Literature: How to Read and Understand the World

By Jackson Holzberg Buckley M.S.

Written for lovers of literature interested in self-actualization, Literature: How to Read and Understand the World teaches readers how to derive principles of wisdom from literature and apply them to their lives. The book achieves this through a series of five essential steps, including identifying with literary characters, aggregating principles of wisdom from their experience, and applying those principles to readers’ lives. Along the way, the author reveals his own transformation through this process. Literature: How to Read and Understand the World will help you to enrich your life and world!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982242664

Jackson Holzberg Buckley M.S.

Jackson Holzberg Buckley is a spiritual teacher premising his work on the notion that there is one soul manifesting as myriad selves. He has taught ESL, English Literature, and tutored writing. He is currently a graduate student and TA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Copyright © 2020 Jackson Holzberg Buckley, M.S.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4265-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4267-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4266-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902328

Balboa Press rev. date: 02/21/2020

Contents

Introduction

Engaged Reading

Character Identifications

The High Horse

Psychic Mapping

Executive Summary

Community Mapping

Coda: On Respect and Freedom in Modern Education

Appendix A: Popular Questions and Their Answers

Appendix B: Instructions for How to Run this Process in a Book Club

Appendix C: Examples of Engaged Work in Reading Literature

Introduction

When you read a work of fiction, there is probably a part of you that feels excited at all the new information you are taking in. This is the part of you that plans to later relay this information to impress somebody, say at a dinner party or in a classroom. You’ll refer to the information you read in the work of fiction and the person will be blown away by all that you know, and for a moment you’ll get to feel like a master. While you read, this part of you governs your hand so that you take notes, underline passages, or circle key words. Your emphasis is on remembering things such that you can later use them.

At the same time, there is probably another part of you that is responsible for your reading the work of fiction in the first place. This is the part that, when an important character in a work of literature dies, quivers in you, draws back and feels pain. As this part of yourself, you extend the bounds of your selfhood outward to encompass the characters and situations about whom and which you read, re-inscribing the bounds of yourself such that you become larger than what you once were. This process is subtle, but it is happening at the level of your gut and heart all the time as you read. When you speak to somebody in class or at a dinner party, it is really this second part that motivates what you say; there is some sort of gut-level feeling response to the text that you want to relay to the person, and that you want them to feel too.

When we were children, it was only this second part that engaged with story, and we had no self-consciousness about it. You can see this if you reflect back to how you played on a childhood playground: if you donned the mask of Spiderman, you were Spiderman for the period of that game; there was no inner voice in your head that admonished you the game wasn’t quite real, that you didn’t really have superpowers, or perhaps weren’t the right gender to be playing this role. Similarly, if you acted as the husband or wife in a game of House, you perceived that you were that character; there wasn’t the inner doubt that you didn’t really have hair on your arms, or breasts, or hadn’t really given birth or didn’t really have to worry about money. These considerations were subsequent to the part of you which allowed you to fully participate in those roles, and the result was that you ran and screamed and laughed with all the liberation of childhood.

We now tend to think of these times as superficial, but the fact is that when you dared to fully enter and inhabit these characters, you gained wisdom from the crossing. As Spiderman, perhaps you learned the famous adage that with great power, comes great responsibility; or perhaps you learned the even deeper lesson that despite your having superpowers, you couldn’t transcend the character’s shortcomings of being poor and unpopular. As the mother or father in the game of House, perhaps you learned that as enticing as it was to be an adult, there was also a quality of suppressing your desire that was overwhelmingly sad; or more poignant still, perhaps you learned that the reasons your own parents sometimes did things that made you angry or sad, were reasons you could access if only you put yourself in their shoes. In any of these games, what you learned were things you could immediately turn around and set into practice in your own life—whether conscious or not.

This process of gaining wisdom through the act of extending our boundaries of selfhood, then applying this wisdom to the context of our lives is the subject of this book, but I want to share a bit of my own story in order to give that subject its proper weight and drive. Throughout this book, you will get to know a method of engaging with literature which will feel at once familiar, and yet new to you, but you will also get to know me.

The moment when my practice of identifying with characters was cut short, is a moment I’ll never forget: I was twelve years old and a friend and I were playing with sticks in my New Mexico backyard. In our minds, these weren’t just sticks: they were by turn swords, staffs, and bows in a game in which we imagined ourselves as wizards and warriors that fought off magical demons to defend a kingdom. Inspired by a card game we’d played, our backyard game was dubbed Oracles. Unbeknownst to us, while we played a different friend—a friend from the school to which I had just transferred—watched us from his balcony, one from which he could see the entirety of the valley in which we were situated. I now imagine him studying us deeply, wearing spectacles, and taking notes from up there, although of course that wasn’t the case.

The next day at school the friend who’d watched me swinging the sticks approached me about what he’d seen: That was so weird, he said. He mimicked what my other friend and I had looked like, at this point deprived of the context of the mystical demons against which we had been fighting. You must have been up against some pretty big ones, he laughed.

Everyone reading this story probably recognizes this moment in their own lives: it is the moment in which we become aware of how we look while playing, and as such the moment in which self-consciousness is born. Instead of entering the character fully and with abandon, as we formerly had, we now do so with full awareness that in the act, we are being watched; for this reason, we either cease to do it altogether, or we do it only halfway and hedgingly, an act so shallow that we might as well not do it at all.

There is a different story being constructed here, one I call the Story of Perfection: in this story, what becomes overwhelmingly clear to us is that our behaviors are watched, measured, and analyzed, and what we become concerned with is perfecting these behaviors such that nothing about them can be criticized. Like me when my friend confronted me about what he’d seen on the balcony, we realize that if we are seen as doing something outside the norm, it will make our lives more difficult once we stop doing it; as such, we cease to experiment altogether, instead trying to perfect an image of ourselves with which we are already familiar. Like the friend who observed me and my other friend playing, we step off the field into which we had thrown ourselves, instead resting on the Balcony from which no one else can see us, safely watching. To summarize this in a point, we cease to be participants and instead become observers in our lives.

For me, academia stepped in at this moment and supplied a means by which I could excel at self-consciousness itself. Instead of acting out the characters about whom I read in my English courses, I wrote about them analytically, treating them as weirdos who stretched themselves before me as I and my friend had done from the perspective of the friend on the balcony. From where I sat while reading books, I could see characters’ neuroses, failings, and symbolic meanings with utter clarity, and I compiled and wrote about them in papers that achieved excellent grades. All the while, I learned nothing about myself, and didn’t risk anything because I wasn’t writing about myself.¹

I’d like to say I knew at the time that something was wrong, but the truth is that it felt so good to excel at this game of criticism that I played it for the next decade of my life. Becoming enamored of literature in particular, I applied to and was accepted by a private college, majoring in English and minoring in Philosophy, and graduated and pursued a career in teaching. I first returned to and cotaught at my high school, then spent a year teaching English in South America. After this, I returned to the U.S. and spent a year tutoring college writing. I got so good at the Story of Perfection that I leapt through the hoops of becoming an excellent student, then a compelling teacher, mostly without reflection. All the while, the naïve, childish part of me that originally and nakedly identified with characters lay underneath, wondering and burning.

It wasn’t until another climactic event that I really began to question things: this was a shooting that took place on Halloween weekend, 2015, while I was tutoring college writing. I’d already begun to notice since returning to the U.S. that something seemed a little off about the way we taught English and writing in this country, and moreover, about the language that we used to discuss these disciplines. For instance, I noticed in my tutoring sessions how frequently I used the words defend, argument, and justify, all words recalling military positioning and framing students as combatants. What was I really teaching students to do? Why did we think, as a popular saying in the field went, that everything was an argument?

Into this mix came the shooting. Luckily, I had traveled to stay with a friend in a different city when the event took place, so wasn’t actually there and didn’t see the violence itself—nor was available as a target. What happened was this: a man walked out of the apartment across the street from the house in which I was renting a room and shot the first person he saw, a biker who happened to be riding by. Then, the shooter walked up the street and shot two more people, women who had recently joined the halfway house on the corner. After this, the shooter continued down the street toward a nearby high school, but fortunately was stopped by the police. He himself was shot and killed, and that ended the spree.

Although I was away for the weekend when the violence took place, the resonances were many. For one, the man who became the shooter had once lived in my house; he was the former boyfriend of the woman from whom I was renting, who lived there still and opened her blinds to see the violence. More poignant than this, when he had lived in my house the room he had rented was mine—the event seemed to be asking me to consider the ways in which I and a man who walked out into the street and shot three strangers weren’t all that different, since after all I was living on the same street as he, with the same woman with whom he had once lived, and sleeping in the same bed in which he had once slept.

I wasn’t able to answer these questions at the time, but the event brought home and deepened my sense of the wrongness of what I was doing in academia. It was clear to me that the system in which I worked, and in which I had been excelling since the birth of my self-consciousness, required a daily damning of our inborn capacities for compassion, imagination, and play. When I asked students what their argument was, or how they would defend what they had just said or written, there was no question to me that this inculcated the same habits which had driven the shooter to violence: these were habits of isolation, paranoia, and preemptive offense. Was I better than the shooter? Was I worse, because my habits of violence and concern with my image were only more masked? What was inarguable was that my Story of Perfection was beginning to break down.

I’d like to say that I was aware of this