David Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading (subtitle: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time) was published in 2010 on the basis of essays in the Los Angeles Times (where he had been a book critic) and other publications. Gary Luke, the former editorial director of Sasquatch Books (Seattle) persuaded Ulin to recast his writing and publish his expanded essay as a book in 2010. In 2018 together they published a new edition, with a new introduction and afterword, which expanded his original article and brought it forward to the age of the short-fingered vulgarian casino operator from Queens, in the memorable phrases by Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen.
The gist of the essay remains the same: the quiet, focus, and concentration required of deep reading of long-form fiction is hard to summon up in the age of the web, of the shouting multitudes on every side, and of the way that all our concentration and reading attention has been cracked if not shattered by the combination of political and technological disasters of the past decade. "We are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines." (p. xv) Some of the stories are what Ulin (and many others) fear: the stories of racism, the fear of all kinds of others, the ready labeling of disagreement as treason or heresy. "I have come to recognize that all these narratives of incomplete and every one turns out to be unfulfilling, because none of them add up to a vision larger than themselves." (p. xviii) Yet "every narrative is conditional" and "we can live only in our own time." (p. xxi-xxii) Surveying both the positive and horrifying narratives of American history and literature, Ulin writes:
I don't mean to trivialize our situation by referring to it through the lens of narrative, but rather to contextualize. This is how the world works: first we tell ourselves a story, then we dream our way inside as a way of bringing it to life. it's why we have to be careful about the narratives we evoke or create, because they are bound by (or they bind) the limits of what we can imagine, the limits of our ability to think. . . . [This is] a difficult world in which to be human, in which to try to live with integrity. . .
Why do I read? I am looking for authority, intelligence. . . . But even more, I seek engagement—with both the text and the creator of the text. . . . Faith again, some sort of transfiguration, the closest we come to real communion between ourselves and another who shares with us something in common (common cause, common courtesy, common knowledge, common sense). . . . Why should we fear one another's stories? The true act of resistance is to respond with hope. All those voices are what connect us. In a culture intent on keeping us divided, they are, they have been always, the necessary narrative. (p. xxvii—xxxiii)
The connective thread of narratives, both the horrifying and the hopeful, have made 2018 look almost like a preface. Ulin refused to give up hope, and for good reason. Through the ravages of pandemic, policing brutalities, willful cruelty and grift at the highest levels of power, some hope can emerge. The 2020 election answered the grifter in the only way really possible (even as he refuses to acknowledge it). The pandemic has revealed cleavages in America that can no longer be ignored, even though many will try, will deny, will stonewall. In the ravages of pandemic, how can we not all sense this is but a dress rehearsal for the disasters of climate change. People have risen up and refused to give up hope, refused simply to accept corruption, brutality, and incompetence, even though many voted to continue those things exactly. Ulin saw signs of a quiet protest in art, a reclamation of aesthetic faith. As in February 2018, so in November and December 2020, in Samuel Becket's words, "I can't go on, I'll go on." (p. 156)
For those concerned with liberal arts traditions and education, Ulin's essay now reads as a call to memory that became a call to action. Narratives can still connect; we can still imagine our way into a world and inhabit it. In aesthetic terms—in all the arts—we will all only begin to acknowledge, lament, and celebrate the immense disasters, griefs, and passions of this year. That reckoning may (or should) go on for a generation. Unlike the historical response to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, we can't and won't simply ignore it and forget it. The lost of art of reading can lead to the new art of connecting, the new narrative cobbled together on the streets, from disorientation, "art as communion, art as community, art as (yes) resistance in the sense that it invites or provokes us to complexity." Ulin might be willing to extend it, in his own heritage, as tikkun olam: to rebuilt the ancient ruins, repair the breach, and restore the streets to live in.
Tolle, lege: take and read.