A Final Consideration

913 words ^[1]

This is the fourth and—I hope and believe—final installment of a series which sprang from what I originally intended as a single article. Previous pieces were “A Puzzling Situation ^[2]”, “A Short Note on Satire ^[3]”, and “Welcome to My Workshop ^[4].” The trouble started when the first piece met with more incomprehension than I had foreseen. The second piece was meant to provide a few clues; the third to provide a nearly comprehensive key; and this last piece to reflect on the entire experience.

“Welcome to My Workshop” was a nearly comprehensive key to the first piece, “A Puzzling Situation,” but not quite. As I remarked in “A Short Note on Satire,” the understanding of a satire may hinge not so much upon what is said as upon what gets left out, meaning in this case the word “marriage.”

Yet a careful examination of “A Puzzling Situation” will reveal that it does include a reference to marriage—one which probably escaped the notice of most readers. The only “marriage” mentioned in my satire is between the Gender Studies Professor Dr. Naomi Rosenberg and “a Guatemalan labor activist and woman of color.” In my satire, the abnormal has entirely replaced the normal.

Like a skillful magician who directs the audience’s attention where he chooses while carrying out the trick elsewhere, I put the solution to the riddle right there in the piece itself. It was hiding in plain sight.

If “A Short Note on Satire” was an introduction to the genre, this little point is the beginning of your intermediate course of study. I doubt I shall ever find time to teach an advanced course, but the careful reading of Swift, along with a few good secondary sources, will soon take the reader there. Here is a volume ^[5] that can get you started.

It is a cliché that we live in a busy age that places many demands on people’s time. Yet it is a cliché because it is true. Less affluent times seem to have enjoyed greater leisure, and this means they did many things differently than we do. One thing they did differently was reading. Today most people read a lot and read it quickly, more frequently on the internet than in the pages of books. The internet itself had adapted to the resulting rush, helpfully placing notices next to articles to inform the busy consumer whether a piece is a “five-minute read” or a “ten-minute read.”

Sometimes one even comes across two-minute reads with titles like “Five Things You Must Know About Andrew Tate.” My reaction is usually to reflect that I can shave off an extra two minutes by remaining in blessed ignorance concerning Mr. Tate. Practically the only articles I ever find myself reading on the internet are ones marked “read when you have time to spare,” and I have to skip most of those as well, of course.

In other words, I am old-school. I still read old books, and do so as it used to be done: slowly, and often repeatedly. I find it more worthwhile to understand a few really valuable books deeply than to keep up with the latest on subjects of current interest. I am out of my time, I fear: a relic of a bygone age.

But I am not yet quite alone. One class of people who still read in the old way are the seriously religious. Many Christians study the Bible carefully and repeatedly. All who do so inevitably learn how much they missed the first time around, how much more there is to these old writings than meets the eye.

Yet the Bible is not the only literature of which this is true. Swift, for example, is an author who can be enjoyed by children. That is why children’s adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels ^[6] still appear. Young people enjoy Gulliver’s goofy adventures in lands filled with giants and midgets.

The adult reader, however, is meant to perceive that the giants and midgets are not merely imaginary, but are satirical portraits—take-offs, send-ups—of real human types. Lilliput represents England, while its hereditary enemy Blefuscu represents France. The inhabitants of Laputa—each with one eye turned inward while the other looks constantly up at the sky, so that they never see what is right in front of them—is a satire on the Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophers of Swift’s own day. And so on.

Swift’s writings were not meant to be read quickly. By contemporary standards, “A Modest Proposal” (discussed in my piece “A Short Note on Satire”) qualifies as about a ten-minute read. But the reader may have to read it twice or three times before he starts catching on to most of what Swift is doing in this short piece. The same point applies in spades to a book-length satire such as Gulliver’s Travels.

There is a danger that the significance of authors such as Swift may be lost to future generations due to decay in the art of careful and leisurely reading. And Swift is not the only, nor the most important, author to whom this reflection applies. Another favorite of mine, as well as of Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson, is Plato. The more you read him, the more unexpected treasures you discover. Acquiring the ability to read a satirical author such as Swift is good preparation for tackling Plato’s dialogues. And the careful study of Plato’s dialogues was once considered the most proper beginning of a serious education.