Reading Through Your Own Experience

                            

  READING THROUGH YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE

Someone asked me once what I meant by a certain passage I had written in one of my books. I appreciated that she had read my book thoughtfully, but the question made me uncomfortable. "What do you think it means?" I asked.

She gave a thoughtful answer and asked, "Am I right?"

I smiled and nodded, but I'm still not sure if that's what I really meant. Over the years since that encounter I've often wondered what I meant by a lot of things I've written. Here's what I've come to believe: I don't want to tell you what I mean. I want you to understand what it means to you, my reader.

When I was a kid in school I loved to read. I read almost everything from westerns to history to adventure. I even read the cereal boxes and can labels. In school I always read the literature assignments and had another book or two I was reading at the same time, but I was turned off when it came to class discussions on our reading assignments. They almost always consisted of questions like, "What does the author mean by such and so?" Or "Who are the 'dark watchers' in Hemingway's story?"

It wasn't that I didn't know what those things meant to ME, but how could I  know what the author meant? I think she had written her story and invited me to understand it through my own experience.

Only once did I try to answer one of these questions from the teacher. We were reading poetry. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Father Time is flying. . ." I was a young high school junior, and I knew what that meant to me. "For the sword outlasts the sheath," Byron wrote. Those lines invited me to look across the years to that time when the bodies of my sap-green classmates and I would age and prevent us from doing those things we took for granted at the age of seventeen.

"What do you think the author means by that line, 'For the sword outlasts the sheath?'" our teacher asked. When she looked me in the eye and called my name, I told her what I thought. Luckily I minced a lot of words and didn't thoroughly embarrass myself. And even now, liberated by age and a much more open society, that's all I'm going to say.

Literature teachers still nag their students to read authors' minds with that question, "What does the author mean by thus and so?" To that question I still have that same sense of discomfort when asked what I meant by something I had written. I think I'm uncomfortable because the real question is "What does this mean to you?"


Several years ago I attended a weekend conference of Southwest History teachers. We had read Edward Abbey's book, "The Brave Cowboy," in preparation for watching the Hollywood film version called "Lonely Are the Brave," and discussing the film and the book throughout the day. I'm a fan of Abbey's work and the film version as well. At the end of the story the cowboy is lying injured by the side of the road after he and his horse had been hit by a semi truck.

A discussion ensued after watching the movie in our morning session. Most of us agreed that the cowboy probably died. After all, he had just been slammed into by a semi truck traveling at a high rate of speed. But one of the professors in our group began to dominate the discussion. He identified himself as an expert on Abbey's work, and announced confidently that the cowboy had not died because he appears later in another of Abbey's books.

After lunch we reassembled to discuss the book when who walked in but Edward Abbey himself. "I was over in Scottsdale and heard that you're discussing my favorite author. Do you mind if I sit in?" Of course we didn't mind; we were happy to have him.

Our Edward Abbey expert lost no time in confronting Abbey with the question of the cowboy's survival. Maybe he wanted Abbey to agree with him. "Ed, I've read all your work," he said, "and I believe that the cowboy did not die. So my question to you, Ed, is did the cowboy, in fact, die at the end of the story?"

Abbey gave him a forty-yard stare for a moment or two and said, "Damned if I know."