Essays: Reflections and Ruminations

By Robert DiYanni, New York University

Preface

 

The essays gathered here reflect my central pre-occupations—reading and writing, teaching and learning, the arts and humanities, especially music. They were written over a period of three decades, some of them previously published in different form, most of them published here for the first time.

I wrote each of them out of an attempt to better understand how I do what I do. I wrote them to consider what value each of my preoccupations holds for me—and what value they might hold for others, including readers like you.

I have no axe to grind in any of these essays.

I have no single thread of argument to make among and through them.

Nor do I have a motive beyond sharing my experience and reflecting on that experience to consider its wider, broader implications.

I enjoyed writing my way through these essays, and I hope you take pleasure in reading them and finding some value in them for your personal and professional life.

​

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Preface

One                 Three Quick Takes

Two                 How to Gain More from Your Reading

Three               How to Read Great Books

Four                Metaphor & Meaning

Five                 Music and the Humanities

Six                   Musical Excursions: 20 Places

Seven              Music Teaching and Learning: 20 Occasions

Eight               Remembering Robert Scholes, Scholar/Teacher

Nine                The Tears of Things

Ten                  Vietnam Triptych

Eleven             An Approach to Teaching

Twelve            Why the Humanities?

Preface

The essays gathered here reflect my central pre-occupations—reading and writing, teaching and learning, the arts and humanities, especially music. They were written over a period of three decades, some of them previously published in different form, most of them published here for the first time.

I wrote each of them out of an attempt to better understand how I do what I do. I wrote them to consider what value each of my preoccupations holds for me—and what value they might hold for others, including readers like you.

I have no axe to grind in any of these essays.

I have no single thread of argument to make among and through them.

Nor do I have a motive beyond sharing my experience and reflecting on that experience to consider its wider, broader implications.

I enjoyed writing my way through these essays, and I hope you take pleasure in reading them and finding some value in them for your personal and professional life.

Building Houses, Building Books

My father built houses; I build books. He constructed many more houses than I have made books—hundreds to my forty plus. As he worked on a new house, he always had a radio playing. Later, when I wrote my first books, I had music playing in the background. I still write on occasion with SiriusXM playing on my computer.

Besides learning to enjoy and value music from my father, I like to think I also learned from him a few things about designing something and then building it. My father planned the designs for the houses he built, developing a detailed blueprint, with every room and space drawn to precise specifications. I watched him make his blueprint sketches and revise them repeatedly, as he entertained new ideas, and working within the constraints of materials and budget. I learned a few things about process, including the importance of flexibility in making changes and adjustments to both the overall design and to small details, as well as to understanding and working within limitations and constraints.

I was lucky to enjoy the kind of education my father never did, earning a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1976. My dad, on the other hand, took just his high school diploma into adulthood. Only much later did he attend college on the GI Bill, earning a community college degree the same year I was awarded my Ph.D. Our family celebrated these tandem degrees, as excited about his late-in-life associate degree as they were for my doctorate. Although my father labored manually all his life, he appreciated learning and valued it, insisting that his children study hard and do well in school. That he himself could enjoy the pleasures of a modest college experience, however belatedly, was a satisfaction to us all.

My father began a construction business when I was a child. He teamed up with his brother Henry and my uncle, Andy Kasper. They formed the K&D Construction Company and went on to build hundreds of houses, most of them Cape Cod style single-family dwellings.

Some years later, when I was a teenager, my father took me on a house-building project so I could learn what went into constructing a house, foundation to roof. I learned something about each phase of construction, beginning with the planning and revising of the blueprint, and then starting with the actual building, with digging out the cellar, including the rectangular perimeter, which once cement had been poured and cinder blocks stacked on top, would provide the home’s foundation.

After the concrete foundation dried and hardened, it was ready to be built upon, first with layers of cinder blocks, cemented together and stacked one row upon another, forming the cellar or basement, later with wood footers atop the foundation’s perimeter, to which were nailed two-by-four studs sixteen inches apart, framing out the walls. Two-by-eight headers framed the gaps for doors and windows, with variously sized woods anchoring everything in the footers that rested on the concrete foundation.

Pillars were erected upon which were set giant girders, which ran across the foundation and served to support the floors of the house that would later be built above. I remember my father building these girders, nailing two-by-twelves together and setting them atop the pillars already in place on the cellar floor. How he hoisted those giant girders himself amazes me even now in memory. I could only myself provide the most minimal assistance through all this heavy work.

During the building, my father explained everything, providing the rationale for each step of construction, offering his reasoning for the decisions he made, where he had latitude and where he didn’t, detailing the building code requirements for depths and widths of the foundation, thicknesses of materials, including the framing studs, as well as distances between studs that lined up straight to form the interior and exterior walls, onto which would be nailed, respectively, sheet rock or plywood. The sheet rock would be taped and spackled, and later painted. The exterior plywood served as the base for wood shingles nailed in overlapping rows, straight edged and level to the eye.

The care and precision taken with framing and shingling are analogous to the writer’s care in constructing a paragraph, crafting a sentence, shaping a phrase, crafting a sentence, developing a paragraph, constructing larger units of discourse—essay, chapter, book.

A roof was framed as well, its two-by fours, two-by-sixes, and two-by-eights latticed and angled upward, anchored to the framing wood below. Joists had to be constructed to support the roof rafters. Once the rooms had been blocked out, their walls raised, sheet rock nailed and painted (two to three coats), plywood or other roofing material would be nailed as a base for overlapping roof shingles that would be nailed down, after having been sealed with tar to protect against water entering the house. Everything had a function and a name. And everything conformed to strict building code requirements, to be evaluated by the local Building Inspector, a role my father himself assumed later in life in the town in which I grew up, Dover, New Jersey.

I learned a good deal about making, about building, about planning and making adjustments in the process. I also learned about persevering through difficulties, about meeting challenges, about not cutting corners, about following through patiently and with persistence, completing each phase of the work steadily and carefully. I learned about craft, the craft of building houses and the craft of building books. Houses suitable for living, books suitable for teaching and learning.

Later, in studying the composing practices of Beethoven and the Beatles, I noticed similar concerns and obsessions, with a driving impulse to get things right, revising, correcting, adjusting, over and over again, until with enough takes on the themes under development (Beethoven) or the song’s lyrics and music being modified (the Beatles), composer and performers sense that the piece is ready.

I didn’t realize the value of those lessons in construction until many years later, when I began writing my doctoral dissertation, and a few years after that as I edited and wrote my first books. I went about making those books the way my father built houses—methodically, one section at a time, piece-meal, planning the whole but working the smaller parts individually, staying focused, remaining on task, revising along the way, trying always to get the words right, to make a book that was worth reading like a house worth inhabiting.

I was composing my books as well as constructing them, the way a composer organizes a musical composition, working both within and against compositional constraints and practices, trying to provide something familiar that readers would recognize while offering something of difference as well to excite their imagination.

I built college texts for teaching writing and literature, books for first-year college English courses. These initial attempts defined what would become my life-long teaching and writing themes and practices—connecting reading, writing, and thinking; reading and teaching essays; reading and teaching imaginative literature; teaching and learning across and among humanities disciplines: literature, music, history, art. In fact, my very first two journal article publications were about the connections between writing and music, with a focus on “composing,” and then between literature and music, through connections between the music of Charles Ives and the American transcendentalist writers, especially Emerson and Thoreau.

Teaching at Queens College, CUNY, in the 1970s, I teamed up with a colleague, John Clifford, to produce our first book, Modern American Prose: A Reader for Writers, published by Random House in 1983. Constructing this book was a pleasure. Discussing ideas with John about which modern American essayists and essays to include in it and what kind of pedagogy to develop for it were among our pleasurable tasks. We worked separately, each of us writing author biographies and essay headnotes along with questions for reading and writing assignments for half of the book’s writers. And we also worked together, sharing our work, critiquing each other’s writing and assignments, dovetailing and unifying our execution to match our conception, yet retaining our individual styles and voices.

This would be the first of many jointly written and edited college texts I would produce, mostly with my friend and mentor Pat Hoy, who paved the way for my teaching at Harvard and who taught there four years himself before leaving to direct the expository writing program for two decades at NYU, a program in which I taught with Pat for two years..

While working on Modern American Prose, I met Bob Boynton, who had, with a partner, just established a new publishing company, Boynton/Cook. In looking through a couple of their first published books, I realized that my approach to teaching reading and writing were eminently compatible with Boynton/Cook’s pedagogical publishing philosophy. And so, after talking with Bob Boynton, I sent him a proposal for what became my first solo book—Connections: Reading, Writing, and Thinking, which came out in 1985.

I didn’t realize it then, but the title of this book identified what would be a persistent theme of my teaching and writing for what is now approaching half a century. As with Modern American Prose, Connections had a guiding concept. My first, co-edited book focused on the work of fifteen writers only, rather than, as was common in freshman reading texts for writing classes at the time, providing between 50 and 100 essays, each by a different writer. For our fifteen writers, John Clifford and I provided four or more selections each, to offer students a chance to get to know each writer better and to establish connections between and among those four essays.

The guiding concept of Connections, of course, was exactly that—making connections, though this time less among different pieces by a single writer, than among the skills of reading, writing, and thinking. I realized through writing and editing Connections for Bob Boynton that what I had been doing in my writing courses at Queens College was not only teaching students how to write, helping them become more competent and confident writers, but also teaching them how to become critical readers, better able to understand and interpret what they read, and, in addition, aiding and abetting their thinking, pushing them to question and reflect, to analyze and synthesize their reading—in short to think critically about their reading, with writing serving as stimulus and provocation. And I came to realize later via the suggestion of my friend Bill Costanzo that making these connections was the central theme of all my subsequent books and of my decades long work in the classroom as well. Making connections has been the work of my professional life as teacher, writer, editor, workshop leader and consultant on best pedagogical practices in reading, writing, and thinking.

In the process of building these first two books, I came to understand just how valuable had been my house building experience with my father. Seeing my books through the publication process to become finished works standing on their own was a source both of pride and of joy, feelings much like those I experienced in watching my father construct a house.

It wasn’t, however, until my third book, this one devoted to the study of literature, that I constructed an approach to teaching that I have put to use consistently in my classes and books ever since. That book, Literature: Reading, Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and The Essay, was published by Random House in 1986. Planning the first edition of Literature, creating a kind of blue print for its construction, I developed a tri-partite pedagogy inflected across experience, interpretation, and evaluation. Experience focused on a reader’s personal and subjective encounter with literary works. Evaluation emphasized the values embodied in those works—social, cultural, political, religious, moral. And for my middle term, “interpretation,” I laid out a four-part structure: (1) making observations, (2) establishing connections, (3) making inferences, and (4) drawing conclusions. I have used this structure, with variations, through six editions of Literature, the last in 2007. I have put this framework to work in my textbooks on teaching fiction, poetry, and drama; on essay reading and writing, and on critical thinking and interdisciplinary humanities. It has provided me with a solid foundation for teaching and learning—and for building books.

And now more than forty years after I built my first book, I continue to construct others—books for students, for teachers, and for general readers. With my colleague Anton Borst, I co-edited Critical Reading Across the Curriculum, a two-volume work for teachers that explores what critical reading means for different disciplines, how to become a critical reader, and how to teach students to read critically in the various academic disciplines. Anton and I also wrote a book on effective teaching: The Craft of College Teaching: A Practical Guide published in 2021 by Princeton University Press.

And five years later, in 2026, I published five books, one for each of those intervening years, one of them more than ten years in the making, another more than twenty years. These new books—on reading literature, on teaching literature; on writing; on critical thinking; and a memoir: The Teaching Life, (all published by Routledge) are my latest attempt to reach a wide general readership. I want all these prospective biblio-constructions to echo the themes of my teaching and writing career—making connections between books and life, thinking critically and creatively, engaging with texts and ideas through experience, interpretation, and evaluation. Enjoying the pleasures and reaping the benefits these activities provide.

I am still creating new variations on these intertwining themes, with books on The Humanities and on The Sciences and Mathematics—Guides to Key Concepts and Essential Questions—in development and soon to be published by Bloomsbury. A volume of essays and another of my poems are also in the pipeline.

My father built houses. I build books. Through every aspect of creating those books, planning and revising their forms, constructing them with firm foundations, elegant enabling structures, and carefully crafted details, I remember him. I try to continue his legacy of building habitations for living and for thinking. His houses offer comfortable places for physical living; my books, I hope, provide stimulating spaces for the life of the mind.

How to Gain More From Your Reading

Have you ever wondered how some people see so much in what they read—whether they’re reading novels or stories, poems or plays, essays or memoirs, or something entirely different? One of the pleasures of reading literature well is the satisfaction of being tuned in to what a literary work shows and suggests—and to how it does those things. We enjoy the ways literary works entertain us, instruct us, move us. Knowing how they accomplish these things enables us to deepen our appreciation of them.

We gain from literature experience as well as knowledge; we gain the experience of reading literary works themselves in all their unique particularity. In addition, through literary works we live other lives, undergo other ways of being in the world that, while differing from our own, speak, nonetheless, to our condition. In the process of reading literature we enrich our understanding of other people, of the world—and of ourselves.

We become, in some sense, what we read.

Given these ideas, you might wonder how to increase your enjoyment of literary works, how you might amplify literature’s value, savor more fully the pleasures of language and form, of idea and insight works of literature offer. What might we do to enhance the benefits and pleasures literature provides? In the following poem I suggest how we might begin.

The Art of Reading

The art of reading isn’t hard to master,
some say. But I say au contraire; not so.
It is no small achievement to read well,

with intense absorption in the text.
It requires attention and discernment.
The art of reading takes effort to master.

It requires reading many kinds of works,
some easy, some more difficult.
To read good books and read them truly well

with skill and confidence, with ease and grace
deepens understanding, makes one wise.
To learn the art of reading—to become a master—

read widely and deeply, re-read and read aloud,
make observations, ask questions of what you read.
It’s no small gain to read supremely well.

It’s a skill for lifelong learning pleasure.
Read for fun as well as learning—for delight.
The art of reading takes some time to master
in pixels or in print. Go slow. Enjoy. Read well.

To reap the benefits of reading literature with greater pleasure and appreciation you can do a number of things. Here are some of the most important.

Noticing and Questioning

Reading with insight and toward understanding requires paying close attention to what you read, noticing as much as you can about from the beginning. Attending to a work carefully prepares us to reflect on it, to engage with it, to ask questions about it. That’s the key—to bring to bear on your reading your attentive, observant, questioning self.

Consider the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina (in translation of course): “All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.”

What we notice first, perhaps, about this sentence is its parallel structure. Tolstoy’s sentence balances and contrasts happy families with unhappy ones. It asserts that they differ in how they experience happiness and unhappiness, respectively..

OK. So that’s what Tolstoy posits as he launches his 800-page novel. He sets up an early expectation that his book will be about families, some happy and some unhappy. We need to read the book, of course, to find out what their happiness and unhappiness consist of and how they became happy and unhappy families along the way.

In reflecting on Tolstoy’s sentence, our thinking might take the form of questioning what it asserts. We might hold in abeyance our agreement or disagreement with Tolstoy’s assertion. We might even imagine a reversal of what the sentence says, revising it this way: “All unhappy families are alike; all happy families are happy in their own way.” Our observations about Tolstoy’s sentence lead to questions, which lead to reflection, which illustrate how we can engage actively with a writer’s work.

Rereading

Reading with understanding, appreciation, and pleasure requires re-reading. Why is this so? Re-reading is critical because there are so many things going on in a work of literature that we can’t grasp them all in a single reading. We need time to notice and reflect; we need time to revisit and re-see what’s there, time to ensure that what we observed in our preliminary excursion through an essay or poem or story, for example, is indeed there. And we need an opportunity to see what we may have missed on our first reading. In our second and subsequent traversals of a work—our repeated engagements with it—we notice more, question more, think more, understand more, and in the process deepen our reading pleasure.

Consider this brief poem by Robert Frost.

The Span of Life

The old dog barks backward without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

What do we notice on a quick first reading of these lines? First that they rhyme; Frost’s poem is a couplet. We notice that the poem describes a dog—in the present—an old dog. Seeing his aging canine companion, the speaker remembers when he was a little pup. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. Right?

Well, not exactly—though that’s the gist of what the poem shows us. But what if we look more carefully; what if we reflect a bit on what the poem might be suggesting. Noticing involves listening as well as looking, so let’s try to hear the poem in our inner ear. In addition to rhyme, we hear a metrical beat, a rhythm to the words in each line. We hear and feel the slow motion of the first line, as the first five syllables are all stressed. We hear the first line moving with difficulty while the second line skips along. And though the second line looks shorter than the first visually, it contains only one less syllable, ten, than the eleven syllables of the first line.

What might we make of this kind of noticing? We might ask ourselves why the poet stresses heavily the words in the first line about the old dog, why he uses words with syllables that are hard to pronounce, and why he uses words and syllables that are easy to pronounce in the second line about the young pup. We might attend more carefully to the description of the old dog’s having difficulty getting up—barking “backward” (a visual image). Doing so, we notice the contrast between that difficult action and the pup’s much different imagined movements, at that early stage of the old dog’s life. That image of the pup’s movement is not given us by the poet, but it’s implied for us to imagine.

And now one last bit about this couplet poem—it’s title: “The Span of Life.” Has Frost given us in a couplet an image and example of a life span—the life span of his dog? Yes, of course. But he gives us something more as well: he invites us to consider not just “a” span of life—the span of life of the speaker’s dog, but “the” span of life, which includes the span of life of the poem’s human speaker. After all, the speaker has aged, too, along with his dog. And though the dog ages faster, the speaker ages as well—“I remember,” he says. And so do we, especially if we have seen our own pets age and other people age, including ourselves.

In looking at and listening to Frost’s little poem we have been making observations about its words and sounds and images. And we have been raising questions about the sense it seems to make, about its meaning and significance. Those observations and questions lead us to see how, as English poet Alexander Pope wrote, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

Slow Reading

Another way to deepen your appreciation and pleasure in literature is to slow down. We have been doing of that in our reading of “The Span of Life.” But we can benefit from slow reading of longer, more ambitious works. Take your time with them. There’s no rush to finish; and there should be no rush to interpretation either. Take time to think about what you are reading. Take time to enjoy the way the writer presents his or her thinking. Speed is not at issue. Far more important is to spend time reflecting on what a work is saying to you, to mull over the insights you glean from your reading and to enjoy the writer’s craft and art.

When I am reading something of interest and value, I will often limit myself to one chapter a day, for example, or perhaps 20 or 30 minutes of reading time and 5 or 10 minutes to think, reflect and jot notes and questions. Novels I love I read this way. An example: When I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, after a long day’s work, I allotted myself one hour per evening, late at night just before bedtime. In so doing I lived in that 19th-century milieu for over a month, soaking up and savoring the book’s country village atmosphere, while digesting Eliot’s psychological analysis of her characters, reveling in her complex plotting, and stimulated by her philosophical provocations to thought. A little a time. Easy as you go. Stretch out your reading pleasure.

In a book that profoundly influenced both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which took seven drafts over as many years, we are advised to read “deliberately”—weighing and considering what we read. Thoreau suggests that we give to our reading of a work the same kind and degree of care the author took in writing it: “Books” he writes, “must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

Now I’m not suggesting you take seven years to read Walden. I am advocating, however, that you give such a finely crafted book the attention it deserves for both its content and its style. Consider this famous sentence from Thoreau’s book, for example, both for what it says and how it says it: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Now that’s a provocative idea about individualism, couched in a pair of elegantly crafted sentences; they march to their own stately rhythm, and their beauty makes Thoreau’s idea memorable.

Reading Aloud

Yet another way to increase your reading pleasure, heighten your appreciation and deepen your understanding is to read some parts of the text aloud—a sentence or two or three, a paragraph or two, a page. Reading Thoreau’s sentence aloud, for example, helps you notice things you miss during silent reading. The ear (and voice) prompt the eye to see, absorb more of the writer’s craft and art. The art of reading and the craft of writing owe as much to the ear as to the eye. Before I invite you to read aloud a paragraph of prose fiction, I encourage you to return to Frost’s “The Span of Life.” I invite you to read its two lines aloud. Why? Because I want you to feel in your body—in your mouth especially—as you speak the words aloud, how hard it is to speak the first line: “The old dog barks backward without getting up.” Did you feel your tongue against your palate enunciating the “d”s and “g” and hard “ck” sounds? Did you feel the stress on the first five syllables, and the sentence speed up afterwards?

Now feel in your mouth and on your lips and tongue how easy you can speak its second line: “I can remember when he was a pup.” We form the consonants in this line with our lips. And for the “r” and “w” and “he” we simply blow air through our mouths to pronounce. Hard and easy. Old dog. Young pup. So re-read and read aloud for greater insight and pleasure.

Let’s take up now the prose example I promised you. The following paragraph concludes “The Dead,” the final story in Dubliners, a collection of linked stories by James Joyce.

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It

was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further west-wards, softly falling

into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of

the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted

on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the

barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly

through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end,

upon all the living and the dead.

Joyce’s description of the snow falling throughout Ireland is exquisite, a lyrical prose poem. I have shared this ending with hundreds of students, always inevitably succumbing, myself, to its sheer beauty of sound and rhythm. I hope you enjoyed the experience of reading the paragraph aloud—feeling its steady rhythm, hearing its repetition of “falling,” its echoing alliterations in “crooked crosses” and “soul swooned softly,” and Joyce’s nifty shift with the snow first “falling softly” and “softly falling,” and then “falling faintly and “faintly falling.”

These few observations about Joyce’s language touch on the tone and texture of the passage—the compassion it carries in those rhythms and repetitions. Joyce’s masterful prose needs to be read aloud to be fully appreciated. I hope you agree, and will add reading aloud to your repertoire of reading practices to deepen your pleasure in reading literature.

Application

We can reap the rewards that reading literature well provides by applying these reading strategies—rewards of insight and of pleasure, of understanding, of experience, of wisdom. I invite you to read along with me the opening paragraphs of a recent essay, “A Street Full of Splendid Strangers,” by Leslie Jamison, originally published in the The Atlantic, and reprinted in The Best American Essays 2020. Here is how Jamison begins her essay:

When I was young, the beauty of church always belonged to other people: the believers. They saw the same stained glass I saw, but when its jeweled light cut their skin into kaleidoscopic colors, they somehow belonged in that light in a way I never would. They could feel the lilt and soar of the hymns as truth, as collective yearning, as a tin-can telephone connecting them to God. That’s what I told myself. I told myself I was alien to that beauty—I’d never be anything but an interloper lurking just outside its grace.

Let’s begin with a few observations about the writer’s opening sentence, which immediately places us in church. Jamison suggests that being in church can be uplifting for people—a beautiful experience—but that this experience is one she does not share. She emphasizes this point with the last four words of that initial sentence and with her use of the colon. This experience of beauty, Jamison insists, belongs to “other people: the believers.” She, herself, feels somehow shut out from that experience. That’s a striking admission for jump starting an essay. We wonder why that might be the case. Jamison answers our question later, but first she tells us what the experience is like for those “others,” providing us with vivid details so that we can imagine what those “believers” see and hear of beauty in church.

Ironically, Jamison notes that she sees the same stained glass they see, describing vividly its “jeweled light” and “kaleidoscopic colors.” Doing so, however, she separates herself from those other believers: “they belong,” Jamison writes, “in a way I never could.” Here, again, we may wonder why she doesn’t belong, and perhaps why she suggests that she not only does not belong now, but that she doesn’t see herself as ever belonging, as ever being able to experience the beauty of church as believers do. We may surmise that it has something to do with belief—with faith—and that it is religious faith that separates Jamison from the believers and their more deeply emotional experience of the beauty they experience in church. We don’t know that, of course, but we might infer it, given the way Jamison distinguishes herself from the congregation of believers. But that surmise can be tested only be reading further—and doing some additional thinking about what Jamison is saying, suggesting, and doing in and with her sentences.

So far, we have been reading slowly through the first two sentences of Jamison’s opening paragraph, taking us about halfway through that paragraph. Slowing down this way to notice and wonder—to ask some questions really—gets us thinking, very likely, not only about Jamison’s church experience, but also about our own. Jamison’s details—first visual, then aural—(which we’ll get to momentarily)—should evoke the sights and sounds (and perhaps the tastes and smells as well) of our own remembered church experiences. In doing so we connect our reading with our lives, with our past experience, perhaps sharing in the experiences Jamison imagines for the believers she describes, sharing perhaps Jamison’s experience of self-exclusion. Or perhaps not. Perhaps our reflections about this passage and the questions that arise in our minds as we read take us in other directions.

One of the most striking sentences in Jamison’s first paragraph is the third, the sentence about sounds, where she notes that those other believers could “feel the rhythmic lilt of the hymns.” The hymns, she imagines, evoke feeling, emotion, for the believers though not for Jamison, as she once again separates herself from the “truth” and the “collective yearning” she presumes that believers experience. Her sentence about sounds and what they evoke in church, however, has something more in it—another detail: the “telephone connecting them to God.” Did you notice and wonder about Jamison’s use of the word “tin-can” to describe the telephone?

What image does she conjure with that adjective? What tone do you hear in Jamison’s use of that word? A bit of disdain, perhaps?

What we are doing with these opening sentences of Jamison’s essay is noticing textual details and raising questions about them, as we slow our reading down and re-read her sentences, some of them aloud. This deliberative process of reading leads to our discovery of moments of exhilaration we experience in Jamison’s essay.

The last two sentences of the opening paragraph pivot to “what she told [her]self.”

Jamison uses that phrase twice, for emphasis. And what she tells herself is that she is an “interloper,” an “alien” presence who does not, cannot, and will never share the experience of beauty that church believers d, noting that she lurks “just outside its grace.”

And what a word that is, “grace,” to conclude a paragraph about the beauty experienced in church. It’s a loaded word, an exhilarating one appropriate in the context of religious belief and churchgoing, and one that captures well what Jamison is missing—how she lacks the benevolent gift of grace.

As we read this concluding sentence, and as we mull over the significance of what Jamison is suggesting in her first paragraph overall, we may wonder where she will go next with her essay. We might wonder whether there may be some other form of grace available to her.

Here is how Jamison continues with the second paragraph of her essay.

Some version of that girl I’d been in church—with legs too long for her denim overalls, and palms covered with half-moon crescents where she’d dug her nails into her skin—was summoned for a different rapture, years later, by the photography of Garry Winogrand. Some version of that girl was told: This is beauty you belong in. The first time I entered , part of its force was this immediate sense of invitation, as if a door had been carved in a wall, leading to some new world, and now I could cross into it—or perhaps simply see more clearly that I’d been living in that miraculous world all along. It had only disguised itself as something familiar, or banal.

Let’s note, first, the splendid details of that long first sentence, the vivid description sandwiched between the double dashes, which make those details stand out. Let’s observe, too, how Jamison takes herself and us to another place, in this paragraph—to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a different kind of sublime space, one in which Jamison, and we, can experience beauty unconnected to church and religious faith. Let’s remark, as well, on Jamison’s diction—on her choice of the word “summoned” to something she can’t resist, and her choice of “rapture,” a word rich in connotation, with both spiritual and sensual associations. What might it mean to be “summoned” to “rapture”; with what kind of “force” we wonder with anticipation?

Jamison feels that some form of rapture, a special but different kind of grace, can be hers, and that this transcendent experience of beauty and its attendant emotion is occasioned by an exhibition of color photographs (an echo of the colored stained glass?) by Garry Winogrand, whose works create “a kind of beauty” Jamison tells herself that she “belongs in.” We, thus, discover that Jamison can experience “moments of exhilaration,” of rapture, but that these moments occur, for her, not in churches, but in secular spaces, including museums.

Jamison reserves, for the last part of the paragraph, a series of striking images that capture the sense of splendor and grandeur she experiences upon viewing Winogrand’s photographs. For her, a “door” opens into a new world, one into which she “crosses,” entering a different extraordinary space where she experiences transcendence—a sublime beauty that she feels includes her, a beauty she relishes, cherishes, and feels as rightfully hers.

Jamison concludes her second paragraph with the stunning idea that the “miraculous world” that Winogrand’s photographs create has been there all along—in the everyday world that Jamison, and we, inhabit. It’s just that she, and we, have somehow missed its beauty, and that it takes an artist like Garry Winogrand to open our eyes and minds and hearts to its hidden-in-plain-sight glory. A final irony is that the miraculous beauty Winogrand captures and that Jamison describes not only has been available all along, but that it is “familiar,” even “banal.” Beauty lurks where we least expect to find it. Glory reveals itself to us in seemingly ordinary moments—if we know where to find it, how to see in those moments its astonishing, luminous radiance. That’s a notion to reckon with, to deliberate about, to experience with exhilaration.

Are you curious as to what Jamison saw at the exhibition of Gary Winogrand’s photography exhibition? Here is a small sampling of the pictures she describes:

A woman propped on her elbows on her beach towel, a messy mickey stick-and-poke tattoo on her arm, cat’s-eye sunglasses hiding her mood. A man lying on his back, with his blue-canvas sneakers tucked beside him and the sunlight pouring across his body, the cigar in his mouth pointed straight up toward the sky….a family having a picnic against a backdrop of rolling white sand dunes; street clowns at a parade beneath a sign advertising Dallas’ finest hamburgers; flight attendants in their powder-blue suits, clustered on an asphalt divider, shadowed by palm trees and boxy, off-white airport hotels.

What’s especially interesting about the Winogrand photography exhibit is that his pictures were slides—horizontal images that rotated every eight seconds and vertical images every thirteen seconds. Viewers observed them more than once, a little at a time, and always in relation to different images appearing on the museum walls. Jamison characterizes her experience of the moving images as “a tutorial in the proximity of the sacred,” a phrase that takes us back to the notion of “grace” with which she begins her essay. Her “tutorial” invites us to think about what “grace” and the “sacred” might mean for us and how they might manifest themselves in our lives in churches and museums and other less exalted places and spaces.

Reading with this degree of attention and care brings benefits beyond compare. We read literary works, including Jamison’s essay, for some of the reasons she reads and celebrates Gary Winogrand’s photographs. We read them for the shared feelings they evoke; for a sense of other people’s humanity; for a sense of what others care about; for a glimpse of what they do and make and love.

Reading literature disciplines us and strengthens our powers of focus, aids our capacity for noticing, prompts our inclination to ask questions and to make connections. Reading slowly, carefully, deliberately, a work like Jamison’s essay—as she herself reads Winogrand’s photographs—enables us to participate in a provocative and engaging conversation that leads our thinking in directions we could not have imagined when we began reading her essay. You can find the full essay in The Best American Essays 2020.

Here, finally, are a few suggestions for deepening your reading pleasure.

The Written World, Martin Puchner. Random House, 2018.

This tour de force of a book explains how major literary works inscribe the cultures they embody and influence the values those cultures sustain. Through sixteen foundational texts from more than four thousand years of world literature, the author explains how writing has inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, sparked philosophical and political debates, and led to the emergence of religious beliefs.

Books for Living, Will Schwalbe. Vintage, 2017.

Will Schwalbe offers a celebration of reading in general and an impassioned recommendation of books to guide us through our daily lives. He explains why he cherishes each book he discusses, how it helped him in living his own life, and how it broadened and deepened his understanding of the world.

A Reader on Reading, Alberto Manguel. Yale University Press, 2011.

In this splendid collection of essays about books and reading, Alberto Manguel argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. In reading the words on our pages and screens, we enter the worlds they describe and embrace. Topics include the connection between books and our bodies, the power of censorship, the art of translation, and more. Books, contends Manguel, lend coherence to our world and our lives.

The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Sven Birkerts explores the impact of technology on the experience of reading. Drawing on his own passionate, lifelong love of books, Birkerts examines how literature intimately shapes and nourishes our inner lives. While celebrating the complex pleasures of reading, he raises important questions about not only what we read, but the extent to which the technologies we use for our reading alter our experience of what we read.

Protocols of Reading, Robert Scholes. Yale University Press, 1989.

Writing from a semiotic perspective that sees the world as a text, Scholes analyzes photographs, paintings, and television commercials as well as biographies and novels. In “Reading: An Intertextual Activity,” he offers a profound meditation on the rich and complex nature of reading.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age, Robert Alter. Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Robert Alter provides a witty and wise introduction to the rewards of a patient, attentive reading of literary works. He explores the resources of style, the dynamics of allusion, the formal design of narrative structure, the play of narrative perspective, and more, revealing in the process how reading literature is a source of complex pleasure and insight.