Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific idea.

Today, Rabbi David Wolpe: officially, he is the author of a number of compelling, learned, and wise books on Judaism and faith; was once named The Most Influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek and one of the 50 Most Influential Jews in the World; and he’s debated (compellingly) everyone from Christopher Hitchens to Sam Harris to Richard Dawkins.

To me personally, he was the still small voice of faith that reached me even in the midst of my youthful infatuation with the New Atheists, and he is the writer who’s brought me the most peace and clarity about my own sense of faith.

I once lived in an apartment in Mexico that looked down across Guanajuato City. From there, I could smell wood smoke, incense, lime, street food (spicy tamales or elote, depending on the direction of the breeze), and various garden scents of herbs and flowers. At the same time, which was always, I could hear everything — cars driving, horns honking, children playing, neighbours talking, Spanish everywhere, the buzz of orange wasps zipping in and out of the window, music, water running somewhere, birds on the roof, and the unending cacophony of dogs. There was a dog that slept outside our bedroom window in the day and barked his heart out at night.

However much I thrilled at the vibrancy of life around me, there was also that dog barking and the noise and chaos it represented. So, before the day bloomed into its bright, loud, busy fullness, I would get up early to cut a slice out of the world just for myself. It was brief and tenuous and holy. I’d put on three layers, because even Mexico at sunrise and in the shade could be cold. I’d make a mug of coffee and take it, with my notebook, out of the apartment I rented and down a narrow set of stone stairs, into the coolness and quiet of the small garden below.

To say there was no sound or distraction here would be true only in relative terms — if New York is the city that never sleeps, Guanajuato is the city that never stops talking — but I always felt calm here at this early hour. I felt as though this square of dewy grass and the table in the shade of a lemon tree was something I wanted to keep hidden for myself. In the opening pages of Why Be Jewish? Rabbi David Wolpe captures this serenity when he writes, about his own Eden on a quiet porch in Jerusalem, “I felt as though the sun, the city, and I were secret companions.”

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I’ve revisited those first pages of Wolpe’s book many times. They make up a short section titled “The Secret and the Mystery”, which I want to look more closely at here. Wolpe describes the porch in Jerusalem where he used to sit before the sun had risen, while the city was still, in which the “moment was exquisitely quiet.” The silence, of course, cannot last:

“As the light stretched through the streets, striking windows and rooftops and doors, it began to coax people from their homes. Cars pulled onto the streets, and the sounds of the city, harsh and insistent, made the rose-glow silence of an hour before seem like a dream.”

However, the loudness of the world cannot obliterate the stillness of the morning, nor drown out the still small voice of that sacred solitude:

“Yet the silence and the stones and the soft gleam of the sun were real, and indeed they still lay beneath the bustle of the city. I had seen them; I had been there. They left a gentle mark on my memory.”

In the bustle of the day and the hustle of my work, the memory of such simple, plain beauty remains like an afterglow burned into my eyes: it sits within the vision of the present moment, largely ignorable yet reclaimable if I just turn my attention back to seeing it. What distinguishes these moments of serenity is that they feel like a reprieve of the accumulating burden of things that matter far less but demand much more of me. I’m worrying about an unpaid bill, attempting to organise my week, regretting a sharp retort or a lapse in memory, and then I recall — as if by some act of grace — how I felt this morning while I read a novel in the sun before my street had woken up.

I realise also, again and again, that I can do the same tomorrow, or that when I finish this awful meeting, my wife will still be my wife and she and I will eat dinner together and home will still be the haven it always has been. The kaleidoscope of life resolves into a unified image, and it isn’t only that it’s beautiful and soothing — it also feels true. Truer, somehow, than the bills and the meetings and the hundred or so transgressions of the self that the world demands of me every day. Perhaps my subconscious is a kind of Neoplatonist: it believes the numinous speaks more authentically than the booming din of the mundane.

Given this, the goal of my mind seems to be consistently bringing itself back to that simplicity and peace. As Wolpe puts it:

“The question for me that day — and in a different form every day — is whether I can retain that moment of magic as I go about my work, when the sun is bright, the stones are bleached from the heat of the day, and all the harsh sounds of the city surround me.”

A question that might rise up to greet us here, reasonably enough, is what precisely it is that we’re trying to hold onto during the day? What is the magic in those quiet moments that we lose when the world drowns it out?

What We Lose in the Noise & Find in the Silence

“Inside each of us is a secret searching for a mystery. The secret we carry is uniquely our own. We can share it with others, but we never lose it, like the candle whose light kindles a new flame without being itself diminished.”1

This is the idea with which Rabbi Wolpe opens this short section from his book. That secret is the human soul, unique and individual yet common to us all. “Out of the billions who live, who have lived, no one has shared exactly our secret; no one will ever be as close to it or understand it as we do.” And, in addition to the secret of our souls, there is a mystery:

“The mystery is what to do with our secret. When we are young, the secret seems both wonderful and trivial; we play at it, expand it, and dream that it will one day matter. But it is only as we grow older that we are captured by the force of the mystery: for the secret is the soul, and the mystery is how to tend it and help it grow.”

If the task is to cultivate our souls like flowers in a garden, then quietude is the sunshine in which the soul flourishes. And it’s in silence that we can listen most attentively to the urgent messages of the soul, the reports on the state of the self from the centre of what matters. When we listen carefully to it, we thrive; when we ignore or drown it out, we become disconnected from a true sense of self. “That early-morning moment,” Wolpe tells us, “represents for me the time when I can hear the notes of my soul and feel its connection to its Source.” If only the whole day could be as spiritually rewarding as the morning, but “the world is not all dawns and evenings, and it will not keep quiet so that we can hear the rustling inside”:

“The world blares at us. Each morning as we arise we hear the screech of the headlines, demanding our attention. This is what you must hear, think, give yourself to right now. Tomorrow the issue will be different, but it is never less than urgent, never less than loud. The melody of the self, a strain so thin and delicate, has little chance to be heard. Listening takes time and silence, and in the frantic noise we lose attunement.”

Of course, silence is an easy thing to covet, noise a difficult thing to avoid. Unless we take an extreme route out of the world like monks and ascetics, we will inevitably face the discordance of daily life. Schopenhauer believed that the level of noise one could tolerate was inverse to one’s intellect. This misleadingly broad idea strikes me as a bit of self-justification on the part of the irritable philosopher. It also seems philosophically and spiritually naive, and a concession to the very world it claims to reject. Refusing to play the game is just another way of letting the other side win.

This, then, is the challenge — to nurture a soul in the midst of struggle. “A soul is both a hearty and a fragile thing,” Wolpe writes. “The mystery is to find a way to live in a frantic and fast-paced world that does not do violence to our conscience, that does not stunt our souls.”

We Need More Chairs

What can’t be ignored — and I don’t intend to hide it from you, dear reader — is that, for David Wolpe, the solution to being unable to hear the music of one’s soul is Judaism. That’s the whole point of his book, which, don’t forget, is called Why Be Jewish? “Judaism,” he writes, “is a life system that encourages spiritual awareness and moral passion.” In his estimation (and, frankly, his book did much to convince me of this), his faith is “the mystery that the secret searches for”.

I’ve not made much of this here because I think there’s plenty of wisdom to be found in Wolpe’s writing that any secular humanist can learn from. There is, however, one key phrase he uses to describe Judaism and thereby answer the question of what we find in silence and often lose in noise: the reason, he says, that Judaism helps him “to keep the Jerusalem dawn as the day moves on” is because it “teaches souls to grow by paying attention to more than themselves alone”:

“The world is the stage of all drama. To be healthy, a soul has to care about other things and other souls beside itself and its source. If all we attend to is our own cultivation, we are listening not to the call of the soul but the tyranny of the ego.”

This is why it isn’t enough to simply retreat from the world and “ignore the clatter of the street” — because “isolation is at best a temporary solution”. That silence and solitude, then, is like fasting: it’s periodically useful, even necessary if your spiritual health is suffering from a glut of things that don’t nourish it, but it can’t be maintained long-term. Instead, the trick is to find a sustainably healthy diet. In terms of the soul, that means meaningful work, contributing to a community, finding purpose in service, and, of course, a close group of true friends. For me — a writer who can spend days alone in my study, reading and writing and thinking quietly — this doesn’t always come easily. I have to be reminded to go out of myself and into the world.

In Paris, I once stayed in a room above what was a bistro by day and a nightclub during those hours I hoped to sleep, and the bass thump of music and the voices beneath my window and the raising and clinking of glasses of wine were, I believed then, nuisances. I realise now I should have taken them as invitations to step out of myself, to join the party, to live life with others. On the roof of a restaurant overlooking Prague, I had dinner with friends I’d just made, a gathering that grew and, in doing so, expanded my experience with each new person. As Anaïs Nin once wrote, “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

The truth is that my relationship with noise and socialising would be described in the digital age with the phrase “it’s complicated”. The pull of solitude resists the push of loneliness. This struggle isn’t unique to me. The writer Colette once lauded solitude as “a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom”, yet cautioned that there are days when solitude “is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall”.

Henry Thoreau sought out his own company in the woods, where he wrote that he found it “wholesome to be alone”, adding that he “never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude”. But even he, seeking the simplicity of a quiet life, kept three chairs in his hideaway cabin: “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society”. However much we might enjoy the solitary seat, we will need, eventually, the extra chairs.

NB ~ A few paragraphs in this essay were refashioned out of some material I cut from a previous piece before publication. That deleted material was briefly available in the Bonus section, but I was glad to find a true home for it here. So if something seems familiar, that’s why.

Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific idea.

Today, Vivian Gornick: essayist, critic, and one of the great re-readers, whose writing always feels generous. Reading her on the topic of favourite books, the death of an almost-friend, or what feminism means to her, you feel seen and gifted with the attention of someone whose interest in life is enlivening. Gornick’s writing voice is itself an art-form that, as The New Yorker put it, “does not just tell the story, it is the story”. Here, we’ll look at an essay from her collection Approaching Eye Level.

When was the last time you sat down and wrote a letter? Not a note, or a reminder, or a memo to a colleague scrawled on a post-it note (even that sounds archaic in a world of instant messaging and wristwatches that send emails). I’m talking about placing a sheet of paper on a desk and a pen in your hand to write out the thoughts and feelings you thought and felt that day; to tell someone you love not just that you love them but why; to share a story that, sure, could be summarised in a brief text, but here on the page reshapes bald facts anyone could recount into a lively tale only you could tell.

All right, how about doing any of that but typing it into an email instead of writing it out? I’ll bet a few more of you can raise your hands now. Me too; as much as I romanticise ink-stains and the texture of paper, I’m much more likely to write a letter if I can type it — the same way I write my essays — and send it with the click of a paper airplane icon. The whole thing is quicker and less frustrating than finding an envelope to seal the pages in, licking a stamp to stick on the corner, and going out to find a postbox so that my friend can finally read these words in two days to a week.

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It wasn’t always this way. In her essay “On Letter Writing”, Vivian Gornick tells us the story of her mother’s epistolic relationship with a married co-worker. It began in 1920, when her mother worked for a New York bakery. There she met a bookkeeper who was, “like herself, a European immigrant who read books and listened to music”:

“Mr Levinson (an unhappily married man who lived in the Bronx) saw in my mother (a soulful young woman who lived on the Lower East Side) a kindred spirit. When they parted at the end of the working day his need for her conversation had often not run its course and he fell into the habit of writing to her late at night.”

Mr Levinson’s letters “were remarkably varied in mood and content”:

“Whatever the subject, whatever the mood, when Mr Levinson sat down at midnight to write to My Dear Friend he wrote at length and at leisure. If he’d been to the theatre he described the play, the acting, the crowd on Fourteenth Street; if a child was sick he confided the atmosphere in the room, the look of the patient, how the doctor had conducted himself; if he was continuing an earlier conversation he included nuance and digression freely and fully.”

More remarkable than the honesty and literary broadness with which he wrote these letters is the fact that Mr Levinson often ended them,

“by telling my mother he was now going down to the corner to mail this letter so that she would read it at eight in the morning before they met an hour later at work. This last — that she’d read it in the morning — he predicted with an assurance he was entitled to: there were then five mail deliveries a day in New York.”

Perhaps that’s why people don’t write letters anymore. Maybe it’s about the ease and immediacy with which a phone call can be made, while a letter might now take days to arrive, if it arrives at all.1 The expediency of the phone won out over the effort of the pen. So, the easy answer to Gornick’s question about why letter-writing fell out of favour is “the telephone did it”, just as video apparently killed the radio star or the internet destroyed our ability to concentrate.

Is it that easy? Gornick certainly won’t allow herself to be complacent, and the critical self-insight she reveals here is a model for deep thought. Just as she begins to tell herself that “in my youth I was great letter writer and would have continued to be one if it wasn’t for...” she swerves, turning the finger of blame on herself:

“Nonsense, I answered myself. You can’t blame technology for this. The question to ask is, why didn’t letter writing put up more of a fight? What is it in us that allowed the telephone such an easy takeover? Look to your own part in it. Ask yourself why you don’t write letters any more. Something deeper at work, I think, than ‘the telephone did it’.”

This is an intellectual judo move, one that in my experience (when I remember to do it; I fall short more often than I succeed) yields greater insight and opportunity for growth than the standard, outward looking model. Gornick shifts from the passive — we were corrupted by modernity — into the active — I allowed this to happen.

Gornick spends her essay digging into “the buried history” of the idea that “the telephone did it”. By sifting through the cultural sediment, she uncovers a phrase beneath our tendency to shift the blame: “The world I find myself in.” It comes to her when she tells herself that opting for a phone call “nine times out of ten” over writing a letter is simply what everyone does: it’s “the habitual response of the world I find myself in, that which does not require an active will”.

“The world I find myself in. Now there’s a phrase to linger over. A phrase that furrows the brow; resonates unpleasantly in the head; even presses on the heart. What does it mean to find yourself in the world, rather than that you struggle to take your place in the world?”

Here, Gornick strikes bedrock in her excavation of meaning beneath our preference for the phone (or the terse instant message tapped quickly, composed of “text speech”, and sent immediately) over the slower, more deliberate letter. It’s a matter of ease over effort, of the lure of passivity over the delayed gratification of a more active approach. She’s candid about this in her own life:

“Today, letter writing is a chore. I will not linger over what I write. In my letters I do not elaborate unnecessarily; I do not associate widely; I do not describe at length or at leisure. And still, it will take me hours to write a letter properly. I must, after all, compose it. I cannot scribble down a set of notes. I must write full sentences in full paragraphs. I must make the paragraphs agree with one another, speak to one another, cohere as a piece of writing.”

Gornick goes on to lament, “It’s a decision now to write a letter whereas when I was a girl it was a way of life.” This, I’ve come to believe, is what we’re really yearning for — that the world would make it easy to do the challenging things that reward us in the future (letter writing, eating healthy, exercise). We wish the world would bring the good choices to us, and hide some of the bad ones from view, so that we don’t have to make the decision. We wish living well was simply our “way of life”.

This is precisely what Gornick discovered when she visited Tel Aviv, in the hope of finding “a bit of Paris in the Middle East” in its famous café culture. But when she got there, nobody seemed to go out to the cafés. When she met with a disgruntled Israeli journalist, he pointed his bitter blame at the television. “A few years ago,” he told her, “they would all have been out in the cafés, now they’re home watching Dallas.”

“I asked him if he still went to the cafés. ‘No,’ he replied moodily. ‘What is the use? No one goes any more.’ Where, then, did he and his friends gather to talk? ‘People don’t talk any more,’ he said. What do you mean, people don’t talk any more? I continued. He lived among the most urgent talkers in the world, how could he say people didn’t talk anymore? ‘For God’s sake,’ he cried. ‘The world has changed. I find myself in a world I don’t recognise. What can I do about it? Nothing, I can do nothing; people don’t talk any more.’ I understood then; he didn’t talk any more.”

With the cafés no longer bringing people together, the journalist had given up. As Gornick considers the letters she no longer writes, she briefly resents the changed world with the kind of bitterness expressed by the journalist. “Resentment flared into anger; anger sank into depression; depression gave way to lethargy.” This is what we must resist — the apathy that invites us to slide so easily into it. recently wrote a compelling broadside against grievance culture, against complaining instead of acting. Here’s his advice to those lamenting the decline of the humanities:

“Maybe the culture is in free fall. The only way to stop that is to have more people read George Eliot and talk about her work. If you hate AI slop, share real art. If you hate the decline of humanistic education, read in public. Keep the difficult balance between lamenting the change and being the change you want to see.”

Gornick tells us about the advice of Edmund Wilson in a letter to a friend: “We have to take life — society and human relations — more or less as we find them. The only thing that we can really make is our work. And deliberate work of the mind, imagination, and hand [...] in the long run remakes the world.” Gornick is writing for herself as much as for us; she takes on the challenge of this advice, realising that not doing work is also “world-making”:

“Every time the urge to write a letter dies stillborn in me I am making the world I rail against.”

The question, in the end, is not what kind of world you find yourself in — it’s what kind of world you choose to build.

Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific idea.

Today, Azar Nafisi: one of those writers whose pen can switch with ease from sharp and incisive to elegant and heartfelt. Not only does she write compellingly on living a life of literature — in a manner that convinces the mind and moves the soul — she has lived out her principles with admirable courage, never allowing philistine censors or theocratic bullies to stifle her belief in the magic of books.

Here, I take a close look at her memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran.

What do you think of when you think of Iran? Much of what I imagine comes from the books of fierce and poetic thinkers who describe the contradictions of that fascinating land.

I think of mountains and dry heat and the swirling steam of tea, and Azar Nafisi lends me the words that shape this picture. She writes of Tehran’s “mountains and its dry yet generous climate, the trees and flowers that bloomed and thrived on its parched soil and seemed to suck the light out of the sun”. Of daily life, she tells us, “Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day”:

“We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The colour of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer’s skill.”

Of course, I also think of the theocratic repression Iranians live under, as indelible a part of the national picture as it is inescapable for those who suffer under its rule. I see in my mind the dark ink drawings in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, her singular depiction of the Islamic Revolution and the changes it brought to the lives of ordinary Iranians. I cannot forget what Christopher Hitchens wrote on the horrors of Iran’s theocracy, describing the state as one where:

“virgins are raped before execution because the Koran forbids the execution of virgins; where the censor cuts Ophelia out of the Russian movie version of Hamlet; where any move that a woman makes can be construed as lascivious and inciting; where goatish old men can be gifted with infant brides; and where the age of ‘consent’ is more like nine.”

I’m conscious of the fact that when I try to imagine an individual Iranian, he or she is usually an academic of some kind, living in a house full of books and sunshine, wryly and courageously defying tyranny with literature. This picture is entirely the product of the kind of books I read. As a result, my mental portrait of Iranians is simplistic and broad-brushed. One day, I hope to flesh out the human nuances by actually visiting Iran. Until then, I avail myself of the magic portals that books open into the homes and lives of writers such as Azar Nafisi.

In fact, even that notion of books as a “magic portal” comes to me from Nafisi, from her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. Specifically, it comes in chapter five of her section on Nabokov, which opens with a strange surprise.

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“Upsilamba!”

So begins the chapter, with Nafisi carrying a tray of tea into her living room, where a young woman joyfully throws the word at her “like a ball, and I take a mental leap to catch it”. The young woman is named Yassi, and she is one of the seven female students who gather every Thursday morning at Nafisi’s house to engage in criminal activity: they are there to read forbidden Western classics.

Having left her teaching position at the University of Allameh Tabatabai,1 Nafisi set up a small class of her favourite pupils in her living room, where they enjoyed a freedom unknown to them in the rest of their lives. Nafisi tells us about their first session together:

“All of us had been nervous and inarticulate. We were used to meeting in public, mainly in classrooms and in lecture halls. The girls had their separate relationships with me, but except for Nassrin and Mahshid, who were intimate, and a certain friendship between Mitra and Sanaz, the rest were not close; in many cases, in fact, they would never have chosen to be friends.”

Were it not for books, these women would not have formed their literary conclave and its subsequent solidarity. Their comradery deepens over the course of their sessions together, the novels each contributing to an emerging lingua franca. Which brings us back to Yassi shouting out, “Upsilamba!”

The word comes from Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, described here by Nafisi:

“In this novel, Nabokov differentiates Cincinnatus C., his imaginative and lonely hero, from those around him through his originality in a society where uniformity is not only the norm but also the law. Even as a child, Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the freshness and beauty of language ...”

This unusual attention to words sets the protagonist apart from others, who (in Nabokov’s telling):

“understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences.”

Nafisi once taught Invitation to a Beheading to a class of largely incurious students. “No one in class had bothered to ask what the word meant,” Nafisi writes. She even set the word in a midterm exam, asking them to “explain the significance of the word upsilamba”. Almost none of them had a clue what she meant — none, that is, except for a handful of students who were auditing the class simply for love of literature. Among them were some of the women who’d later attend Nafisi’s home lessons.

These exceptional students turned out to be much like Cincinnatus C. in their curiosity and love of language. Yassi has a “pathological” love of playing with words and tells Nafisi, “As soon as I discover a new word, I have to use it, like someone who buys an evening gown and is so eager that she wears it to the movies, or to lunch.” Yassi later says that she associates the word upsilamba with a dance — “C’mon, baby, do the Upsilamba with me” — which is fitting for one who dances with language as she does, feeling it in her body as much as her mind.

The similarities don’t end there. The society of Nabokov’s novel, in which “uniformity is not only the norm but also the law”, sounds presciently close to Iran after the Islamic Revolution. Nafisi’s study group meet under the cloud of segregation, state-sponsored misogyny, and repression of culture. In studying Western literature, these young women are guilty of “gnostical turpitude”, the crime that Cincinnatus C. is imprisoned for: knowledge of forbidden esoteric wisdom.

These correlations between the novel and real life are to be expected, given that the “theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality”. The purpose of the meetings was to “read, discuss and respond to works of fiction” and discover how they “related to [their] personal and social experiences”. Nafisi adds:

“We were not looking for blueprints, for an easy solution, but we did hope to find a link between the open spaces the novels provided and the closed ones we were confined to.”

However, Nafisi urges her students to resist imposing reality on the novel. On the first page of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi cautions us against making too much of similarities between the world on the page and the world in which we live:

“Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

To “belittle” the work of fiction means, yes, to disrespect it, but also to shrink it down so as to fit within the small and closed world they occupy. To do so would be to negate the expansive, open-source nature of fiction, and to disenchant it of its magic. So, if the idea is not to read the book by the light of reality, what are they doing? Precisely the opposite — reading reality by the light of the books:

“We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.”

Nafisi chose the novels for the group because of “their authors’ faith in the critical and almost magical power of literature”. She tells the story of a young Nabokov during the Russian Revolution, refusing to be distracted from writing his solitary poetry by the sound of bullets and the view of bloody fights from his window. “Let us see,” Nafisi tells her students, “whether seventy years later our disinterested faith will reward us by transforming the gloomy reality created by this other revolution.”

To alter books so they fit reality — which the poor reader does to make simple sense of complicated themes he doesn’t understand, and the capricious censors of all tyrannies do to make fiction work in service to ideology — is to make literature smaller, narrower, meaner. To do as Nafisi shows us in her book, to bring the magic of fiction into the base reality of our lives, is to expand our world. We gift reality, at least temporarily, the powers of efflorescence inherent in our ever-unfolding books.

This is what makes readers so like Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights, the first work the group reads. In the story of a “cuckolded king who slew successive virgins as revenge for his queen’s betrayal”, Scheherazade avoids the same fate by turning to storytelling, preventing the king’s violence with each tale she enchants him with. In doing so, she “breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement”. Little wonder that Nafisi thought such a story might have resonances with their condition as readerly women trapped in a violent tyranny. Scheherazade’s great magic, which her story and all stories grant readers, is this:

“She fashions her universe not through physical force, as does the king, but through imagination and reflection.”

We can wax a little too poetic about such things, so it’s important to note the very real ways that storytelling actually does allow us to shape our world. Humans have been called a “storytelling species” and for good reason: we seem to thrive in the world only when we’ve woven together its brute facts with causality (plot) and humanising its elements (character). This is how life and death become stories.

Even the most unsentimental materialist finds himself dissatisfied with the “neurochemical cocktail” description of his bond with his child; we prefer (perhaps need) the narrative of memory that turns parental love into a causal part of the story we and our children are living through. Hard-headed rationalism often convinces us that marriage is a mere legal document predicated on taxes, until we discover its deeper meaning and profound joy, and we take our place in the human story that, yes, evolves over time but also is rooted in the traditions of our oldest stories.

Asked why we avoid death, few would simply point to our in-built aversion to dying, that animalistic urge to stay alive; we instead tell a story about how our loved ones would mourn our death, and about losing the hypothetical future joy we imagine for ourselves. We use storytelling terms like “unfair” and “tragedy” — a sure sign that a person is thinking literarily rather than literally about the nature of the cosmos.

Nafisi lays out the relationship between storytelling and reality quite succinctly:

“We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings.”

Books make sense of who we are and the world in which we live. They make sense of the facts that surround us by transforming reality into something even more real. It’s easy to be glib about this. We often speak of books having a certain magic, but something rings hollow. Too easy, almost. A superficial, though reassuring, kind of charm substitutes the true, deep power of literature that Nafisi writes of. This is not the magic carpet of escapism, but the despot-deposing, society-shifting, individual-empowering transformations that begin with the written word.

Others find their own ways of navigating the crushing torments of a brutal world, but for Nafisi and her young women, as for me and perhaps for you, it’s not a trivial thing nor a flippant expression of a “quirky personality” to say that books help us survive. They are silent incantations that transform us into who we need to be when it matters, and that allow us to escape the confines imposed on our minds like Houdinis of the imagination. That is their magic, and it’s much more than just a trick.

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Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific topic.

Today, Milan Kundera: a Czech-French novelist whose profound sense of humour took seriously the absurdities and contradictions of life. His last book before his death in 2023 was The Festival of Insignificance, a short and deeply ironic novella that confuses and inspires me in equal measure. Here, we’ll look at an essay from The Art of the Novel.

New Atheism was very good — or at least always entertaining — on the absurdities of religious certitude, but it struggled with the kind of faith that struggled with itself. It’s not as easy, nor as entertaining, to mock the sincerity of people who confess, “I believe, but I don’t know for sure.”

While the closed-minded of both sides argue with each other, those in the middle get on with the task of finding ways to work together, of holding on to the light of faith while mindful not to be blinded by it. This is what Cardinal Lawrence (in Edward Berger’s Conclave2) is thinking of when he delivers this speech to his fellow faithful:

“St Paul said, ‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.’ To work together, to grow together, we must be tolerant — no one person or faction seeking to dominate another. And speaking to the Ephesians, who were of course a mixture of Jews and gentiles, Paul reminds us that God’s gift to the church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views, which gives our church its strength.”

This is fairly standard-issue kumbaya ecumenism, the kind that helps get a film eight Oscar nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. (The film is also entertaining and elegantly shot, if somewhat silly and deflated by a fatuous ending.) But our cardinal swerves away from the feel-goods to caution his peers against a mindset that might undo all of this tolerance:

“Over the course of many years in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. ‘Dio mio, Dio mio, perché mi hai abbandonato?’ he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross.”

Certainty, argues the cardinal, is antithetical to those qualities of the Catholic Church (and, I’d argue, many other faiths) that are often overshadowed by unquestioning and narrow dogmatism. Cardinal Lawrence then says:

“Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and, therefore, no need for faith.”

This sense of faith as existing at the intersection between mystery and knowing, of containing contradiction even while being blown open by it, is something very like what Milan Kundera says separates literature from totalitarianism. In The Art of the Novel,3 Kundera celebrates the ontological distinction between the two, writing that “Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel”.

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The Art of the Novel closes with Kundera’s acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for Literature in 1985. In it, he suggests that the novel is a route out of the biases of an author and, therefore, a method of defying ideology:

“When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction. He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.”

Kundera then asks what that wisdom of the novel might be, and poses a cryptic answer in the paraphrasing of a Jewish proverb: “Man thinks, God laughs.” Why, you might wonder, does God laugh when humans think? Kundera answers:

“Because man thinks and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more one man’s thought diverges from another’s. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is.”

The truth of this, Kundera argues, is revealed in the first modern novel, Don Quixote, whose protagonist thinks and the truth of reality slips away from him — he comes to believe ridiculous things about himself, his situation, and the world he moves through. Watching this absurdist comedy unfold, God can only laugh. The comedy is in the error; the tragedy, however, is in Quixote’s certainty, in his absolute and misguided conviction that what he erroneously believes about reality is in fact reality.

A novelist who thinks this way can always be discovered in the narrowness of their novel’s worldview and its lack of novelistic morality, which Kundera says is specifically to discover some “hitherto unknown segment of existence”. Just as an explorer fails if he never discovers unmapped terrain, a novel fails if it simply re-treads what the novelist assumes to be true. In describing how a novel escapes the restrictions of its author, Kundera brings up his favourite eighteenth century novel:

“Of all that period’s novels, it is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy I love best. A curious novel. Sterne starts it by describing the night when Tristram was conceived, but he has barely begun to talk about that when another idea suddenly attracts him, and by free association that idea spurs him to some other thought, then a further anecdote, with one digression leading to another — and Tristram, the book’s hero, is forgotten for a good hundred pages.”

In describing Tristram Shandy as “a curious novel”, Kundera is playing with the duality of the adjective — the novel is both curious in being unusual, and curious in wandering from one idea to another. The book’s hero is lost for some time amid the exploration of ideas, and when the novel eventually comes back to Tristram, our understanding of the character has changed. This capacity for a novel to get away from its creator, to resist the dictates of the author’s ideology, is the laughter of God.

This is another way of thinking about the failed novel or novelist: that it or he has failed to hear God’s laughter. They are what François Rabelais called an agélast: “a man who does not laugh, who has no sense of humour.” Kundera explains why there can be no understanding between the true novelist and the agélast:

“Never having heard God’s laughter, the agélasts are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are.4 But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everybody has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.”

It’s in the affirmation of the individual that the novel stands against totalitarianism, which attempts to negate the individual by subordinating her to the supremacy of the group, the ideology, or the tyrant (who can, in such systems, be the only individual permitted). And in its celebration of pluralism and transcending absolutes, the novel stands against the tyrannies of certainty. Here, Kundera opens the novels of Gustave Flaubert to parse wisdom from their pages:

“Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert’s novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. [...] But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert’s vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!

With a wicked passion, Flaubert used to collect the stereotyped formulations that people around him enunciated in order to seem intelligent and up-to-date. He put them into a celebrated Dictionnaire des idées reçues. We can use this title to declare: Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas.”

Novelist Martin Amis called the clichéd phrases that perpetuate stupidity “herd words”. It’s this self-subscribed program of repeating other people’s bad ideas, through received language, that fertilises the ground out of which certainty grows. Certainty rarely survives sincere, intelligent scrutiny; the “nonthought of received ideas” is what certainty requires to perpetuate itself.

It’s fitting that we’ve arrived at the concept of the “dead words” that convey zombie ideas (dead but kept animated as if alive), given that we left Conclave with Cardinal Lawrence claiming that it’s a relationship with doubt that makes his faith “a living thing”. Faith and fiction of the most vital kinds share something equally essential: both are bulwarks against certainty, which is antithetical to life.

Kundera closes by noting that the agélasts and the nonthought of received ideas are one and the same — they are the “enemy of art born as the echo of God’s laughter”. This art and the faith that Cardinal Lawrence champions must be defended against certainty, because they create “the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood”.

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Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific topic.

Today, C. S. Lewis: Christian apologist, author of the Narnia series and sci-fi novels, master of the pitch-perfect analogy, through which he was able to render an idea immediately intelligible to his reader. He was surely one of the greats.

Last year, the New York Times ran a piece questioning the importance of Great Books.1 It was written by A. O. Scott, whom I’ve quoted approvingly in the past on the topic of criticism2 — here, he seems to have given in to philistine populism. Perhaps the most telling, and the most damning, line in the article is this: “The great books are the ones you’re supposed to feel bad about not having read.” This comes soon after having claimed that great books are also, by definition, not the books we read for pleasure.

A parry to the dull blade of this attack has come from the digital pages of Substack, where, it seems, everyone is reading Middlemarch and having a blast. Great books might be out of favour with the traditional literati, but the classics are back in fashion here on Substack. Just look at the success of (where Henry Oliver wrote a bracingly lucid response to the Times article3), , , and (which covered the Middlemarch renaissance4).

My own reading life has inadvertently followed the same trend. My tastes have always eddied around the late twentieth century, from which I read everyone from Shirley Jackson to Penelope Lively to Philip Roth. Last year, I wanted to understand the contemporary fiction scene, so I prioritised new books. Each time I reached in and pulled something out of the latest offerings, I never knew if I was going to find a nugget of gold or a handful of coal, though by the end of the year my hands were more dusty with soot than filled with treasure.

So, this year, I’m returning to the classics from earlier than my late-twentieth-century wheelhouse, with a mix of re-reads and first-timers. I’ve read The Great Gatsby — for only the second time — and its title is not false advertising; Pride and Prejudice, a long-time favourite, was my way of easing into the Austen I’m yet to read; later this year, I’ll be taking up Jane Eyre and Silas Marner for the first time. Each book reveals its own set of wisdom, but the collective takeaway came quickly: these books remain with us because they are, in fact, great. Sometimes, the truth is quite simple.

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C. S. Lewis ranks among the greats. A prolific writer, Lewis left us many books we could examine, but today I want to bring you his words from a short essay called “On the Reading of Old Books”.5 In it, he argues that books from “yesterday” are often more deserving of our attention than new books. Though he never states it explicitly, it’s clear that, for him, “old books” might as well be synonymous with “great books” — but that doesn’t rule out more recent books from the status of greatness. The devil’s in the details, and the divine is in nuance.

“There is a strange idea abroad,” Lewis begins, “that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.” This strange idea looks suspiciously like the notion that great books, in their esoteric difficulty and ontological opposition to pleasure, are the preserve only of those studying literature, or engaging in high-minded criticism. Normal people should stick to those page-turners concerned with escapism rather than exploration and explanation.

Lewis is sympathetic with those who buy this line because of humility. Having noted that a student of a discipline will avoid reading Plato’s Symposium for himself, preferring instead to “read some dreary modern book ten times as long” that synopsises Plato’s thought, Lewis explains it this way:

“The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew that the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.”

I’ve had many conversations with people in my own life who feel too timid to pick up a classic novel. There’s a sense that reading Homer, or Shakespeare, or even Dickens is an intellectual workout that only a Herculean reader will be up to; these people tell me they’re still in the featherweight category and believe they must “work their way up” to the great works of literature.

To be sure, it’s not that the move from a modern YA novel to Tolstoy is something the average reader won’t blink at, and there’s often a transition required to adapt your readerly mind to the syntax, punctuation, and thematic ambiguity of great novels. But that transition is often much easier, much less prolonged, than people think it will be. In my own experience, it’s less of a gradual climb to the top of a mountain, and more of a flip of a switch: you struggle through a few pages or a chapter, and then, like one of those magic eye pictures, you suddenly see it.

Many readers are also anxious that they won’t “get” everything there is to get out of great literature. A reader might have heard others parsing out the intricacies of political commentary buried deep in the subtext of a middle chapter in a 900-page novel, or read about the social criticism written in that invisible ink apparently found “between the lines” of a text, and she worries she won’t have the skills required to discover all of that for herself. And there’s a good chance that she won’t — and that’s fine. Lewis points out that you might not understand all of what the writer was saying, but you’ll understand enough of it because they were a great writer.

It can’t be avoided that Lewis is taking aim at the practice of reading summaries of great books rather than just reading the books. I might offer a brief defence of what I’m doing here with this series (and what many of the best writers on Substack are doing when they write about great novels). The criticism Lewis makes is against the commentary acting as a substitute for a classic novel. He writes:

“It has always therefore been one of my endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

Reverence for the firsthand over the secondhand in wisdom is precisely why I include excerpts of the original here in my essay. More importantly, I see my role as that of verbose signpost, celebrating great writing in the act of directing readers towards it. I never want anything I write about a book to stand in place of the book itself. Everything I write here can be distilled to: Close this browser and open the book! Read it for yourself — it’s worth it!

When it comes to modern books, Lewis was no reactionary. “Naturally, since I myself am a writer,” he admits, “I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books.” He even gives advice on a considered diet of reading:

“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old to every three new ones.”

So, not no modern books, but a balance between the old and new. Modern books might not have yet had time for the selection of generations to winnow out the great from the thankfully-vanished bad, but that doesn’t mean there’s no greatness to be found among them. And a mere half-century is enough to begin separating the eternal from the temporary, to sift glittering wisdom from the silt of the banal. Much ephemera won’t yet be strained out, and, as the bard tells us, not all that glitters is gold — but some of it will be.

That said, Lewis does argue for the particular qualities of older books, as opposed to great books in general, and it’s worth paying that some attention. First, he tells us that only reading new books is a good way to shut yourself out of the fullness of the conversation:

“If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why — the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book.”

This reminded me of reading ’s latest novel and recognising its opening line: “It was a strange, sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker, but Brooke Orr had decided not to let that interfere with the business of life in New York.” Anyone who hasn’t read The Bell Jar won’t have their reading of the novel coloured by this association as mine was — indeed, it gave the book’s name, Entitlement, a whole new spin. You’ll still get much out of Alam’s book if you haven’t read Plath’s classic, but you won’t get as much as you could. This is true of every great book, which is inevitably in conversation with previous books.

The second reason to value old books is that, as Lewis points out, “Every age has its own outlook”:

“It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

Every society takes certain things for granted and shares modern values and viewpoints. It’s incredibly difficult for anyone living through the modern moment to clearly see these assumptions — many of which will turn out to be false — and will therefore perpetuate them:

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century — the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ — lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.”

Our best defence against the underscoring of bad ideas is the clarifying light thrown on our disorder by the books of the past. “Not, of course,” Lewis is quick to point out, “that there is any magic about the past.”

“People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”

Indeed, witnessing the errors of the past — seeing clearly what they couldn’t back then, and seeing the extent to which even the smartest minds fell for those errors — often prises open a crack in our own temporality, our subjectivity, to hint at what we might be getting wrong ourselves. It’s humbling to realise that minds greater than your own made mistakes that you can now see through, causing you to realise in turn that future minds will see mistakes you are blind to today. “To be sure,” Lewis writes, “the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

We do, however, have greater access now than at any time in human history to the best ideas, the most beautiful prose, and the most edifying and entertaining stories of the past. We should make use of them, because they are our best bulwark against the particular idiocy of our time. As Lewis puts it:

“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”

In response to the question of why we read, C. S. Lewis once wrote, “We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves.”1 Lewis — an exemplar of what we mean by a “well-read person”, if the term means anything — knew how books could broaden us in just that way.

We push back the boundaries of our minds, expand our moral territory, widen our cultural gaze in order to be more than we presently are. We try to be more widely read, widely travelled, more open-minded and open-hearted. We often seek this by concentrating on breadth. We open up our personal canons to make sure we read from other cultures and voices; we challenge the repertoire of our own tastes. This is, of course, a good thing. However —

We too often overlook depth in our frantic search for breadth. We fail to see how going deeper is often what we need to go wider. We keep a tally of how many books we read each year, as if hitting a magic number will at last grant us the accolade of “well read”. But this does damage twice over.

First, it perpetuates the myth that our learning can end, that there will be a final test we can pass or fail. The wonderful reality is that becoming our best selves is a lifelong process.

Second, it confers a certain momentum on our seeking, so we move ever faster in the hope of reaching the mythical finish line sooner — or become that much wiser that much quicker. Oftentimes, the best route is the slow one. The journey (to paraphrase some popular wisdom that actually turns out to be correct) is not beside the point, it is the point. All that scenery on the scenic route is what furnishes the life of the mind.

It’s worth occasionally slowing down and taking a second look, a closer look, at things of value. Because just as Keats knew that a thing of beauty is a joy forever, the genius of certain works are never truly “used up”. Paul Valéry once wrote that a poem is never finished, only abandoned; likewise, the study of a novel, the soul-searching within a piece of art, is never finished. We simply move on from it. I’m here to argue that you should re-read something beautiful, rediscover something wise.

Which is why I’m bringing a new series to Art of Conversation: Words of Wisdom.

In each edition, we’ll zoom in on a passage of writing — a short essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific topic. It will be one piece of text and one big idea, and we’ll take a close look at the latter through the former. I’m planning on bringing you selections mostly from non-fiction, at least to begin with. I want to grapple directly with ideas by showing how others have wrestled with them. Eventually, I expect to draw on poetry and fiction as well.

It’s fitting that I opened this introduction with a quote from C. S. Lewis, as he’s the first writer we’ll turn to in the new series. You’ll be able to read it on Saturday.

Happy reading,
Matthew