Not a good week for men of consequence. Certainly Catcher in the Rye is defining for any introspective person. I used to keep a copy of it tucked into the side of my loft bed between the mattress and the wood when I was in college. I haven't read it in quite awhile. I would like to say I am going to brush the dust off that old book and start it again. But we all know when I get home I am just going to watch Law and Order.
The loss of Howard Zinn this week has touched me even deeper. There are few writers whose prose is powerful enough to change someone's entire outlook; there are few books that have affected me so profoundly that I remember the extraordinary feeling of my mind opening as I read.
That is how it was for me when I first read A People's History of the United States. I was 17. I could hardly speak when I finished the first chapter. I remember sitting on my bed in the quiet of my thoughts. Tracing the stitching on the quilt covering my bed. Trying to process what I had just read. Knowing that I would never look at things quite the same again.
I was raised by educated people who encouraged critical thinking, no doubt. Nevertheless, until I read Zinn, I didn't realize how many ways one history could be told; how differently things are experienced; how the voices of the conquerors and the conquered have different intonations.
So thank you, Mr. Zinn, for your work and for your words.
1 comment:
man, you were so much more...thoughtful... than me on that front. I never really read any of the assignments out of that book, I just had Kelsey explain things to me in the class period before the test on those readings. It took me years of maturity to understand history in that way. I should probably go back and do some rereading.
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