On Reading and Writing

Why do we need people who write and publish, and people who read and discuss?

Fragonard: Young Girl Reading

Writing and the why-of-it is no insignificant matter. Speech and writing are the means by which ideas are transmitted, for one, and nothing shows this better than the study of linguistic history.  

      Human evolution from Heidelberg Man to Neanderthal Man to Homo Sapiens to modern humankind has shown that the evolution of language has paralleled physical evolution. Thinking ability, problem-solving potential, inventiveness have through all the stages of evolution complexified, and that largely because the development of language has kept pace, allowing for what can be called the communal brain. Ideas can be worked on by hundreds simultaneously, but only because the vehicle of language has kept pace with progress.

      But language is not only a vehicle, its a tool with which we think, solve problems, formulate ideas; language is the engine of the individual’s reason train. The discussion about whether or not we can think what we can’t say is old as psychology itself. (Click here for a primer on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and more.)

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There are at least two good reasons for us to take another look at writing and reading in our day. Pick up Henry James, Portrait of a Lady or Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and you’re sure to conclude that while our world is becoming more complex, our language breadth may be shrinking. 

      The consequences of keyboarding replacing writing with pen and paper is one on which the jury is probably still out. 

      More concerning is that the majority of the population doesn’t spend much time in—what is in simplest terms—the library of the meaning of our very humanity.

      One additional point. The lament over the uneven distribution of wealth in industrialized countries is a big concern. I see a parallel in the uneven distribution of literacy with similar consequences, i.e. the dividing of our world into ever more distinct have and have-not classes.

      We who’ve been lucky to have been granted a sound literary education have a responsibility to the world, a responsibility that reaches toward ever better writing and the universal ability to benefit from it. If there are sacred things in our world, surely the collection, the making available, the reading of our thoughts and ideas has to be on that list.

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Journalism students are told early on that it’s only the last thing that they as reporters, columnists, commentators have written that will be remembered by their readers . . . and that only briefly! When we think of poets, novelists, writers of books generally, this obviously isn’t always true. But for those of us who write blog posts—like this one—or sermons or lectures, the maxim seems to have merit.

      Which raises the question: “Why bother posting a column, writing and delivering a sermon, composing a letter to the editor, preparing a study lesson? What’s the point if its attended to half-heartedly, forgotten by the time lunch has been eaten? Isn’t thoughtful writing meant to change people, like a vaccination or a heart transplant?

      Perhaps we’re imagining writing (stories, sermons, lessons, op eds, poems, etc.) through a false metaphor. Perhaps the parallels to nutrition make more sense. We eat a hearty breakfast, work for a few hours, forget the bacon and eggs because we’re hungry again and long to be fed. The choices are endless, ranging all the way from chips and coke to a balanced carb/protein/mineral plate of lamb, potatoes, broccoli, and a lettuce & tomato salad. 

      As with food, there’s nutritious writing and junk writing. As with food, the inquiring mind, the healthy outlook is not supported with junk writing and certainly not with one fabulous post, one terrific sermon. It’s a steady, balanced, nutritious reading/listening diet that provides mental, spiritual and intellectual benefits.

      We grow physically on the quantity and quality of the food we eat. We grow mentally, intellectually, spiritually on that which we read or listen to, day in, day out.

      If this metaphor holds, then writers are chefs, or at least sous chefs or cooks. They have skills and work hard to produce a steady stream of nutritious meals.

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It makes sense to reiterate here that the nature of being human on planet earth is in constant evolution, one need only compare the conditions from century to century to see this. That language should evolve conjointly goes without saying; this implies, then, that its not masterpieces that we’re in need of, but a continuing stream of writing, reading, discussion, adaptation commensurate with the evolution of circumstances and ideas. The vilification of a free press is a dangerous tactic employed only by those who would halt progress in protection of their own interests. Tyrants who do this are unlikely to be broad, thoughtful readers.

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There’s a difference between spoken and written speech. When we dialogue informally, our utterances are mostly “off the cuff,” unproven, tentative, and that’s a fine way to exchange local information and ideas, feelings and commiserations at the family/friends/community level. It’s one of our most-loved pastimes as well.

      The serious, written word, by comparison, is constructed, vetted for accuracy, edited for language conventions and pondered . . . often for days and weeks. This is not to say that a thing is only true if it’s written down; it only means that good writing has a chance of doing what the unrehearsed, spoken word really can’t: prepare and serve a complete, a tasty, a nutritious dish.

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If there’s skill involved in writing, there’s also skill involved in reading. The written material that flogs a political viewpoint, that attempts to persuade us to certain actions, that fudges the truth for an ulterior purpose is everywhere. Good reading requires a growing vocabulary, attention to the credentials and purposes of the writer, a keen sense of what’s logical and what isn’t and a host of important considerations that separate the astute reader from the one who’s ripe for the picking. But all that is a huge subject for another day.

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True, we mustn’t forget that writers (not unlike the rest of humanity) are ego-driven to a lesser or greater degree. Writers hope to be read, hope their work gains recognition, long for positive feedback. At their dreamiest, they may have visions of a Pulitzer, or a Mann-Booker, or maybe a CBC Reads appearance. But more generally, thousands of people are writing because they enjoy the act, may even experience it as compulsion. They write to their community and are content with the privilege of publishing, even if its only in a circular with a small readership or on social media or a weekly sermon.

      And let’s be realistic; a writer has no more right to the limelight than does a cook, a sales person, a farmer, truck driver or kindergarten teacher. But if we’re to thank the cook for feeding the body, let’s also thank the writer once in a while for cooking up a dish for the mind.

       So eat something, then find a quiet, comfortable place and read.

       Somebody put in a lot of effort in the kitchen.

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“I don’t like reading. I get restless. I can’t concentrate for more than a few minutes.”

      “I don’t write. I wouldn’t even if I could. I’d rather be doing things . . . out there.”

      You’ve probably heard the excuses for remaining disengaged from the written arts. I could have added, probably, “Half the time, I don’t know what that stuff is talking about, so I lose interest,” or what for many are reasons—not excuses—resulting from developmental or chronic physical/mental challenges. But for those of us with average vision, average minds, engagement with the written word is within reach even if left unexercised.

      Chalk it up to life-style choices, possibly. Every day presents an abundance of options and just as in the expenditure of money, what’s spent on A can’t also be spent on B—with the caveat that daytime is a fixed amount for everyone alive. You can watch a hockey double header on TV of an evening, or read a few chapters of Yuvel Harari’s Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, but you can’t do both at once.

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Meanwhile, what we choose has a history that begins in childhood: parents who read/don’t read, the relative prominence of books and reading in the home, family involvement and support in schooling, parental and school nurturing of curiosity, etc., etc. Many adults these days are spending a lot of time and effort driving children to hockey, soccer and baseball practice. Physical activity and sportsmanship can be immensely beneficial. 
      I guess I’d plead for the arts—including language arts—to be granted similar status. I’m reminded of the father who desperately wants his son to excel in hockey, but when he offers to drive him to register for his first level is asked by the son, “Could you drive me to the library instead?”

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I have often lamented the fact that my parents and grandparents didn’t write. What thoughts my mother and father had as they moved from place to place, what they discussed on my birth day and why they named me as they did, what it felt like to be self-isolated during the 1918 ‘flu epidemic when she was 17 and he was 21, even an inkling into what they believed might have given the current world a perspective I could really use.

      Some parents of the 20^th Century in my community did journal, but it was most often a weather report with significant events named but not enlarged upon. My great-grandfather who lived his entire life in the 19^th Century in Ukrainian-Russia, by comparison, kept marvelous journals including the nature of his personal struggles with hard times.

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I’m reminded of an adage having to do with an old man planting trees under whose shade he will never sit. Hope that extends to children yet unborn may in the end be the elixir that saves humanity from its own folly.

      This may—in the end—be the best reason for writing . . .

      . . . and reading?

RENO©

George G. Epp

“This house looks pretty bad, but it’s got good bones,” he said.

It’s something renovators say, I’ve discovered, it’s got good bones—and they don’t mean that there are skeletons buried under the basement floor. I figured that out pretty quickly.

“What does that mean . . . exactly?”

He looked at me as if I’d just crawled out from under a pile of wood scraps. “Well, it’s basics,” he said. “foundation’s in good shape, no serious cracks, it’s square and solid, floors . . . ya know, are almost level. That kinda thing.” He drove his hammer through a wall, tore back a piece of gyproc. “See here,” he said, “studded with rough two-by-fours.”

“And that’s good?”

He said something about how planing a two-by-four makes it thinner, weaker. I couldn’t argue with that; I could have debated the merits and demerits of the single pane windows and the removable storm windows that obviously hadn’t been removed for years, but didn’t.

“It’ll be a matter of replacing the doors and windows, slapping new wallboard over the old after we blow in insulation, painting it up and done.”

I nodded. It was sales talk. Painting it up and done. As if.

When dad got wind that I was looking to buy the Wilkosky house down by the creek, he tsk-tsked. “That place would have to be a money pit,” he said.

“I can do some of the work in the summer while school’s out,” I said.

He shrugged. “Hope you’ve learned some carpentry since you left home. Remember when you . . .” 

I didn’t let him finish. Of my history with saws and hammers, nails and glue more than one sad story had already been told. I do have all my fingers and I built a passable record cabinet in Industrial Arts back in high school.

“Jefferson’s gonna do the job, if I decide to go ahead . . ..”

The Wilkosky house had been empty for two years, Jason at the real estate office told me. He had it listed for a few months after the Wilkoskys moved but they didn’t renew. They apparently rented it to a family on Social Assistance who disappeared after only a month. “Easy to forget about people down there,” Jason said, “what with all the trees and down there by the creek an’ all.”

“What were they asking for it?”

“Cheap. Thirty-five thousand, I think. Needs an awful lot of work.”

Jason flipped through a binder on the counter. “There’s actually a lien against the place; seems there’s a bundle of power bills, gas bills, back taxes unpaid.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means that the bills would have to be paid before Wilkosky could get his money, if anyone should happen to buy it. I really doubt that that’ll happen. Lot’s probably worth only ten, fifteen thousand being down there by the creek.”

I told Jason then that I was interested, that I wanted to do a reno and that house could certainly use one. Jason looked at me over his glasses. “Really?” He paused. “Well that one’s certainly a candidate for renovation if ever there was one.”

“How would I get in touch with them?”

“Well, I’ve got an address here. Why don’t I see if I can find them 

. . . what they’re thinking now, and then I’ll give you a call.”

It seemed like a good idea. I detest paper-work, phoning strangers, arranging things.

I left.

He called that evening. “He wants fifty-thousand now.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry. He’s probably thinking you might be a rich guy with romantic . . . uh, feelings about creeks and trees and will pay anything. Offer him thirty-five or forty and he’ll probably jump at it.”

I pondered this for a moment. “Are you supposed to say stuff like that if you’re his agent?”

He laughed. “I’m not his agent. I’m yours. I’ve got no contract with him.” I opened my mouth to say something about the patently obvious fact that he had no contract with me either, but changed my mind. Who needs another piece of paper? He knew what I was thinking. “I’ll need only a . . . a modest finder’s fee,” he says. “Business is slow. I’ve got time.”

He pulled out an Offer to Purchase form, I told him thirty-thousand and signed. He phoned me an hour after I got home. “He accepts your offer. The house is yours.”

A tinge in his voice told me he thought I’d just bought a pile of cow manure on a blanket, but that he’d had a really fruitful business day. The “finder’s fee” turned out to be a lot like a standard commission—I realized later—of four percent, only I, not the seller, was charged.

Turned out, there was no key to be found, so I jimmied the front door with a screwdriver. That first afternoon of my ownership of a property listed on an old contract in Jason’s binder as “17- Water Street” was when Jefferson stopped in to “take a look.”

“This house looks pretty bad, but it’s got good bones,” he said.

I asked him about an estimate and he said he’d have to do some math, “but you’ll have to list what you want done; you want the deluxe . . . the deluxe or the, well, the ‘make it liveable’ job—ya know what I mean?”

I couldn’t explain my thinking to him, probably because I could barely explain it to myself. It might have to do with pyramids and the Guggenheim and Agatha Christy and a television show about home renovations in which a pile of junk is turned into a stately home in a half hour—minus commercials. 

The pyramids were a week-long, confluent-education focus in my Grade 5 class wherein I’d decided that the core value would be the confluence of imagination, ingenuity and perseverance (at least that’s what I wrote in my project-plan summary). I remembered in detail the experience of a day in the Guggenheim in New York when Sadie and I were still in love, when we’d hold hands walking down the streets of exotic places during the summer-vacation travels that had become our pre-parenthood obsession. Frank Lloyd Wright, a conceiver and realizer of fantastic monuments to human ingenuity. He’d scoff at a reasonably well-made record cabinet, I’d concluded. And then I saw a photograph of Agatha Christy sitting at a desk with all her books stacked beside her typewriter, two towers of raw accomplishment.

Then, getting hooked on Home and Garden television real estate shows, recorded during the day, filling lonely evenings with vicarious can-do narratives and the happy conclusion the advertisers of tools and materials obviously hope for: if those schmucks can to it, I can do it. How hard could it be?

The empty beer cans, candy wrappers and used condoms littering what was once a family living room lingered as ghosts of clandestine parties and fornications. The back door was locked, but I discovered what others must have determined before; if you lifted the door by the knob, there was enough play for the dog to slip the striker plate and “open sesame.”

I swept up as much of the debris as I could and shoveled it into a garbage can I’d brought from home. With paper and pen, I walked around the main floor working on a list for Jefferson: 1 - Rip up living room carpet and refinish floor (I’d pulled up a corner of the carpet to reveal oak boards). 2 - refinish kitchen cabinets and replace counter tops. 3 - Remove wall between kitchen and dining room. I was up to number thirteen before I’d even started on the second floor and as I mounted the creaky stairs, I remembered that saying about old cars for whom the best remedy would be to “jack up the paint and drive a new one underneath.” 

I remembered walking across a pasture in England with Sadie, following a path leading to the scanty ruins of a castle purported to be the birthplace of Catherine Parr. “We should build a ruin in Canada,” Sadie said, “imagine the tourist dollars!”

Three bedrooms and a bathroom flanked a square hallway upstairs. The linoleum in the hallway had separated and curled at the corners and the bedrooms all had grimy broadloom in ghastly green and red. The bathroom was floored with a maroon indoor-outdoor carpet and the toilet seat and lid lay in a corner by a linen closet. Some time ago, some idiot had decided to take a shit in the non-functioning toilet; what remained had dried up beyond smell. I placed the seat and lid on the toilet to hide it.

A closet in the smallest bedroom had had the bi-fold doors removed and a few wire hangers, one with a man’s wide tie hanging awkwardly from it had been left behind. Whoever built the house hadn’t deemed it necessary to put wallboard up in the closets; the bare two-by-fours interspersed with the backside of bedroom gyproc in this closet had become an easel for some child, once upon a time. In a far corner of the closet, stick men in all kinds of bizarre configurations told horrifying stories: a large stick-man wielding a strap in one raised hand while a small stick-child cowered beneath, was typical. A stick-dog with an open jaw full of pointed teeth was another.

I suppressed an urge to vomit and left. I’d finish this another day.

“Listen, Jeremy,” my dad said when I told him the deed was done, “I don’t think it’s a good idea but I’ll help as I can.” I was reluctant to take him up on the offer; something in me knew the reno would gradually turn into a project of my dad, Jefferson and the various tradespeople that would be traipsing through the place expertly doing things I can’t do. I could already hear them talking past me about sewer pipes and dimmer switches and electrical panels.

“Thanks, dad, but I hate to bother you with this.” That was a mistake; I should have said something like, “Thanks, dad. But I mean to do this on my own.” The “hate to bother you with this” would obviously be taken as a thanks for his generosity.

We walked through the house together; I’d cleaned and cleaned up as much as I could in order to counter a bit of the negative impression that would undoubtedly be revealed to a man who’d spent his life inventing, planning and making homes for people. I needn’t actually have worried. My dad has always been one to insist that it’s not the decisions we make, but how we carry through that makes a project sink or swim. Going to college right after high school was a choice he left to me: “Whatever you decide, do it with conviction and without regret,” he said to me just before I opted for college.

When we were done, he said, “Well it’s better than I expected, but what carelessness!”

“Sorry?”

“I mean, everything that’s wrong with this house is a result of sloppy or no maintenance.” He poked at a rotting rim around the kitchen sink. “A half-hour’s work with a caulking gun could have prevented this.”

“I guess some people just don’t know how to do that kind of . . . maintenance.”

He spread his arms in a gesture of exasperation. “What’s to know about picking up the phone and calling a repairman?”

I could have argued that cost might have been a factor, but he would have come back with the obvious ounce of prevention shibboleth. I’d heard it many times.

Sadie phoned me the evening following the day in which Jefferson moved his tools in to start work on the Wilkosky house. She only phones when it concerns Chantel. Chantel was my darling until she was eighteen or so when her allegiances mysteriously switched to Sadie. She explained it matter-of-factly as an oedipal complex working itself out. “Girls are supposed to hate their moms when their maturing because she’s a rival for their father’s affection.” Psych 101. “That doesn’t mean I love you any less, Daddy,” she’d said.

It was Jeremy Jnr. around whom our growing estrangement began and developed. He was a difficult delivery, 20 hours of agony for Sadie and his eventual, screaming arrival sounding like, “I’m not coming out and you can’t make me,” an attitude that accompanied him into childhood and adolescence. To prove that we “couldn’t make him,” it seems, he hooked up with a bunch of self-destructive drug-heads and his slide into addiction and, finally, an overdose proved his point.

I’m a teacher. Junior’s repulsive attitudes and behaviours were not novel to me, except that they stripped me of the conviction that behind every failed child is failed parenting. He tired us out so completely that by the time he hit what should have been his final year of high school, he was living on the street or in his room, emerging occasionally to grab a plate of food from the dinner table to take back to his room. How he’d paid for the black leather and the tatoos was something I didn’t even want to contemplate.

I think now that we finally just accepted that we were like some people who have a child in a wheelchair, or a son who’s autistic or learning-disabled and there’s nothing you can really do about it. But those were accidents of birth; Junior had to be a case of shoddy workmanship. Or, at least, that’s what I saw in Sadie’s eyes. I failed her son. The man who doesn’t model integrity to his son has a great deal to answer for. She probably never said anything like that; she didn’t have to.

“Chantel’s engaged,” she said on the phone. She’s had the boy over for a meal twice and he seemed nice. The call implied a heads-up; another rare occasion when we will need to act in concert is coming up. I didn’t tell her about the Wilkosky house. She was having a problem with her right shoulder; they were having a stretch of unusually hot weather in Edmonton. Her mom seemed to be adjusting to the nursing home.

Jefferson and my father, turns out, were a fabulous team. It took less than two months to completely redo the Wilkosky house. I ran out of money before the siding and shingles could be replaced but the Credit Union gave me a mortgage after inspecting the place. The inspector was impressed.

“Why don’t you sell your old place instead of borrowing?” Dad asked.

“I’m thinking of renting it,” I said. I had thought about it, but not much.

I was sitting on the veranda step watching Jefferson’s truck pull out of the driveway and disappear around a stand of poplar and onto Pioneer Avenue when I heard footsteps across the new, hardwood living room floor and Dad came out through the front door. I thought he’d gone home. 

“Well Jeremy, you pulled it off,” he said.

“Actually, Dad, I watched you pull it off.” He sat down beside me.

“What’re you gonna do with all this space?” My imagination walked through the house, the two smaller bedrooms upstairs with their closets freshly gyprocked, painted, the master bedroom where we’d added an ensuite, the family room that was really a redundant, extra living room, the kitchen with the shiny cupboards, the island, the “country house style” double sink, the basement where we’d put in a rumpus room with a pool table, bar and fireplace. And now, the loud, echoey sound of every footfall in the unfurnished expanses.

“I really don’t know, Dad.”

We sat in silence for a long time. The creek had more or less dried up in the summer heat but the reservoir behind the dam was home to families of Mallards leaving random, directionless wakes behind them, diving for their dinners. I’d sat on a park bench by the reservoir a few weeks before and watched the fledglings trailing after their parents and marveled how much they looked like the rubber ducks with which Chantel had spent hours in her bath: marshaling them into formations, talking to them, once throwing a duck at me when I insisted it was time to get out and get into her pyjamas. She apologized to the duck. I wrapped her in a towel and trundled her off to bed.

And she kissed me and said, “I love you, Daddy.”