I’ve only purchased two ebooks in my whole life. I don’t like to do my reading on devices, and in fact I’ll do almost anything to avoid reading a book electronically. I love the feel of having a paperback to take with me and mark up—in my mind, nothing matches their ease and pleasure.

Of the two ebooks I’ve ever bought, one was trivial, and the other is a book that I’ve never, ever told anybody about. When I first bought this book I would have died of shame if anybody saw me reading it or happened to find it in my apartment. I purchased it as an ebook because that was the only way I could be sure that it would remain my secret.

I bought it in November 2010, and even though I’ve never told anybody about it, I don’t mind sharing it with you all now. Its title, in full, is Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, and it is an academic work of gender theory by a Princeton professor named Gayle Salamon, published in 2010 by Columbia University Press.

I know precisely why I wanted to read this book, and why it felt so shameful to me. For my whole life I had been experiencing doubts as to my presumed male gender, and I felt an intense desire to experience life as a woman. But I had never, ever been able to do anything about it. For about 20 years I had lived with this quandary, always profoundly ashamed of these desires, yet also deeply yearning to explore them. For those two decades I had gotten more or less nowhere.

Well, not exactly nowhere—I had at least figured out that this question wasn’t ever going to go away, and I would have to do something about it, otherwise suffer this angst more or less every single day for the rest of my life. So, more as an act of desperation than anything else, I downloaded Assuming a Body to my iPad with a vague idea that I could read it in secret and maybe it would do something to help me.

This book opened up some door in my mind that I had never been able to open in all my life. It helped me see that other people had wrestled with exactly the same questions I had wrestled with; not only that, they thought these were entirely valid questions, proper matters for the most serious kind of inquiry. Not to put too fine a point on it, but seeing how deeply Salamon took these matters, as did so many other thinkers that she cited and discussed in her book, made me feel as though I had a right to exist. This validation as a gender-questioning person was extremely powerful for me, and Salamon’s book also gave me theories and terms that I could use to begin thinking these questions through for myself.

I don’t want to overstate the impact of this particular book. I think that a number of books might have done what this one did for me—there was clearly something of it happening to be in the right place at the right time. All the same, I have no doubt that many other books would have failed to so move me. I should also add that it was still a very long time before I could even say the word “crossdress” to another human being, let alone feel comfortable being feminine in front of others. One single book didn’t suddenly change my life, but it was a crucial spark: it started something within me that I had never been able to start, no matter that I had tried very hard for years to do it, initiating an inquiry that led me to other books, which themselves led to even more books, this array of written material eventually becoming conversations with other people that slowly led to the courage and self-belief that I needed to find myself.

For those of us who value books as readers, writers, publishers, publicists, editors, critics, booksellers, or what have you, it’s essential to keep in mind that the books we cherish always have the possibility of making this kind of an impact on somebody. That, to put it bluntly, words matter, they matter very, very much.

Often the world fights to make books seem tiny and banal. If you work in the literary field, the daily grind of one’s job can make books feel like just another commodity. If you’re someone who loves to read, the mind-numbing cascade of new books, book reviews, author interviews, bookstore events, profiles, lists, gossip, feuds, and so on make it easy to diminish the importance of any individual reading experience. But I think we must always fight this tendency. If nothing else, my story proves that just one single book can be immensely powerful. When I feel that my work with literature has become just a little too routine, a little too uninspired, I bring out personal memories like this one to remind me just what kind of an impact words can have. All of us who love books must recognize this potential on some level—it’s clearly one of the big attractions that has drawn us to this world, the power that these words have had over us, or perhaps over very important people in our lives.

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Because I am so aware how powerful words can be, it pains me very much to see that the President of the United States is someone with seemingly little regard for the grievous harm he inflicts when he lashes out at vulnerable individuals and groups. When Donald Trump suddenly banned transgender troops from the US military with one ill-considered, base-baiting tweet, he did a lot more than ruin the careers of 15,000 dedicated service personnel: he told every transgender person who was struggling as I once did that their hardships were unimportant and their searching was invalid. He told every queer person that their place in society is marginal and their rights are precarious, capable of being demolished with a tweet. I have no doubt that as news of this tweet spread around the United States, many gender-questioning people were thrown that much further into self-hate and hiding. Callously unemploying 15,000 Americans while also forcing our military to suddenly fill 15,000 positions for no reason other than bigotry is surely no way to make America great again, particularly at a time when our saber-rattling President needs his military to be at its very best. This is a terrible, shameful, self-defeating thing from a person whose very purpose should be finding ways to enable the success of every decent American, not to denigrate some in order to curry favor with those who espouse hate and division.

We could apply this logic to the many other groups that Trump has made a practice of persecuting as a candidate and now as President. It is not merely that our fellow citizens now see an extraordinarily powerful and norm-setting individual telling them their religion, race, gender, or sexuality is wrong; it is also that the President’s messages enable a constellation of other individuals to spread the same messages, from high powered television personalities like Sean Hannity all the way down to the local two-bit bully. Who knows the damage this has already done throughout this country. We can tally the number of families that Trump’s Executive Orders have destroyed, we can count the hate crimes that his repulsive rhetoric has inspired, but it’s much harder to know how many people have been pushed into a deeper level of shame, fear, and distress by Trump’s words.

If we cannot know how many minds such rhetoric has savaged, we also cannot know how many lives have been bettered by the messages spread in great books. That this is hard to measure and often invisible to us does nothing to change the fact of the great importance of these words for those around us. This is a crucial thing to keep focus on at any time, but particularly now, when those moved by resentment and rage are filling our society with hateful messages. We must never forget that this is a central fact of literary culture.

I know that against the awesome power of the President of the United States a single book doesn’t seem like much, against a hateful Klan rally a mere LGBTQ bookstore display seems puny. But I’m here to tell you that these things do make a difference for a lot of people. We must not doubt the importance of books. When we publish, or handsell, or review, or simply recommend to a friend, we must think very deeply about the kinds of messages we are putting into the world, as well as the sort of country we want our literary culture to represent. They are heard and seen by people all around us, and they are affecting lives.

This is something I know very well, not only for the impact books like Assuming a Body have had for my own life but also because I have had the great fortune to see the effect of the literary messages I have put into the world. After years and years of searching and struggling through my questions about gender, in 2014 I published an essay that revealed some of this personal history—it was the first time I had ever publicly talked about gender and revealed who I was, and the essay was a huge success. Two years later I published a short book that included this essay in the wider story of my life as a genderfluid person.

Many people who have been touched by these works and have gleaned some bit of courage or self-understanding from them have contacted me in one way or another to share how it has affected them, so I know for a fact that when you put good things into the world, it helps other people. It not only does that—it makes these people grateful, and it instills in them a desire to help others as they have been so helped. It very much pleases me to think that I have been able to push forward this literary conversation that has given me so much, enabling others to make their own contributions. This I think is key. We needn’t publish a bestseller or become President of the United States to meaningfully participate in the continuance of these ideas that bring us together and allow people to live their best lives. This is what we have to give, and with it great things are possible.

Books That Have Helped Me Find a Little More of Myself

Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality 
Gayle Salamon
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Trans
Juliet Jacques
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Kissing the Mask
William T. Vollmann
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Kiss of the Spider Woman
Manuel Puig (tr. Thomas Colchie)
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“The Cyborg Manifesto”
Donna Haraway
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Conundrum
Jan Morris
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Orlando
Virginia Woolf
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A Thousand Plateaus
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (tr. Brian Massumi)

Shortly before the birth of Christ, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus took a moment to reflect on a practice that was still not very widespread in the Western world, yet one that he had concluded was indispensable to human prosperity:

Who could compose a worthy encomium of literacy? For it is by means of writing alone that the dead are brought to the minds of the living . . . While it is true that nature is the cause of life, the cause of the good life is education based on the written word.

Siculus was a historian—a great one in fact, who authored a 40-volume work comprising the entire history of the known world. I have been thinking lately about his idea that words speak to the dead, and what this means for a people. Words create a historical record—thus allowing us to form a sense of national progress and identity—and they provide vital opportunities to address a nation’s history.

I realized as much as I recently read Letters to Memory, in which the Japanese-American author Karen Tei Yamashita converses with the many documents that have preserved her family’s experience as internees during the Second World War. Yamashita was not yet born when her family members were taken from their homes and forced to live for well over a year in a barren wasteland deep in the Utah desert—the man who would become her father was still young and unmarried at the time—but by poring over the letters, diaries, and other documents that retain her family’s experiences she had the opportunity to construct a dialogue. It is from this encounter that her beautiful, necessary book has emerged.

I have asked myself why the family saved these letters. You might say they were historians, that they knew the value of their stories, this proof of their thoughts and actions in unjust and difficult times. History is proffered to the future. This is what we did. Do not forget us. Please forgive us.

In 1942, Yamashita’s father, grandparents, aunts, and uncles were told to assemble for pickup at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, bringing only what they could carry. (Against regulations, her aunt was reputed to have taken a vacuum cleaner and waffle iron.) After being placed into custody at the Topaz internment center, they lived in spare conditions in the desert for over a year, in the process losing their homes, their jobs, their community, and virtually all of their possessions. Upon their release in 1943 the family was scattered throughout the United States, where they faced discrimination and the enormous challenge of starting their lives over. They were among 120,000 Japanese-Americans so treated, the majority of which were US citizens.

It is obvious that this constitutes a grave historical injustice—what does a nation do with such wrongs? In 1988 President Reagan signed a bill that provided for reparations—each detainee was allotted some $20,000, although many of them had died by then and the $1.2 billion that was distributed represented only a fraction of the wealth that was lost by these individuals. Even though this was a victory that the Japanese-American community had fought hard to win, and the apology was a major (if long overdue) accomplishment, monetary compensation and official admittance of guilt can only be one part of the work of memorializing, forgiveness, education, and dialogue through which such deeds are truly brought to rest.

Where do personal mechanisms of grievance and understanding insert themselves into this machinery of bureaucratic justice? Yamashita first began looking into her family’s past when in 1995 she discovered some papers long held by her Aunt Kay. Soon she became known throughout her clan as the repository of all family documents, and in combing over these archives she began to encounter the internment of her family in a way she had not previously been able to. This was when her dialogue began to emerge.

Yamashita calls her project “memory”—it is memory that blends the author’s own recollections with historical narratives, personal papers, bureaucratic records, and great historical tomes. It is perhaps a species of group memory formed over thousands of years as humans have engaged the questions of war, necessity, failure, grievance, law, justice, forgiveness, and transcendence, all taking place through the medium of the written word. As we all must do, she is finding her own place in this legacy, hewing out her own sense of what she is and what has transpired in the lives of those closest to her.

Yamashita knows that to a large degree her parents’ lives were shaped by their internment and the discrimination prevalent throughout postwar America, and she knows that these lives in turn made her who she is. This history is in her, it is personal as can be, and yet it is also a significant part of her nation’s story. Her book goes beyond her personal story to situate this episode of US history into the larger fabric of human history. So it is more than memory, it is a means of creating her own contribution to this discourse that has occurred over generations. Yamashita poses this book as many things—revenge, resistance, recovery, documentary, inquiry—but I read it most fundamentally as an act of forgiveness, a thing that she says “requires the confrontation of two parties, a meeting face to face between people who have the capacity to hurt one another, and thus, perhaps, to discover grace.” Needless to say, when things are buried so far in the past such a meeting largely occurs through written words.

If we are fortunate, we forgive, but we do not forget. Letters to Memory is an important book in part because it points to how a nation’s past errors are never really over, and how it nonetheless inches its way toward a future. There are plenty of reminders that the internment still lives on, not only in records but in the Japanese-American identity and in the lives of the descendants of internees. Yamashita goes beyond her family’s story as internees to unpack what that experience became as they dealt with the ordeal of building new identities and re-establishing their communities in the face of great loss and ongoing racism. It also very personally deals with the author’s emotions regarding this legacy. This is the work of establishing these deeds as an ongoing, living part of America’s being.

The last surviving member of Yamashita’s family to be interned during World War II died in 2015: we are at a moment when the living memory of this shameful act is disappearing from the world, which surely must have been a motivation for the creation of this book. Once the last survivors have passed on, all that will exist of this episode are the written testaments, along with the documents of American bureaucracy, news stories, records of the resistance, and the little that remains of the camps themselves. If these acts are to be learned from, and atoned for, it will require the work of authors and historians to keep that memory alive and that conversation moving forward.

I have visited two of the sites of Japanese internment: at Manzanar, east of the California Sierra Nevadas, there is a visitor center and some preserved buildings, but the great majority of the camp has long since been dismantled and appropriated by people in the Owens Valley. If not for the concerted efforts of Japanese-American activists to construct a site of memory on the Manzanar space, it would likely resemble the other camp I have visited, Tulelake camp, where all one can now access is a small placard in remote Northern California. I remember what it was like to stand there on a chilly summer day, a violent wind rocketing past my face, trying to imagine how it would feel to be taken from my home and forced to live in this dismal wasteland.

Tulelake is a piece of our past that, like so much of our history, has been lost to the forces of decay and barely exists any longer in any meaningful way. I am grateful to the people who have fought to maintain the memory of what happened in Manzanar, for it is only through their work that I was able to see the conditions of those who were forced to live there and learn some of their stories by reading some of the documents they left behind.

I am, of course, also grateful to authors like Yamashita, who have fought so hard to make this story vivid and to think through its implications with a true wisdom. As I read Letters to Memory and thought of the ways in which Japanese-Americans have sought to reconcile with and preserve this legacy, I couldn’t help but think of the ethnic and gender groups that are currently being demonized by the United States government. Although there has been talk of a “Muslim registry,” thus far nothing has occurred that can compare to the wrong inflicted during World War II, but still families have been scattered and decent people have been terrorized, and there have been beatings, murders, and bombings. Certainly those who have had to find some way to endure these wrongs are now creating their own paper trail as they reach out to their loved ones for support and seek redress from the authorities. These deeds are becoming part of the American identity, and they too will have to be dealt with. We must do the hard work of keeping this national memory alive and conversing with it.

Yamashita writes that she does not intend her book to merely be a sermon, an application of past wrongs to present-day evils; rather it has “no formed definition . . . except an intuition that you would listen and be attentive and somehow understand.” And, in fact, the scope of her book goes far beyond the experiences of her family, as she puts in conversation, among others, Homer, Gandhi, the Buddha, the Vedas, and numerous other writers, thinkers, and texts. She writes that “every history is a story told, weighted by the knowledge of the teller,” and I think it is here—in the knowledge of the teller—one locates that elusive quality that Yamashita hopes will elevate her act of memory beyond a sermon. There is a responsibility here: to herself, to her family, to history, to the future—and also her nation. Yamashita’s story has become a part of America’s account of itself, this process of wrongs, redress, and reconciliation. To my mind, this is the building of a nation’s history.

This is an American story: how America’s government and its people reacted when asked to confront fear, our unsteady process of assimilation and rejection, wounds and forgiveness. It is us. It is a story that has occurred numerous times in our history, but one, as Yamashita’s book testifies, that we are still learning to tell. In fact, right now we are caught up in a major chapter of it, and it is incumbent on us to participate. As Yamashita writes, “art and music and poetry performed in . . . circumstances of incarceration, in death and labor camps . . . is an impulse to sustain one’s humanity and is an act of resistance.” She adds that it is also “an act of witness. . . . [W]hile art may be spiritual practice, it is also political.”

Let me conclude with the words of former President George H. W. Bush, regarding the treatment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War:

In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history. The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated.

I include this in part to illustrate how far the Republican Party has fallen—from a President who said “it will never be repeated” to one who talks of Muslim registries and supports white supremacists. And I also include it because Bush is correct: no nation will be great if is does not understand its past. For exactly this reason, we are blessed to have writers like Yamashita.

Books to Help Confront History

Karen Tei Yamashita, Letters to Memory
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Octavia Butler, Kindred
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Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
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Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do
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Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
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John Keene, Counternarratives
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Lauret Savoy, Trace
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Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation
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Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, “At the Tulelake Relocation Center.”

An oddly postmodern thing happens right near the beginning of Virgil’s ancient classic the Aeneid. Having fled Troy in defeat from the Greeks, and destined to found the great Roman civilization, a defeated, beleaguered Aeneas and his men wash up on the northern coast of Africa near Carthage. Before long Aeneas locates the bustling port city, eventually stealing into the magnificent temple of Dido the queen. As he is acquainting himself with the surroundings he discovers an elaborate depiction of the very war that he is a refugee from:

Wondering at the good fortune of the city,
And admiring all the things the makers had done,
The workmanship of what was told on the walls,
Suddenly he saw depicted there,
One after another, the scenes of the Trojan War,
Famous through all the world . . .
Aeneas stopped, and weeping at what he saw,
Said, “Is there, Achates, anywhere on earth
That does not know the story of our trouble?”

Imagine it: the catastrophic war that has wiped your home off the face of the Earth is now the stuff of legend, famous clear across the entire known world. The beloved comrades you watched die as you struggled to defend your homeland are now wrought exquisitely into the walls of a queen’s temple. You even see your own self, fighting the war you have just fled from. It is a curiously modern moment: Aeneas sees the horrific reality he has just escaped as a story told by foreigners a thousand miles away, not so different from, say, a refugee from Venezuela, or Yemen, or Syria, or Myanmar escapes to a more stable nation, only to see the story of her nation’s escalating tragedy—and maybe even herself—broadcast on CNN.

It was years ago that I first read the Aeneid, in classicist Robert Fitzgerald’s standard-bearing English translation, but I had forgotten this scene, and I only mention it now because I have discovered it anew in poet David Ferry’s extraordinary new translation of Virgil’s classic. I do not recall what I thought of this scene when I first encountered it, but, reading it today, it seems prescient of the world in which I live. For the story of the Aeneid is nothing if not a story of how war begets war and destabilizes the world—fleeing destroyed Troy, Aeneas will obliterate the Latin civilization in order to found Rome, and his descendants will come to conquer the very Carthage that honors his loss.

When he discoverers his story in Dido’s temple, Aeneas is at once bewildered, saddened, comforted, and inspired—he also feels some pride to know that the deeds of he and his fellow warriors have become famous. This newfound fame encourages Aeneas, making him bold enough to reveal himself to Dido, who is amazed to learn that this miraculous hero is in her very court. Soon the two have fallen deep into a romance that has been celebrated for thousands of years in myths, ballets, paintings, and novels.

Reading this passage of the Aeneid today has made me wonder what extraordinary events of our modern world would deserve this treatment. What recent parts of history have become so famous as to travel to the ends of our globalized world? What individuals have become so famous, inspiring, and mythic that even far-flung cultures are re-telling their deeds? What events are so amazing that we would feel immensely honored if their heroes happened to visit our land?

These would have to be immensely extraordinary doings to match up to the tale of the Trojan War, which is one of the greatest stories ever told. By the time Virgil wrote the Aeneid—roughly 1,000 years after the Trojan War was first told—this tale was still so universally known that he could assume anyone who might read his epic poem would know the ins and outs of it. In the centuries after Virgil’s death in 19 BC the story continued to live on through the ages (in no small part because of Virgil’s contribution to it), and it is still so famous, a good 2,000 years after Virgil, I can safely assume that most people reading this column will know the broad outlines of it. In fact, just a couple of months ago it again popped up in my life (as it does, seemingly every few months) as I watched the California Shakespeare Theater perform Marcus Gardley’s Black Odyssey—a fusion of the African-American experience and the story of Odysseus’s return home from the Trojan War. It is one of the most canonical stories humans have ever told, one of the most re-told, and one of the oldest, likely even pre-dating the Book of Genesis.

It has also accumulated a distinguished literary pedigree. Perhaps ten centuries after Homer, Virgil wrote the Aeneid, and then fourteen centuries after the Aeneid, Dante Alighieri made it the foundation of his Divine Comedy, widely considered the greatest work ever written by an Italian and acknowledged as establishing the modern Italian language. Famously, Dante is accompanied through Hell by Virgil, but the great Florentine doesn’t just use him as a guide to the underworld—he also draws heavily from the Romanized variants of Greek mythology that Virgil deeply wove into his Aeneid, creating his unique vision of the afterlife. These ideas that Dante created from this fusion of Christian and Greek theology proved to be so vivid and compelling that for over a thousand years they have transformed our conception of what awaits us after death.

Through the Divine Comedy, the Aeneid’s influence continued to live on and on. For instance, Milton’s pivotal portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost—which gave him a depth that no prior author had ever given him and made its own contributions to our image of evil—grows out of Dante’s Inferno. Jorge Luis Borges also held Dante as one of his key authors, once declaring the Divine Comedy, “the best book literature has achieved”—under the influence of this master Borges would go on to revolutionize our concepts of time, history, originality, and infinity. (Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which of course was a huge influence on Borges, among others, was also inspired by Virgil (there is even a scene in Cervantes’s masterpiece that references Aeneas’s discovery of himself in Dido’s temple, but I digress . . .) Undoubtedly there are authors working right now who are heavily influenced by Borges, and maybe even Milton and Cervantes—and thus also Dante, Virgil, and the Trojan War.

This column began with a war in the Middle East that storytellers began recounting 1,000 years before the birth of Christ, and we have followed it to North Africa, Rome, Italy, Spain, and Britain—and all the way to Borges clutching his bilingual copy of the Divine Comedy in Argentina in the early 1940s. I find this one of the greatest things about the literary tradition: it works on the longest timescales of human history, and it easily perforates borders. Literature conducts ideas across continents and through time with a startling efficacy: in the case of the Trojan War, it has traveled all throughout the world and back to the dawn of recorded history. Literature is the medium that is most conversant with humanity’s master narratives, the one that has done the most to form them and make them so indispensible and famed.

Perhaps now, when we are all quite taken by new media, it is important to keep this much slower, low-technology medium in mind. It is quite easy to be impressed at how social media has taken already-compressed cycles of 24-hour cable news into nuclear territory—our national political debates have reached a sort of ecstatic frenzy in which, just minutes after the latest talking points, scandals, and memes hit the Internet they become the subject of tens—sometimes hundreds—of thousands of Tweets and Facebook posts, giving them an oppressive ubiquity. Each twist in this neverending onslaught of raw political incident seems to hit with a maddening regularity, saturating us every which way we look.

There is only so much of this anyone can take, and perhaps we don’t need as much of it as we consume. I myself have become more and more of a social media junkie, but increasingly I ask myself why. Who can even recall the hashtags that were being used to mock poor Anthony Scaramucci just two months ago, much less what the memes du jour were at the beginning of Donald Trump’s Presidency? When I step away from the online frenzy and immerse myself in the longer rhythms of something like Virgil, I feel a profound, visceral relief, and I also feel a whole new perspective taking over. If the Trojan War is one of the grandest narratives ever constructed, the latest political Twitter memes are like microscopic pieces of narrative thread—from the perspective of the everlasting present they may seem hugely important to us, but from the perspective of Virgil they are puny.

I don’t mean to say we should all just check out, but I do think such perspective is something many of us can benefit from right now. We have grown accustomed to calling our national politics “not normal” and “unprecedented,” and I will readily agree that in many ways things are quite bad, but they are still very, very far from the worst this country has seen. To see just how bad things have gotten, read the latest piece by the indispensible historian Adam Hochschild in The New York Review of Books, where he recounts what occurred in the United States during and immediately after World War I. You will see that just 100 years ago there was mass incarceration of immigrants, the shutting down of newspapers and magazines, speeches about executing editors for “treason”—Congress even refused to seat a fairly elected Representative simply because he was a member of the Socialist party. As Hochschild writes,

As our newspapers and TV screens overflow with choleric attacks by President Trump on the media, immigrants, and anyone who criticizes him, it makes us wonder: What would it be like if nothing restrained him from his obvious wish to silence, deport, or jail such enemies? For a chilling answer, we need only roll back the clock one hundred years, to the moment when the United States entered not just a world war, but a three-year period of unparalleled censorship, mass imprisonment, and anti-immigrant terror.

As Hochschild writes at the end of his piece, we all must stay engaged and informed to ensure that this Presidency does not become nearly as oppressive as that of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s, who spearheaded these odious deeds. But I think we might also use a little better filtering when we decide just how important any given outrage is. We might subject the latest transgression to the Virgil test: if an artisan were carving this story into a palace wall half a world away, which incidents would make the cut? Which developments in this critical American saga would make it into the grand narrative of these years that may one day be passed down through the ages? Which things would we want to see if, like Aeneas, we happened to suddenly discover this story being told far away? And which developments are just noise, things that sap our energy and attention but that ultimately are not worth so much fuss?

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Literature from the Longue Durée

The Aeneid by Virgil (tr. David Ferry)

The Divine Comedy by Dante (tr. John Ciardi)

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (tr. various)

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (tr. Royall Tyler)

The Epic of Gilgamesh by unknown (tr. Stephen Mitchell)

For several days after Stephen Paddock perpetuated the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States, I would start my morning off by crying. The tears would just well up from no particular place, manifesting as a slight constriction in my chest and a warmth behind my eyes as I drank my morning coffee. I made no effort to stifle them as they trailed down my cheeks and wet the front of my shirt. To the contrary, they felt quite good.

I am generally an optimistic, put-together person who can maintain his composure during tough times. Even after other horrific massacres, like those at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I never experienced anything quite like this. The Las Vegas shooting put me into a depression unlike anything I can recall. As soon as I felt those tears, I knew why this time was different.

Everyone has their limit, and in those days after the massacre in Las Vegas I reached mine. I understood that this was not simply a matter of one evil person mechanically slaughtering innocents. That brutal act had pushed me over the edge, but it only had that power because of all the other heartless, abusive, destructive things I have had to witness ever since that day in late January when Donald Trump was sworn in as our 45th President.

I have come to see that we are a country in the midst of experiencing a mass trauma. Those of us who are dismayed at the almost daily cruelties and absurdities meted out by our nation’s President can be likened to a family member who must live in the household of an abusive man. We ourselves may not be the beaten wife or struck child—and certainly those directly on the receiving end of Trump’s policies have suffered far worse than I, who merely must watch this buffoonish man spit upon what is noble about this nation—but simply to live inside of what another has termed “the abuser’s house” for months on end is taking its toll.

I first encountered this framing during the Presidential debates last October, when Trump made unhinged statements and childish outbursts on live television. This behavior was clearly outside the norm for any Presidential debate I had witnessed in my lifetime, as was Trump’s practice of stalking Hillary Clinton around the debate stage and looming over her in a blatant attempt at bodily intimidation. Of course, the debates were only the tip of the iceberg, as they were preceded by such low points as: bodily mocking a disabled reporter, suggesting that Muslim terrorists should be executed with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, calling Mexican immigrants rapists. We all well know the norm-shattering things Trump did and said in attracting the people who would later elect him President.

The debates were a climax in terms of this behavior, a point when the pure malice of this man crystallized in the minds of many—recall Trump threatening to put Hillary Clinton on trial for treason—and following them the journalist and historian Josh Marshall declared that we were all living in the house of an abusive man: we all had to watch as Trump cholerically and spitefully transgressed the norms and institutions that have kept America’s democracy stable. We had no choice but to sit there and endure his outbursts. We watched him issue outlandish, febrile threats to various groups and individuals. We watched his misogynistic declarations that Hillary Clinton was a criminal, his pleasure at churning his crowds into a frothing rage until they were crying out for her blood.

None of us may have personally met Trump, we may not have been singled out by him for abuse, but violent acts such as these leave marks, particularly when they are made week in and week out by the most powerful person on Earth. And we are quite clearly impacted by the bans on Muslims he has signed into law, his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, his brinksmanship with North Korea, his efforts to destroy the gains made by the Affordable Care Act, his assistance in shredding the social safety net in order to give tax breaks to those as rich as he claims to be. Having to watch this endless, often spiteful assault on our most basic values adds up, and it deprives us of our hope for a better future. It is, quite simply, an ideology of abuse.

Let us take a very characteristic example. Here is Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and a hugely powerful Republican, talking with Sean Hannity, a powerful and widely watched TV personality, about what would happen if President of the United States punched Maxine Waters, a female, African-American member of Congress who has very prominently disagreed with his Administration.

NEWT GINGRICH: First of all, let me just say—you’d never get it to happen, but the idea of a round between her and Donald Trump is pretty interesting. I think he would probably win in the opening half minute. But look, what you have on the left, and you see it over and over–

HANNITY: He’s not going to hit a girl, a woman. He’s not going to do that. It’s not–

GINGRICH: Oh, sure.

HANNITY: But– but– but–

GINGRICH: Yeah, but if he was confronted with her, he would be very pleasant until she hit him, and the second she hit him, he would knock her down. I mean, let’s be honest here, this is crazy. I mean, we’re going to have on the left–

HANNITY: Oh jeez, I can see the headline: “Newt Gingrich encourages Trump to hit congresswoman.” I can see the headlines now—that’s not what you’re saying.

GINGRICH: No—look, my point is this, the left—I mean, I did this interview with a reporter the other day, and I cut him off and I said, “You know, you have a pathology. I can’t answer your questions, because you are pathological.” And he was totally stunned and said “What do you mean?” I said, “You are so anti-Trump, you are not in touch with the real world.”

HANNITY: There’s no talking to you.

GINGRICH: “So, how can I have an interview?” I think Maxine Waters is in the same group. There’s this whole group of people who are so, frankly, crazy, that they are certifiably out of touch with reality.

This bears all the hallmarks of an abuser. (For those who would like to read in greater depth on the clinical patterns of abusive spouses and fathers, I recommend Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, from while I am cribbing liberally.) We begin with Gingrich indulging the fantasy of violently silencing someone he disagrees with—in fact, a woman he disagrees with. When Hannity very rightly recognizes that such thoughts are unacceptable, instead of apologizing for the outburst and shaming Gingrich, he instead chooses to make light of the situation and shift the blame to the victim of Gingrich’s abuse. This is all standard operating procedure: issuing violent threats, then undermining the victim through mockery, while also allowing no outlet for properly addressing such violence. Hannity even goes so far as to preemptively demonize the media, just in case they decide to accurately report on what Gingrich has just stated. Already up is down.

It gets worse: after fantasizing about physically assaulting an opponent, Gingrich recounts how he declared to a reporter that anyone who disagrees with him is “pathological.” When the reporter responds with a stunned reaction at this broadside against his rights and responsibilities as a journalist, Gingrich decides that the man is “not in touch with the real world,” finally concluding that he is “frankly, crazy . . . certifiably out of touch with reality.”

These are textbook tactics of abusers. Instead of attempting empathy and admitting that other human beings may have legitimate needs and beliefs, they instead ceaselessly mock and trivialize their victims. They tell their victims that they are crazy, that their beliefs are simply not worth even a moment of thought. In so doing they seek to create a closed environment so that their victims are unable to get an outside perspective on reality. This is how abusers warp the minds of their victims: they demonize the very validity of their victims’ own thoughts until the victims doubt everything they have ever believed and become willing to accept the abusers’ truths as their own. When this technique is not enough to get the desires results, abusers supplement this assault with violence—be it emotional or physical.

This has happened quite often with the Trump Administration. Recently, we can note, for instance, Donald Trump’s harassment of the widow Myeshia Johnson after she found inadequate his sympathy over the death of her husband, a U.S. Army Sergeant who fell in the line of duty. Trump’s repeated insistence that Johnson lied about things that she and others in the room heard him say is one of the most basic techniques of the abuser, as is Trump’s attempt to create a false reality by having his surrogates support these false statements; for instance, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, who opined of the widow, “I think there were people who were just looking for something to complain about.” Gaslighting has proven to be one of the core methods pathological narcissists use to maintain control over their victims; needless to say, only those with serious mental deformities would even think of gaslighting a mother who had just lost her husband in the line of duty as an American armed serviceman. Or we might take the statement of New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a noted Trump sycophant and a confirmed repeat victim of Trump’s abuse: Christie says that Trump “yells at me at times, but he respects me.” This is such a boilerplate statement of a victim of abuse as to almost be comical in its lack of self-awareness.

Such incidents are not hard to find; to the contrary, they form the modus operandi of Trump and his team, this Administration having left a string of such victims in its wake, going all the way back to then–Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s very first news conference, where he baselessly declared that “members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting” before accusing journalists who simply reported the facts regarding Trump’s lackluster inauguration of “sowing division.” At this point there is, quite simply, an enormous amount of evidence that this Presidency operates through massive, continual psychological abuse.

We all must watch it occur and be victimized by it in one way or another. This is the trauma we are all currently bearing. We know that societies that have existed under brutal dictatorships, ruinous civil wars, catastrophes, or pervasive states of uncertainty, moral devolution, and enlarged pessimism are traumatized by that experience. Clearly we are not at the stage of dictatorship, civil war, or even catastrophe, but we are experiencing uncertainty, moral devolution, and pessimism. We are living in the house of an abusive man. This is reason enough for grave concern.

Let me return to my own personal example. The fact is, it is not regular for me to start multiple morning in tears, and nor is it regular for me to feel on edge, easy to provoke, pessimistic about the future of my world, or unsure that millions of my fellow Americans have any moral compass. These are facts that have settled into my life as I have daily witnessed the callousness and blatant disregard for the wellbeing of others that has characterized Trump and his accessories in the GOP and elsewhere.

These are conclusions that I have fought hard to resist—even today I look for reasons to doubt them—and I will continue to resist pessimism for my nation’s future every single day, but fundamentally there is no escape. I fear that these thoughts and feelings will only continue to get worse until there is a sea change in American politics.

And this is the thing. It is possible to live one’s life in an abusive relationship. People in such households can have good days mixed in with the bad; sometimes for a period the abuser will seem less malign and life can take on a surprising normalcy. But what one can never do in such a relationship is to recover. Those who have made such abuse their field of study are clear: recovery only begins once the victim has escaped the abuser’s grasp. The processing of this trauma can only happen once the victim begins to feel a measure of safety and begins to truly believe in a better future.

We cannot escape. We are stuck with Trump until he decides to move on, until he is voted out of office, until Congress finally accepts its duty to protect the nation from dangerous and blatantly illegal leadership. Fundamentally we cannot begin to recover from the trauma of living under this government until it ends.

I have mixed feelings about applying the term “not normal” to this Presidency for in many ways it whitewashes the enormous wrongs that have been committed by prior American Presidents, Democratic and Republican alike. But regardless of exactly how unprecedented, how non-normal are the policies aims of this Administration, it is clear that its abusive and authoritarian methods diverge significantly from recent Presidencies. We must never normalize the abuse being perpetuated on the people of this nation, the mean-spirited, childish callousness that has now become part of how our Federal government operates. The true danger of authoritarian regimes comes when the emotionally exhausted, desperate populace eventually succumbs to a kind of sleepwalking, still aware that things are gravely wrong but now accepting that this is their reality. This is the beginning of conditions such as Stockholm Syndrome, where the victim loses touch with reality outside of the abusive relationship, and this is where even the toughest and most resilient minds are broken down.

I welcomed those tears in my kitchen for many reasons—they were a necessary release, moments of catharsis, little breaks from the work of pushing against this vileness and absurdity—but most of all I wanted them as proof of my humanity. At their most basic, they were a recognition that I had experienced one tragedy too many under this President, proof positive that I would never be able to say—as I had just heard a Kansan tell a journalist for National Public Radio—that we must simply accept 58 murders and hundreds of casualties as the necessary cost for the freedom of arming ourselves to the teeth with weapons made for war zones. These tears were my proof that on this morning I was not succumbing to the brutal reality this President hopes to force upon us all—in fact I found such a normalization horrifying to the point that it induced tears. Going forward I will continue to remember these tear-filled mornings as a point at which my body very viscerally told me that I had witnessed too much violence in these 8 months.

I have generally written these columns in an optimistic key, because I am fundamentally an optimistic person, and because there is already more than enough cynicism about this nation’s future to be found on the Internet. The elevator-pitch description of this column is “how the arts make the Trump Presidency more bearable,” and here I have sought to inspire, to show how these books we love, this literary community that sustains us, can give us perspective and support during this historically awful moment. I still do endorse that philosophy, and I know for a fact that literature and the communities I find around it have done enormous amounts to sustain me in this period, clearly one of the worst of my life. But perhaps also part of the task of making this Presidency bearable is to at times make it unbearable. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produced.” We should recognize that suffering, if only to let it out and be more honest with one another. There is relief and knowledge in occasionally witnessing ourselves in extremis, in simply admitting that terrible things are afoot and crying the necessary tears.

Recently a friend of mine visited New York City for the first time. He is one of the many who have immigrated to the United States—who continue to immigrate here despite this Administration’s efforts to define the U.S. as a “white nation.” He has only been here for a short time. Most of his energy has been encumbered with the work of navigating bureaucracy, setting up his home, and establishing himself at his new life. But he at last took a break to see what his new home had to offer. So he saw New York City, one of the most indelible achievements America has given to the world.

Throughout the weekend of his visit to New York I was pleased to see him post one photo after another on social media, each one featuring a caption that communicated his sincere astonishment and joy at the cultural treasures he felt so honored to experience. During his trip we happened to chat via text message, and he became solemn about what he was seeing in New York. My friend told me that he felt it was a privilege to be able to live in this country, a place of such cultural opulence and grandeur.

I cannot tell you how much I needed to hear those words right then. I thanked my friend for giving this nation of mine a very gracious and honest compliment, and I informed him that it was precisely what I needed to grab on to at this moment of intense doubt in the goodness of my homeland. It has been proven that even in the wake of life-wrecking disasters, hope for the future can be preserved if we are given reason to believe that we live in a caring community of those who will give material support to one another. Essentially, that there are still decent people and institutions with whom we can build a better tomorrow. I will keep on grabbing on to such sentiments wherever I can find them. They are things that I need right now more now that I have ever before.

Reading for Troubled Times

• Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno (tr. E F N Jephcott)
• Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
• Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boll (tr. Charles A. McBride)
• Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman
• No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein
• Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

When I started this column a few weeks after Donald Trump had been elected our 45th President, I knew that something had gone drastically wrong with our politics, but I couldn’t then grasp how this disquieting year would transform us. It’s been a scarring 12 months, and here we are now at the end of this administration’s first year, having endured something together—just what, I can’t really say, and nor can I guess exactly where this dangerous episode in American history is headed.

But I will say that our artistic communities have been responding in ways that have helped keep me afloat. And today, as historic marches across the country mark the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I would like to tell you about an old story that I have recently witnessed re-imagined for this shocking era. It’s a national myth about the most blessed land on Earth, a place of such vast riches that you can just pull wealth right out of the ground, a beautiful terrain of natural magnificence, remarkable people, wide open spaces for everyone to enjoy, and the advancement of freedom—how does this land turn into a place of cavernous inequality, xenophobic resentment, economic desperation, hate, illiberality, and murder? I know you’ve heard this story before, but I’m not talking Trump-Era United States. I’m talking about the California Gold Rush.

This is the place that John Adams—quite likely America’s preeminent living composer—has chosen to set his fifth and latest opera, Girls of the Golden West, which I recently saw in its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera. Discussing contemporary politics by assaulting a major American myth is by now par for the course for Adams: he made a name for himself by scandalizing critics when he wrote an opera about Nixon’s visit to China (now regarded as a classic), and he was later celebrated for making one around Robert Oppenheimer and his unleashing of the nuclear demon.

He has also considered making an opera from the life of LBJ, as well as the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, TX, but he ultimately decided to explore the California Gold Rush, a quintessentially American event. This episode embodied our distinctly New World sense of optimism, fresh starts, and deeply entrenched belief in equality and social mobility, and it combined these good things with white supremacy, Manifest Destiny, pillage, extermination, and greed. The Gold Rush communities that formed in California exhibit the melting pot that is America, drawing hopefuls from all over the world alongside ranks of resentful white men who believed the fat of the land was their birthright—despite the fact that California had only been part of the Union for one year when the Gold Rush started. This episode engages some of the deepest questions of this nation, questions that are far from resolved and are very much at the heart of the present crisis.

Yet though there was very much white supremacy in the Gold Rush, and even as Adams’ nativist ’49ers plotted race riots, I was moved by their earnest pride for America, which the composer relates in their drinking songs. While it’s true their boasts are at times so absurdly grandiose as to come right from a Trump rally—”We’ve got the highest mountains here / Taller trees, and faster deer”—there is much sincerity and earnest truth when they sing, “There is no land upon the earth / Contains the same amount of worth.” America has long prided itself on being just such a cornucopia to the globe, and California, with its bountiful natural resources, extraordinarily fertile farmlands, and intense, savage beauty, often seems most blessed of all. I cannot doubt the miners’ sincerity because I have felt exactly this pride for my home state, even as I have seen many Californians exhibit the exact xenophobia that led these miners to disparage the diverse peoples who have boundlessly enriched our culture (many of them arriving here long before Americans did), while also providing a source of cheap and often exploited labor to make the state run.

This, it seems to me, is the riddle that Adams examines, a riddle foundational to America, that has returned with a vengeance, starting in 2016: Why in a land with so much wealth and opportunity is there so much resentment and animosity? Why in a place that is so beautiful and so desired the globe over are we tearing ourselves apart with hatred?

Opera is the most literary of classical music forms, and Girls of the Golden West is a particularly literary opera. Using a collage method familiar to 20th-century American literature, librettist Peter Sellars composed Girls’ libretto from the remarkable letters of frontierswoman Louise Clappe, as well as newspapers and songs of the time, immigrant diaries, and the writings of Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain. As I experienced it live, these words came across as a distinctly popular American idiom that is full of poetry—so much so that when Act II begins with a staging of Macbeth, it took me a moment to register that we had transitioned from the words of America to those of the Bard.

Adams has observed that these American lyrics demanded that he write a certain kind of music. “What makes this opera unique for me is the influence of the Gold Rush lyrics,” he told the San Francisco Opera, “because structurally they’re as simple as can be. You can’t take language this simple and this frank and set it to overly complex music. It needs to have music that respects its own simplicity.” This is a style that Adams has honed over a lifetime of dealing with America’s most crucial events—including a truly remarkably response to 9/11—and so it is no stretch to say that the sounds of his operas have very much become a part of what America sounds like.

Sellars’ collaged lyrics give this music a basis in our collective voice and shared national history. The people who built the California Gold Rush must have known that they were part of some grand historical moment that would live on in our national memory, and the documentation they have left of this episode testifies to the remarkable thoughts and feelings stirred up by this unique event. Watching Girls of the Golden West, I was able to feel the emotion behind this well-known American myth in new and surprising ways. I realized there is still so much here to learn from and think through: the form penetrates through the popular viewpoints of the era in a way books, film, and TV cannot. To hear the mixed-race character Ned intone Frederick Douglass’s words “What to a slave is the Fourth of July?,” backed by an orchestra while white ’49ers celebrate America’s founding, is to feel the emotion of this sentiment in a more powerful and overwhelming way than I have ever felt it. Similarly, Adams’ ability to open up the songs of the era for a 21st-century audience gives an important viewpoint on the white men who came to California in search of a better life, and whose ambition mixed with desperation, their compassion combined with exploitation.

What ultimately most resonated for me in this work was its polyphony of viewpoint, and this opens onto one of the most unremarked aspects of this opera—its feminist bent. Despite being set in a thoroughly macho environment, Girls of the Golden West revolves around three powerful female personalities, and its climatic scene is the lynching of a Mexican woman for defending herself from a man trying to rape her. The frank, elucidating frontier letters of the fish-out-of-water Louise Clappe—under the pen name Dame Shirley—form the backbone of the libretto and are drawn from her published works, widely recognized as among the great American frontier chronicles of the 19th century. The Chinese prostitute Ah Sing performs the opera’s most remarkable act by purchasing her freedom, and her forceful entrepreneurial designs best any man in the story. And lastly there is the lynched Josefa, a woman whose quiet poise and grace are far too great for the indignities she is made to tolerate daily—her stabbing of a man out to rape her is as much a response to a lifetime of abuse as it is an act of self-defense. It is in these three women, who are each deeply affected by the far West, and who see much better than their male counterparts how their common struggles are obscured by false divides, that the opera shows us the kind of intersectionality that has been too often missing from politics in these divisive times.

Amid all this talk of racial justice, equality, and shared struggle, I would be remiss if I did not recognize what a white, elitist institution the opera is. The truth is, opera is something I can only occasionally enjoy because the price of the tickets are high, and even these prices are greatly reduced by enormous private donations. The extraordinarily wealthy patrons of the arts whose generosity subsidized the price of my ticket are, to judge by the sponsors profiled in the opera’s program, overwhelmingly white: this is an institution that is sustained, enjoyed, and perpetuated largely by upper–middle class and superrich whites. This racial and class divide continues on to the composers and performers: as the San Francisco Chronicle has reported, “The lack of ethnic and gender diversity among performers and even more critically among the composers whose work is represented on the programs of America’s symphony orchestras and opera companies has long been a stigma for classical music—one that neither the San Francisco Symphony nor the San Francisco Opera has remotely dodged.” This is obviously worthy of condemnation, and it must change, but I am cheered by the diversity of people I have seen at the San Francisco Opera audiences this year, as well as the great ethnic and gender diversity of the cast of Girls of the Golden West—dubbed by more than one critic as “the future of opera”—and I hope to see more and more of this diversity in the future of the opera in the Bay Area and nationwide.

As Josefa is being lynched at the end of Adam’s vast monument to the history of America, the action pauses for a moment as this gracious woman spreads her arms magnificently and asks God to forgive those who are murdering her. It is a radical act of empathy that cuts to the core of the community that we must have to endure as a nation, and which is being torn apart right now by animosity. In all frankness, I wish I could muster today the grace that Josefa shows in forgiving the racism and resentment that will soon destroy her; it is not yet a thing I have the capacity for in these dark times, but it is a thing we need and that we must be ready for if we are to climb out of these national depths and become again a nation worthy of the greatness so many claim.

And perhaps this gesture is why I ultimately find the California Gold Rush an inspiration, however unsteady and problematic. Out of this lawlessness, villainy, limitless potential, beauty, murder, courage, cowardice, pillaging, understanding, hatred, hope, ignorance, and genius came one of the most storied and inspiring places on Earth: California, a state that currently stands as a beacon in these days when we have so much reason to doubt the future of our country. It is my home and I have immense pride in it, even though I know intimately many of its damning failures. It is a place that, when I was young, instituted the racist “3 Strikes” law and cut off medical support to undocumented immigrants, but that over my lifetime has attempted to correct many of these terrible mistakes and that has edged more and more toward equality and tolerance.

In a word, it gives me hope, and as this disturbing and terribly painful year draws to a close, I would like to direct your attention to Josefa: well aware that an angry and race-baited mob of white men will soon come to murder her, she calmly attires herself in a rich gown, resplendently braids her hair, adorns herself with magnificent jewels and precious metals. She is noble and magnificent. It is in this form that she meets a mob of ragtag ignorance, calmly beseeching God to grant them grace. In a world that was not yet good enough for someone of her character, she exercised the only choice remaining to her: to die with dignity, making it clear to those who came to murder her that they were killing somebody morally superior to themselves.

I thank Adams for sharing her story at a time when we are perhaps ready for her moral rectitude to at last triumph over those who unjustly ended her life. I reflect on Josefa, and I see that though we are disempowered—though we cannot stop the Republicans from ramming through a disastrous and repugnant giveaway to the superrich, though we cannot make the GOP fund essential health care for impoverished children, and though we cannot prevent Kellyanne Conway on Fox News from slurring Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump as an “attempted coup”—we do have the power to present a vision of moral superiority for history to remember. And as we fight to resist this awful misrule and reclaim our country, to everybody who is today struggling for the soul of this nation, I think of you with opulence.

You are the greatness of America—you are pristine and gorgeous as you engage in the most important work that anybody can undertake. Be aware, this is not work that will end once this ruinous Presidency is over, nor will it conclude once this feckless Congress has been voted out of office and its inhumane and degrading laws overturned. This is the work of a lifetime. I am here for that struggle, and I hope you are too.

Reading to Fuel the Struggles Ahead

The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851-1852 by Louise Clappe
*
History Is Our Mother: Three Libretti: Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, The Magic Flute by Alice Goodman
*
Letters to Memory by Karen Tei Yamashita
*
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
*
About Looking by John Berger
*
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño (tr. Chris Andrews)

I cannot tell you how much I depend on Tony Judt these days. When it came to 20th-century Europe, Judt was without peer. He illuminated the rise of fascism, the triumph of democracy, why the right took power in some places, the left in others. As our contemporary politics gets more and more ominous, his books loom larger in my mind.

Before he died in 2010 of ALS, Judt gave us at least one indispensible book. It is the masterwork known as Postwar, a titanic effort that in 900 pages narrates the six decades in which Europe recoiled from Armageddon and built a prosperous, united continent. This book is the very first thing I would put into the hands of anyone who asked me to explain where our current politics comes from and why so many of our leaders are striving to tear apart the fine civilization that was built in the wake of history’s worst war.

I would then suggest they read Judt’s remarkably prescient collection of essays. He knew just how fragile were the prosperity and peace the West had managed to build, and, in fact, in a 2008 essay he warned that “fear is re-emerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies . . . the politics of insecurity are dangerous.” Had he lived to see the rise of Donald Trump, Theresa May, and their fellow autocrats, he would surely have known that he was proven correct.

Judt was that increasingly rare thing—a true public intellectual who possessed the rigor of the academy but could write for a general audience—and he was only possible because his reading was boundless. Look through his work and you will find, among others: Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian; Primo Levi, an Italian; Hannah Arendt, a German; Albert Camus, a Frenchman; Leszek Kołakowski, a Pole; Amos Elon, an Israeli; Edward Said, a Palestinian. You will see familiarity with Romanian periodicals, with Russian history, with the oft-neglected Belgium, with philosophers of every stripe. Judt was such a voracious reader that for his 13th birthday he received a three-volume study on Trotsky, and demolished it.

Judt inspires me to never stop broadening my boundaries as a reader, and this is something we all need to do these days. It has become a cliché to say that we live in a globalized world—we drink coffee that was grown in Central America, use smartphones whose components are manufactured in dozens of nations, eat cuisine from every corner of the earth, apply Korean beauty products, drink wine from Australia, outsource our customer service to India, and of course wear clothes made in too many nations to name. But only a tiny amount of the books found in our bookstores come from countries other than the United States, largely because our publishers choose to publish so few every year.

It makes no sense to me that we live in a globalized world but seek to understand it through largely monocultural reading. Tony Judt’s astounding knowledge was only possible through a lifetime of globe-spanning curiosity, and his masterful ideas on European and American history were only possible because of what he read. If we do not follow him in reading beyond our borders we will have no chance of comprehending—much less solving—the problems our culture(s) faces today.

The Scottish author A.L. Kennedy said as much when she recently excoriated risk-adverse British publishers for their xenophobia: “Europe reads us, although we don’t return the favor. Britain has little appetite for foreign work. Or, perhaps more accurately, British publishing has little appetite for foreign work.” Kennedy elevated her critique from a purely literary accusation to a political one, calling the lack of foreign literature “dangerous” to Britain and linking this failure to Prime Minister Theresa May’s blatantly anti-immigrant, anti-Europe rhetoric. At length, she celebrated everything readers have to gain by reading beyond their borders:

For more most of my lifetime as a writer, less than five percent of all our books printed in any year are translated from any language. I am a writer built out of Chekhov, Calvino, Levi, Perucho, Vian, Alfau and so many other terribly foreign and European voices. I am writer who walked in Paris, in Moscow, in Granada and had, in a dreamlike way, already been there in books and books and books. There was no culture shock, there was only a larger and larger culture, echoing and debating and rippling before and behind.

It is not hard to see the same critique applying to the rise of Donald Trump in the States. We know that the places where foreign literature tends to do well are generally more diverse, more open to outsiders, and more curious to know about the lives of others. We likewise know that in those places that celebrate diversity Trump fared horribly, whereas in places uneasy with foreigners he scored large victories.

I do not mean to be preachy. I have worked with translated literature for many years, and in that time I’ve heard more than enough dutiful statements about the grave importance of cultural exchange. I never suggest that someone read a book because it’s “good for you,” and I never do so myself. First and foremost, I read so much international literature because it is what appeals to me—I don’t do it to support a political agenda, nor from a sense of personal obligation.

I am simply curious about the way people live elsewhere, and I deeply believe that I have much to gain from the insight people in other societies have brought to the common dilemmas faced by all. No group has a monopoly on the right answers to timeless quandaries, and we would be foolish not to learn from each other’s experiences. Furthermore, we can only put together the full picture—as Judt so masterfully did—if we possess all of the pieces. It is only through world literature that I have come to even partially understand the history that has occurred throughout the globe.

We also do poorly if we are not empathetic to the lives of other people, and in this realm words can be extraordinarily powerful. I think of the winter I visited Manzanar, one of the camps where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. Like everyone I had read about this sorry episode in our high school history textbook, and it didn’t make a terribly big impression. But to actually visit the site—and to read and hear the internee’s stories narrated in their own words—brought tears to my eyes. It has been almost four years and I have never stopped feeling dismay at all those lives ruined.

When you read a text you are entering into an intimate relationship with another person’s voice. The encounter requires all of your focus, and it often takes advantage of language’s unique capacity to engage all of your senses. The results can be profound.

Unfortunately, however, such profound experiences can only occur if the words are available to the reader. We in the publishing community have a responsibility to make a deep engagement with the whole world possible here in America. As readers, as publishers, as editors, as librarians, as booksellers, it is up to us to live up to this responsibility. I know that the forces currently seeking to tear us apart fear it when such eye-opening knowledge is spread, and they rest easy when we purvey monoculture that keeps our horizons narrow.

We must always challenge ourselves with books that take us outside of our comfort zone, showing us just how much we don’t know. It is a fact that foreign books have a particular affinity for doing just that. Let me provide one example: I was recently in Houston, where I spent some days with my good friend Mark Haber, who is a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore and who also leads a monthly reading group there. Mark told me about his experiences last summer, when for three months his group read and discussed Roberto Bolaño’s marvelous, thousand-page 2666. Mark first explained that many members of the group chose to read the book in the original Spanish, and I was surprised learn that Houston is so rich in passionate bilingual readers. He also told me that the group boasted Mexican immigrants, who provided particular insight into the large parts of the book that take place in Mexico. Of course there were also many monolingual Americans, no doubt thrilled to have so many original perspectives on this complex book.

To me, what sounded so special about the group was how people of different backgrounds came together around this enormous, global text, each being able to elucidate different parts based on their different backgrounds, experiences, and languages. That is one of the great things about books from foreign cultures: even while they remind native-born Americans how much there is to know about the world, they give outsiders an opportunity recognize their own particular knowledge. This process rips apart the typical dynamics that govern our ideas of citizens and foreigners, opening up spaces for conversations between people of different cultures.

Of course, these conversations can only take place if the books are available. Having worked so long with world literature, I am familiar with all of the arguments about why such books are risky, and why they cost more to produce than home-grown literature. I am sympathetic to these arguments, and I know as well as anyone that publishers survive on razor-thin margins. Still, I would like to ask that we do better. Yes, there is a risk and a cost to doing foreign books, but isn’t the risk and the cost much higher in denying the next Tony Judt the books necessary to feed his or her young imagination? And isn’t the payoff to living in a nation rich with the world’s stories so much greater that just a little more profit on the ledger?

A Few Books for Piecing Together How the World Got Here

Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
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Reappraisals by Tony Judt
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Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty (tr. Arthur Goldhammer)
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Wonderful, Wonderful Times by Elfriede Jelinek (tr. Michael Hulse)
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Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski (tr. Bill Johnston)
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River of Fire by Qurratulain Hyder (tr. by the author)
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Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka
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Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
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Dance on the Volcano by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (tr. Kaiama L. Glover)
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A Narco History by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace

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