Wasting Time with Books

On the one hand, Charles Spurgeon said this about reading:

Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. You need to read.

On the other hand, Spurgeon had a thing against reading fiction--idle hands, devil’s workshop sort of thing:

How many young people there are whose hearts are just a road along which thoughts of levity and desires for amusement are continually going! How many precious hours are wasted over the novels of the day! I think that one of the worst enemies of the Gospel of Christ, at the present time, is to be found in the fiction of the day. People get these worthless books and sit, and sit—forgetful of the duties of this world and of all that relates to the world to come—just losing themselves in the story of the hero or heroine. I have seen them shedding tears over things that never happened, as if there were not enough real sorrows in the world for us to grieve over! So these feet of fictitious personages, these feet of foolish frivolities, these feet of mere nonsense, or worse, keep traversing the hearts of men and making them hard so that the Gospel cannot enter.

There is an acceptable way of reading this. Spurgeon the Baptist preacher was not entirely wrong in that much of the popular fiction of his Victorian day was trash and probably did fill the minds of readers with nonsense, just like most fiction today. A cinematic American example based that era: remember the writer in the excellent Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven? He wrote penny-dreadful novels of gunslingers and derring-do, silly novels meant to stoke simplistic daydreams of fallen masculine power. Clergy in 19th century America and  England were opposed to such salacious trash of the day, just as we today are rightly worried about our kids watching trash like the Saw movies or the Fast and Furious franchise nonsense. We cannot fault Spurgeon (and other clergy) for advising his flock to keep from wasting time or money on infantile fantasies that lie about the way life really is.

Jesse James, Superhero

But there is something more here, something not quite right in Spurgeon’s distaste for fiction. Spurgeon and his American counterparts sometimes forbade reading any fiction of any kind, including such classics as Don Quixote. The great American novelist Stephen Crane, for instance (1871--1900), had a Methodist clergyman father who dissed reading novels as an un-Christian waste of time. No wonder a talented child would forsake his faith the way Crane did if it was for him the only way to live out his vocation. By identifying one form of creative art in all its dimensions, whether trash or excellent, with ungodliness, Crane’s father constructed a terrible gap between talent and calling, leaving his son no alternative but to walk away from a constrictive evangelicalism. The Christian tradition at its best has found that the vocation of fiction writer finds a rightful place among all the ways of tending the Garden, which is the primary covenant God made with earth-man (Adam, related to adamah, Hebrew for earth).

I am not sure how widespread this attitude is today, but it still survives, more often now it seems in a utilitarian form. Reading fiction takes up too much time, this attitude says. One should be reading the Bible, or cleaning out the garage, or watching sports, or doing something.  Reading fiction (for some, reading anything) is a monumental bore and/or waste of time. There is no justification for it. Even Christians fall into this-- reading the sports page is infinitely preferable to reading a short story because you gain useful information from the first, since sports is much more important, whereas the second . . . wastes time. And it’s harder to read, anyway. Any reading, including fiction if one must have it, ought to be edifying, upbuilding, educational, improving, and so on. Or at least the reading ought to be simple, entertaining-- vacation, summer-by-the-pool, easily digestible and disposable books. One complaint against serious literature--it’s too hard. Or it’s too downbeat. Or it’s too long.  How many Christians today are aliterate?

But the shape of the lives of human beings is narrative. All the world’s a stage, Jacques says in As You Like It, and we all come on the stage, say our lines, and then exit. Individually we yearn for meaningful lives, we anxiously read our own lives to see if there is a pattern, a plot,  that we are not randomly living random accidental lives that simply stop randomly. Even the most pugnacious atheist wants to believe that his life is not literally a chaotic play of energy in the meaningless space of the cosmos (“I get a job, I do well, I am recognized, my friends like my insights, I go on to accomplish things for the Cause, and then I die-- having completed a worthwhile life that means something, doggone it”).

On a larger stage, the narrative of Scripture is the ultimate template of all plot--beginning, complications, resolution, end. The Bible tells us by its very nature that there is a narrative quality to existence. There is the cosmic sized story of creation, redemption, fall, and restoration, and within that meta-plot, there are subplots. The Bible is full of narrative (not fiction, understand). Compare that to the Koran, which is mostly compiled of legalistic statements and highly truncated and edited stories from the Hebrew scriptures, scattered higglety-pigglety throughout the book.

Give yourself unto reading, indeed. Read some good theology, like Spurgeon says, but also read some good fiction like Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” It isn’t a sin. Besides, reading good novels is good for your brain. The science is in.