literature & Medicine programs across the state for many years.
THANK YOU to the Deborah Morton Society Members and the University of New England for bestowing upon me this distinguished honor. I accept it with humility and gratitude.
I want to talk about reading, and talking about what you’ve read with a variety of people, and why I believe such a discussion to be the most human of activities. It is, I believe, the single thing that each of us can do to change the world.
A book is not completely read until it is discussed. Discussion is a dying art that needs to be revived. The Maine Humanities Council is one of the few institutions that encourages and nurtures discussion. I am eternally grateful to the Council for allowing me to participate in this peculiarly human art of discussion.
To begin reading a book is like entering a strange city for which you have no road map. A reader has expectations, of course. The reader wishes to find entertainment, amusement, information, or inspiration. S/he chooses a book for reasons of personal taste. Still, the writer’s choices for the way the work unfolds are at the beginning unknown. And, for a good while into the book, the techniques of exposition, the figuration of language, the presentation of characters and their development or lack of it, the genre, all remain areas for exploration. The road markers are unsettled, open for discovery. They seem to move about and result in consequent dislocation. At this time, the writer and the reader are in conversation with each other. Are they in the same discourse group? Do they speak the same language? Can the writer give and withhold information regarding the content sufficient to keep the reader engaged until the book’s end? Can the reader negotiate the terrain? Finally, there is the question of whether the rewards of reading the book justify the effort required to complete it. The reader’s destination in the city must, at some point, come into view, and the plan of the city needs to become clear. Then the completing process begins.
Each reader brings to a text the sum total of his or her experience up to the point of entering the strange city of the book. Age, gender, regional location, religion or lack of it, income group, education, and other demographics determine the world-view that each reader brings to the reading of a text. Still, each reader’s completion of the book is idiosyncratic. For no one, not even identical twins, is the same as anyone else. Our solitudes are just that. Each of us is separate and each of our reading experiences is also separate. So, although the words are the same, the type exact, the books reproduced so that each is exactly like every other one, the same book is different when I read it than it is when you read it. We will see elements on which we can agree. We will experience the text on many levels in common. But there will be differences from person to person and within the same person at different times in that person’s life.
The solitudes that meet in discussing a text are the most human experiences we can know. Those solitudes, meeting each other with respect, are uniquely human. No other species can know them. In fact, everything about this process is limited to human beings. No other species writes about ideas. No other species manufactures books, distributes them, or reads them; nor can they know about them. So this supremely human activity is worth reverence, worth cultivation, worth doing whatever we have to do to experience it. Yet, while we celebrate being humans, call ourselves humanist, many of us will do everything we can to avoid participating in the reading of a book. We are too busy. Researchers report that only 20 percent of Americans read a book not connected with their work last year. A few more read about four books. No one has reported on how many people participated in discussions about those books. How can I bridge the gaps that separate me from my neighbor if I do not talk with my neighbor about things that matter? In discussion, our solitudes open and admit the other and we meet: not to agree or disagree, not to tie up and pin down the answers to questions raised by the reading, but to explore the possibilities offered by the book. When we fail to read and to discuss, we become less human.
The Maine Humanities Council and the Bangor Public Library have afforded me opportunities to facilitate reading and discussion groups throughout Maine. Those experiences to me are beyond price. I recall being in a discussion group in South Addison, Maine, that lasted so far into the night that a woman in the group had to take me home with her to the Pleasant Bay Bed and Breakfast: the roads had frozen over, it was snowing hard, and I could not have made it to Ellsworth, not to mention Orono, where I lived at the time. We had begun our discussion at the regularly scheduled time. But the time simply flew by because a new person—unknown to anyone usually present—had joined the group for that evening, and a whole new array of speculations and challenges arose that consumed us. I knew better than to allow the talk to go on so long, but I also knew better than to interrupt a real meeting. When solitudes greet each other, they meet on holy ground.
In a world beset by the problems created as a result of diversity and pluralism, in a world made smaller by new technologies, in a world suffering from nature-deficit and a host of other disorders, in a world looking for simple answers to complex questions, it is tempting to retreat into a book and hide out—away from the chaotic and unsettling world. Let me offer instead, as a remedy for the troubling problems of coexistence: let’s read a book and talk about it together. I want to get to know you and your world. And I want you to get to know me and mine. Let’s read. Let’s meet. Let’s talk about it.
Thank you for your attention. Good reading and talking with you.
