College Reflective Essay

I did some significant thinking during the end of this last semester about reading, researching, scholarship, and the library. This culminated in an essay for my English Senior Seminar course on my reading experience at Wheaton. I was surprised by Dr. Jacobs resonse to my paper: he gave it a 98 and said, "Jason, this is a wonderfully intelligent, distinctive, and unusual essay — unusual because it's on a subject I don't recall anyone ever writing about (and one dear to my heart as well). You write vividly and clearly throughout and give a compelling picture of what can, and cannot, be managed as we gather more knowledge — and, we hope, more wisdom. Excellent!" Obviously this will be a long post, since I've copied the essay in full here. Follow the footnotes down to the end. Cheers!

English Senior Seminar

Dr. Alan Jacobs

4/17/09

The Reader and the Researcher: A Personal Reconciliation with the Library

Sitting at a Wheaton library computer with a combination of books and journals and articles on hand, strewn over each other to the right of the keyboard, I periodically switch between the book I am currently mining for insights and the Word Document that I have up to record my findings. Every few minutes I type out notes on the section I have just read or otherwise quote a passage entire, making sure to include the page number for easy reference later. By the time I am done I know I have over-researched, with more than twenty pages of notes for a simple 6-10 page paper on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. My Works Cited page includes Tim Keller’s recent book The Prodigal God, Ryken’s Words of Delight, Tissot’s article on Patristic Allegories of the parable, C. H. Dodd’s work on Jesus’ Parables, and Klynne Snodgrass’ hefty tome Stories with Intent An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus which served as our textbook for the class, to mention just a few. Later the next week when I finished off what I could do for the paper at the 10 page mark, I included the headings for the next issues that I had planned to deal with from what I discovered in my research, even though the paper stood on its own as it was, and provided a personal note to my professor on my hopes for further work on this topic in the future. Looking back at it now, not more than a month later, I realize that I have become a researcher. My manner of reading now would be unrecognizable to my high school self. Not only that, the library itself has become my home away from home in a way I never would have expected upon entering Wheaton College.

Though I was a reader throughout high school I never had a deep relationship with any local library. Most of the books I read growing up were books that my parents had in the house. I read books they had bought for me, or that they had recommended, or occasionally something I had picked out at a bookstore. I did not, as a general role, go to a library to check out books to read, nor would I study there after school¹. My dad had a fairly good library of Christian Living or Popular Theology literature, mostly dated to the 70s, but including some classics like E. M. Bounds’ books on prayer. During my later years of high school, I raided this collection and systematically devoured most of it. Other than the Christian bookstore, I had nowhere else seen a sizable collection of spiritual and theological works, which had come to occupy me during late high school in virtual replacement of my taste for fantasy. So when I visited Wheaton, you can understand the ground-breaking imaginative experience I had while touring the Wheaton library. I remember walking over to the library alone after the day’s activities from the house of a local resident that my dad and I were staying with. I spent at least half an hour just walking around the library mesmerized by the stacks and stacks of books that I wanted to read, but couldn’t. To be honest I was overawed and overwhelmed by the seemingly limitless shelves of “worthwhile” books. I had no way to process it all, no way to know where I might start.

What a contrast to my use of the library in my research on the Parable of the Prodigal Son! While I still have the problem of there being too much to read, and not enough time to do it in, my lens for what I consider “worthwhile” to read has significantly sharpened. I can clearly distinguish what I want (or need) to read, at least as regards present circumstances. By searching databases and consulting bibliographies for the Parable of the Prodigal Son paper, I was able to find a wide range of very helpful scholarly works that had been done on the exact subject I was concerned with. Browsing among the books at home in high school, I had no such lens and no necessity for it. I simply pulled off the shelf what I wanted to read at the time, and eventually tried to read everything that wasn’t unbearable. While it could be rightly pointed out that I had no intention of finding something to read that evening as I wandered about the library, this does not diminish the fact that my understanding of what reading entailed was remarkably shaken at that point by so large a presence of interesting books.

Considering this initial encounter with the library it is understandable that I avoided the library for much of my freshmen and sophomore years at Wheaton. In fact, I took pride in the fact that I almost never went to the library during those years. When I heard others talk about how they did homework in the library and would come back to their room late, I inwardly scoffed, preferring seclusion in my room with my manageable set of books on my shelf. I did all my studying at the desk in my Fischer dorm room, reading as I leaned back precariously on my chair or typing as I crouched forward absorbed in the screen of my laptop. There I was the master of my environment. Lining the shelf were only the required books for my classes and some of my favorites from high school, like Foster’s Celebration of Discipline or Lewis’ The Weight of Glory. I could quantify the knowledge I had there. It was manageable. The limitless shelves of the library, packed with books I knew nothing of, would have intimidated and distracted me at that stage. In my room I could read from Milton’s Paradise Lost in my Norton Anthology and ignore even the possibility of the shelves of literary criticism about it. I do not mean that I knowingly avoided the idea—I’m not even sure I ever consciously considered the possible expanse of secondary literature. I simply mean that something in me was subconsciously threatened by the expansive nature of the information contained in and symbolized by the library. It was unbearably wild in my imagination and so I avoided it out of ignorance, and in my ignorance praised my avoidance.

Another simpler reason for my library neglect was that it wasn’t necessary for most of the classes I was taking during those years. I didn’t take many upper division classes early on because of having two majors, not to mention Gen Eds. Much of my first two years was spent in the Greek and Hebrew introductory classes. In Greek, only Clayton Croy’s Grammar and my Greek New Testament were necessary for success. I made vocabulary cards for the prescribed words, memorized the paradigms taught, and scored high marks on every quiz and test. I kept all my homework and handouts well-organized in large binders, ordered in the precise sequence in which they were done or received. I did the same thing when I started Hebrew my sophomore year, likewise completing all the homework, memorizing all the paradigms and scoring near perfect marks. It was a defined body of information and it could all be successfully crammed in my head. I could and did master everything for those classes, and even today I have a 4.0 in my Ancient Languages major classes. I also still have the binders, and I’m sure they will be very helpful to me when I do get around to reviewing the grammar in the next year or so before I attend seminary.

I did not do this obsessively, nor did I have qualms over less than perfect marks. I was not perfectionistic, per se, but I relate this because I think there is something in all of us, and in some of us more than others, that is attracted to this quantifiability, this manageability of information. And there is some innocent part of us that dies when we come to a fuller realization that our efforts to quantify are, in some ultimate sense, doomed to fail. When I finally settled officially on being an English major during my sophomore year, this death became imminently inevitable. There is little that is less conducive to manageability than literary criticism.² In contrast, Ancient Languages study tends to focus more upon mastery of a defined corpus of literature. Reading tends to be slow and manageable; grammatical and lexical questions can dominate the discussion, and understanding comes by translation.

The seeds of reconciling myself to the unmanageability of information, chiefly envisioned in the reading of books, were of course planted in many other experiences than my English major, and Ancient Languages classes were no exception. For example, even in my Greek introductory classes I was also being introduced to just the basics of such fields as textual criticism. Imagining having all the manuscript evidence before me and the marvelous amount of time and effort it would take to be able to master it all such that I could myself determine with personal empirical confidence the best reading of a passage took its toll on my sense of the possibility of mastery. Textual criticism, though surely it must be done, became quickly undesirable to me, altering my perception of my own relationship to information. I had before somewhat subtly confounded the biblical knowledge, or wisdom, to use a more contrastive term, that I had gained from reading books with an idea of the mere accumulation of information. Ironically enough, to me reading books (even if they were of the most practical kind) fell under the category of learning information. Text criticism opened my eyes to the glaring fact that there were some types of information that I did not want, from a sense of personal vocation, to expend the time and effort to gain.

Time and effort were not the only constraints that began to attack my innocent love for manageability. Money, funds, resources were other important factors that I soon came to feel firsthand. Educational books, especially in some specialized field, can be extraordinarily expensive. My family’s own financial leaps and hurdles made me acutely aware of this. My Hebrew professor Dr. Graves would once talked to our class about his purchase of multivolume works over a period of years, adding up to sums in the upper hundreds of dollars. On a visit to the bookstore, I saw the price of more than $70 for the only offered version of the Septuagint, and I walked out of the bookstore without a glance backward. I was taking a quad class on the Septuagint at the beginning of my junior year, and instead of buying the book, I simply printed out the relevant portions from the free Bible software E-sword³ in Greek and got by that way. I have since done the same thing with Homer in both an Iliad and an Odyssey readings course, mostly because of money and the worth of such an investment in a critical text, but also because of the comparative usefulness of online resources like the Perseus Digital Library⁴. Likewise, when I was really strapped for money the previous year, I decided not to buy the history textbook for the Gen Ed history course. It is with some shame that I recount how after getting caught multiple times reading the book in the book store, the gracious bookstore manager gave me an old book that had been sold back but was missing the first three chapters. Since this was after the first test (which I had still got an ‘A’ on) that had included those chapters, that book made my life so much easier for the rest of that semester.

This awareness of the costs of education, as well as the costs of specialized knowledge in any field, had several effects on me that relate to my perception of reading and my relationship with the library. Knowing that I could easily go crazy at the Wheaton bookstore or the Christian bookstore back home, buying books that sounded interesting to me before I’d finished ones that I had, I made a vow to myself not to buy a new book for myself at anything near full price, except if it was required for class or reading with a small group or something like that⁵. What I did instead was raid the religion section of the corner of my library where cheap books were sold that had been donated by local customers. During the summers I visited fairly regularly to search this corner for good finds. Not everything I got was good reading, but I began to make quite a library for myself at the rates of $0.50 for a good hard back, a quarter for a dinky hardback or a nice paperback, and 6 for a dollar for the smaller paperbacks. These frequent trips to the library (even if I ignored the primary services that a library has to offer) began to alter my need for the manageability of books. My initial assumption of the general equality of worthwhile-ness among many books began to slowly disintegrate. I was regularly forcing myself to pick and choose what to buy and read, and thus developing standards of evaluation. After reading more in that genre I was more and more able to compare the good works with those that were not as good. Over the years I became increasingly skeptical of the relative value of the books I found there, buying less and less summer after summer. Ironically, my systematic approach to the manageability of my own personal library of books made this sort of acquisition no longer as desirable.

Meanwhile during the summer before my sophomore year, I started work on a Discipleship program in light of my plans to lead a Discipleship Small Group the following year. My method in putting together this program sheds some light on my complex relationship to these issues of reading, manageability, and the costs of learning. I used a small collection of 4-6 books, and drew quotations from them (usually other authors they quoted, but an occasional gold nugget from the book in front of me) concerning a certain spiritual discipline. I would aim for about a page of scripture quotations, with a space in between, and about a page of quotations from other writers, whether theologians, mystics or even secular writers in a few cases. But before this I had used primarily Richard Foster’s and Kent Hughes’ books on the spiritual disciplines to formulate my own theologically motivated system of the disciplines. I posited 24 disciplines, in sections of 4, and in each section a discipline fell under the category of relating to the Head, Heart, Hands or Feet (how we think, how we feel, what we do, where we go, all metaphorically envisioned of course). In order to do this I re-read. In effect I underwent a project of mastery of the best sources of information on Christian discipleship I had available. While ostensibly I created this program to ease the burden of reading a whole chapter of a book before small group discussion (that might be too class-like), I also used the process of re-reading and typing up quotations as an opportunity to master the material myself, in hopes of growing spiritually thereby. This was a meditative process for me and I continually reviewed this material, meditating on the words and ideas to come to a greater personal understanding and experience of the truths contained therein.

This all relates to the issues I have been raising in that I took a manageable amount of material, worked at mastering it, and summed it up to make it more manageable for others. Up till now I have only alluded to the negative effects of my desire for manageability, like my ignorance and neglect of the library and therefore inexperience of the type of reading that is a skill of the researcher. I do not think, however, that my desire for manageability was ultimately a misguided one. Information overload is a distinct possibility in this modern age. Yet it does carry dangers along with it, one of which might be expressed for instance in the criticism of one modern biographer of Augustine that he was “steeped too long in too few books”⁶. If I honestly look at the trajectory of my education as represented by my work on that Discipleship program, were it not for my liberal arts education at Wheaton, I’m sure the same could have become true of me. On the other hand, my program also represents a step toward the reading of a researcher. After all, I was engaging in research-like reading of texts, and the process of writing a research paper includes researching in a relatively narrowly defined body of literature. In fact, my method of reading and extracting pertinent quotes that I used in my paper on the Parable of the Prodigal Son was not all that distant from what I was doing in making the program on my own with no formal instruction.

While there is this continuity between my reading and study methods from my freshmen and sophomore year with my present ability to research, the critical leap came for me during the first semester of my junior year. Someone looking at my Wheaton experience might guess that moving out of Fischer dorm and into a Michigan avenue apartment made the difference for me. While it’s true that a further walk from campus has affected my study habits, especially living in an off-campus house this year, I don’t think on its own that would have reconciled me to the library. Instead, it was the annotated bibliography on Hamlet that was assigned in Dr. Ryken’s course on Shakespeare. The work I did on that assignment more than any other bridged the gap for me, not only leading me into a positive appreciation for the library but into the world of scholarly literature itself. The experience of reading articles was almost completely new to me at that point. The critical article is its own genre with its own conventions. Reading twelve articles on Hamlet from vastly different times and authors transferred me to a whole new dimension of the world of the academy. Further, it was an immensely helpful step in the learning process for me to only have to weigh in with these authors in a brief annotation during my first experience in this world. This prolonged focus on reading forced me to be a better reader than I probably would have been if I had been asked to construct a paper of my own right then. What I needed first was to enter in with wonder at what great resources I had available in the library, to read first with a listening ear rather than typing hands. Thus I was reconciled to the unmanageability of the library, even as for the first time it became, in its own way, manageable for me.

The library has become the solution to many of the dilemmas that plagued me in my pre-library days. It is the answer to one of the longings that prompted my work on the discipleship program, the longing for sustained and summative research on a topic with the goal of creatively contributing to the discussion of others. The library solves the dilemma of at least the tremendous monetary costs of education, since I can access a wealth of the most worthwhile literature out there for no personal cost at all. Moreover, my growing understanding of how libraries work has greatly contributed to my ability to navigate through the modern information overload. I am gaining more discernment as a reader, which has yielded a sense of confidence about how worthwhile I consider what I read. In these ways and more, my reconciliation with the library has flowered into a deep relationship that I will not soon forget or neglect.

1 A few times I did check out some books on vocal technique, since I had been taking some voice lessons in preparation for the high school musicals the following year. One or two of them I scrupulously read and learned quite a bit considering my level of ability and time in life.

2 I realize this need not be so in every institutional experience of literary study. Even accomplished scholars writing on a work may only consult criticism on the work written in recent history, say the last twenty to thirty years, and thus feel like they have a handle-hold on the work. I refer more broadly to the continual process of contextualization, engagement and appropriation in literary criticism that is limitlessly (at least hypothetically) encouraged at a place like Wheaton. I would be very surprised to hear a Wheaton professor claim to have mastered the Odyssey, for instance.

3 http://www.e-sword.net/. Other than Bible reading in multiple versions with study notes available, I have also used this for the great number of Christian classics available for free download. Electronic reading, even if harder on my eyes, has been one of the important methods I have used to cut costs.

4 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. This is a tremendous resource for study in the Classics, and they are even expanding much beyond that now.

5 I’ve kept this resolution. To my memory the largest personal investment I made in a non-required book was about $20 for a copy of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline for small group my Freshmen year, and that was only because the copy I had read in high school was my dad’s and remained in California. The second was about $10 for Kent Hughes’ Disciplines of a Godly Man, which I ended up using in writing my Discipleship program my sophomore year.

6 As quoted by Dr. Alan Jacobs in one of our class discussions.