Show notes
Persuasion article, “Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul”
List of “Best Books” for children
“Keep a poem in your pocket”
Keep a poem in your pocket
and a picture in your head
and you’ll never feel lonely
at night when you’re in bed.The little poem will sing to you
the little picture bring to you
a dozen dreams to dance to you
at night when you’re in bed.So —
Keep a picture in your pocket
and a poem in your head
and you’ll never feel lonely
at night when you’re in bed.The biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer George is reading.
George had the Jesuit idea backwards, but the point about early influence being the most relevant stands. St. Ignatius Loyola (may have) said: “Give me a child till he is seven years old and I will show you the man.”
Eli Steele’s documentary Killing America
Paul Kingsnorth’s video post “Deepfake World”
Bible verses on the concept of “dying to the world”:
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul?” (Jesus asks, in Mark 8:36-37)
“And [Jesus] said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:23-24)
“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ…” (St. Paul in Philippians 3:8)
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (Jesus in John 12:24)
“So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (St. Paul in Romans 6:11)
Fox and Father, Laurence Fox’s conversational podcast
The Social Network (Aaron Sorkin’s movie about the origin of Facebook)
Reading and Politics
In this first quote, Professor Nafisi is describing the difficulties of trying to teach literature at the university when the university’s officials and many of the students were consumed with revolutionary politics and new moral rules.
Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservient to politics and subject to politics and subject to arbitrary rules. Always, the joy of teaching was marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime — how well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was not the quality of one’s work but the color of one’s lips, the subversive potential of a single strand of hair? Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Bronte because she appeared to condone adultery? (10-11)
Another quote:
One day the radical students and faculty members in the Drama Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts convened to change the curriculum. They felt certain courses were too bourgeois and were not needed anymore, and they wanted to add new, revolutionary courses. Heated debates had ensued in that packed meeting as drama students demanded that Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Racine be replaced with Brecht and Gorky, as well as some Marx and Engels — revolutionary theory was more important than plays. The faculty had all sat on the platform in the hall, except for this particular professor, who stood at the back by the door.
[And he voices his disagreement, and the attacks begin. But…]
A girl rose and tried to calm the cries of indignation. She said this professor always had the students’ best interests at heart and should be given a chance to defend himself….
[And he comes to the podium.]
When he spoke again, it was to say that he felt one single film by Laurel and Hardy was worth more than all their revolutionary tracts, including those of Marx and Lenin. What they called passion was not passion, not even madness; it was some coarse emotion not worthy of true literature. He said that if they changed the curriculum, he would refuse to teach. True to his word, he never did go back, although he participated in the vigils against the closing of the universities. He wanted his students to know that his withdrawal that day was not out of fear of government reprisal. (139-40)
Reading and morality (Gatsby on trial)
In this second quote, Nafisi’s university class has put F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” on trial. There’s one student arguing for the moral core of the novel (Zarrin), and another student arguing against it (Mr. Nyazi), a student who is acting as the judge (Mr. Farzan), and Nafisi herself jumps in there as well.
“If a critique of carelessness is a fault,” I said, somewhat self-consciously, “then at least I’m in good company. … Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can’t experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic — not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels — the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.” I said all of this in one breath, rather astonished at my own fervor.
“Yes,” said Zarrin, interrupting me now. “Could one not say in fact that this blindness or carelessness towards others is a reminder of another brand of careless people?” She threw a momentary glance at Nyazi as she added, “Those who see the world in black and white, drunk on the righteousness of their own fictions.
“And if,” she continued with some warmth, “Mr. Farzan, in real life Fitzgerald was obsessed with the rich and with wealth; in his fiction he brings out the corrupt and decaying power of wealth on basically decent people, like Gatsby… In his failure to understand this, Mr. Nyazi misses the whole point of the novel.”
Nyazi, who for some time now had been insistently scrutinizing the floor, suddenly jumped up and said “I object!”
“To what, exactly, do you object?” said Zarrin with mock politeness.
“Carelessness is not enough!” he shot back. “It doesn’t make the novel more moral. I ask you about the sin of adultery, about lies and cheating, and you talk about carelessness?” (132-33)
Reading and the perils of dreams
In this third quote, Nafisi is reflecting on the meaning of Gatsby with her class, and she has this epiphany about the similarity between Gatsby’s unfulfillable dream and the Iranian revolution’s unfulfillable dream.
[T]here is an overall undercurrent to [the Great Gatsby] which I think determines its essence and that is the question of loss, the loss of an illusion. … Gatsby fakes everything, even his own name… Gatsby is constantly being made and remade by others… The reality of Gatsby’s life is that he is a charlatan. But the truth is that he is a romantic and tragic dreamer, who becomes heroic because of his belief in his own romantic delusion…
Gatsby’s loyalty was to his reinvented self, which saw its fulfillment in Daisy’s voice. It was to the promises of that self that he remained faithful, to the green light at the end of the dock, not a shabby dream of wealth and prosperity. Thus the “colossal illusion” is born for which he sacrifices his life. …
… The dream is not about money but what he imagines he can become. It is not a comment on America as a materialistic country but as an idealistic one, one that has turned money into a means of retrieving a dream.
[Gatsby] could be dishonest in life and he could lie about himself, but one thing he could not do was to betray his own imagination. Gatsby is ultimately betrayed by the “honesty of his imagination.” He dies, for in reality, no such person can survive…. Gatsby should never have tried to possess his dream, I explained. …
For Gatsby, access to wealth is a means to an end; it is a means to the possession of his dream. That dream removes from him the power to differentiate between imagination and reality…
What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then.
Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.
When I left the class that day, I did not tell them what I myself was just beginning to discover: how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby’s. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream? (141-144)
The fragility of the literary tradition