There was a lot of ground covered in my latest reading of Ari Goldman's The Search for God at Harvard:
Ari's search for a library at Harvard where he felt comfortable
studying; Ari's happiness that being a student gave him a chance to read
more books than he could when he was a reporter, caught up in the
hustle and bustle of his responsibilities; how writing a paper for a
class was different from writing a news story (he got a "B" on a paper);
how he felt bad when he was violating Shabbat, not because he feared
divine retribution, but because keeping the Sabbath allowed him to be
himself; how he was not allowed to help a tired woman carry her
groceries on the Sabbath, and he felt bad on account of that; how a
Catholic church in the 1980's rejected a request by a man dying of AIDS
and his wife to renew their vows at the church, and the
arch-conservative John J. O'Connor stepped in, reversed that decision, and attended the wedding; Goldman's interview with the controversial John Shelby Spong;
and how attending a synagogue provided male Orthodox Jews with a
conversation-starter for women attending the synagogue, namely, "Shabbat
Shalom, what did you think of the sermon?"
What I'll comment on
in this post will be where I mostly studied when I was at Harvard, and
also the question of whether or not being a student gave me more time to
read for pleasure.
I started out studying at the Divinity School
library. The thing is, before it got refurbished, it was not
particularly the most comfortable place to study, for it largely had
desks with hard chairs (but there were a few couches). Goldman mentions
the distraction of the congenial people there, but I tended to avoid
the library because it reminded me of how I did not fit in with people: I
preferred a place where I did not know as many people, rather than to
be at the Div School, where I was reminded that I did not fit in. (I'm
trying to get over this avoidant personality trait.) I tried Widener,
but Widener had a lot of desks with hard chairs, and I found the study
carrels where the books were to be dark, lonely, and depressing. I
studied at Lamont for a while. The big room on the first floor had
comfortable chairs, but there were a lot of people there, so it was
distracting. Like Ari, I sometimes studied at the Farnsworth library at
Lamont, and it was a nice place of solitude, but it was rather dark,
and the leather chairs were not always the most comfortable for me. I
often went to the law school library, but the place that had the
comfortable chairs had a lot of people circulating around.
And
then I found Hilles, which Ari does not mention. I learned of Hilles
when I was looking for a video, and the online catalog said that it was
at Hilles. I used to enjoy watching movies at DePauw University, and I
wondered if Hilles, too, had a place where I could watch movies. And it
did: it had a video collection, and also a room with televisions.
Moreover, even though it was a rather big library and had lots of books
on a variety of subjects (and I could often find what I needed there for
papers), not many people were there. And there was a nice comfortable
sofa, where I could lay down and do my reading. Plus, during my second
and third years as a student at Harvard Divinity School, Hilles was the
closest library to where I lived. I enjoyed taking walks at Hilles when
hardly anybody was there, as I prayed and looked at books. But I can't
say that I was entirely isolated socially, for there were a few Div
School students who also hanged out there, either to study, or because
they worked there for their work-study, or both. So I got to have some
small-talk with other students, but I found Hilles to be calmer on my
nerves than the other libraries at Harvard.
And I wonder if the
layout of Hilles had something to do with it being calmer on my nerves.
I said that it was a big library, and it was, somewhat. But the
ceiling was rather low on each floor. And Hilles struck me and others
as a rather Spartan place, which was why others I knew thought that it
was a depressing place to study (someone told me that it needed new
carpeting), whereas I liked it. At other libraries, the ceiling was
usually really high, which intimidated me, and there was also a lot of
color at them (i.e., a lot of blue at the law school). One
characteristic that I've heard that people with Asperger's have is that
they like monochromatic settings. I'm not sure if that is universally
true, but that may be another reason why I enjoyed studying at Hilles:
it was simple and Spartan.
Now for my question about reading: Did I
have more opportunities to read for pleasure as a student? Goldman on
page 184 says: "My year at Harvard was a little like fulfilling a legion
of New York intellectual fantasies. It was like reading The New York Review of Books and knowing that you would have time to read each new book reviewed."
I
found my time at DePauw University and at Harvard to be a lot like
that, and the reason was that, when researching for papers, I had an
opportunity to read quite a few books. At Harvard, I decided to do a
paper on Paul Tillich for a class, and so I got to read Tillich's huge
systematic theology, which my Mom gave me. I was thinking about writing
a paper on Karl Barth's view on revelation, and so I read the volumes
of his Church Dogmatics about the Bible as the Word of God. I was taking a class on Jonathan Edwards, and so I read Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, and Religious Affections in
researching for my paper. I considered that to be reading for
pleasure: it was the academic passion that I used to have, the desire to
dive into books that I wanted to read but ordinarily did not have the
time or the discipline to read.
At Jewish Theological Seminary, I
somewhat got away from that, and the same was true at Hebrew Union
College. Why? I still did reading to research for papers, but it was
usually articles, or the pieces of the books that I needed rather than
the entire books. Plus, I was taking so many language classes that took
up a lot of my time (though, as I think back to my Harvard days, I
wonder how I found the time to plow through all of those books that I
read, while taking a full course-load of classes and also working at my
work-study job). But I did get that old feeling of excitement when a
professor of mine at Hebrew Union College gave me a list of books to
read for my comp on the Hebrew Bible. And, as I prepared for my comps, I
availed myself of the opportunity to read other books that I long
wanted to read, but did not have the time to read, such as Julius
Wellhausen's Prolegomena.
Nowadays, I read a lot. I'd
say that blogging has encouraged me to read, the same way that writing
papers and preparing for comps were an impetus for me to read books in
the past, for I can blog about what I read, and that can spice up my
reading, as I look for interesting things to blog about. But there are
times when I prefer simply to enjoy the book, without offering my
two-cents worth on it.