Getting a ‘Sense of the World’

In 1821, James Holman was blind when he traveled the world and followed his dreams, yet he still had the capacity to experience the environment more boldly and passionately than many of his peers. He was sightless, yes, but his vision remained quite clear. In Jason Roberts‘ stirring and inspiring biography, “A Sense of the World,” we embark on Holman’s journey toward self-fulfillment and satisfying his life’s ambitions. The man lost his sight at the age of 25, and yet he never allowed this tragic adversity to overcome him.

How many of us give up when faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, settling for a life of complacency and bitterness? While reading about Holman’s travails, I realized how easy it is for us to lose ourselves while trying so very hard to find ourselves. It’s ironic; we desire a life without pain, yet instead of making positive choices, we take the alternate route, a destructive path of self-inflicted agony and despair.

James Holman was blind, but he was unstoppable. He kept his dreams alive, and in turn, his dreams kept him alive.

Where have all the readers gone?

Does anyone read any more?

The conundrum isn’t all that puzzling, really — after all, I do live in Los Angeles. This is home of the entertainment business, not a literary mecca like New York or San Francisco. And yet I find myself asking the same questions each day. How can people not read books? I can’t imagine a life without them. Living in L.A. makes me yearn for a community of serious readers.

Literature seems even more valuable when you’ve spent time away from it. A couple of years ago, I was devoting all my time to improv comedy theatre, rehearsing with my team, watching shows, and performing at least once a week. I loved every minute of it, but something was missing. There was a void in me so deep that I began questioning everything around me. What am I doing? Why am I here? These are questions that I’m sure everyone has pondered at some point, but for me, the more I asked, the further I descended to an abyss of utter madness. Life felt like one heavy burden that I couldn’t lift.

I then realized something: I had stopped reading.

I looked through my bookshelf and pulled out Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays, How to be Alone. I had read it while I was in college, and reading it again, I remembered why I’ve always wanted to be a writer and why I love books. Reading allows one to connect with a community he or she may not be able to find elsewhere.

Franzen asks, “The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?”

It’s a question I’m sure many writers and readers will continue to ponder.

Subscribing to success

I recently subscribed to two magazines, Fast Company and Fortune, even though both are available for free online. There’s something different about holding the pages in your hand, as if somehow you can channel the wisdom and knowledge through your fingertips. Your own potential for success immediately seems more tangible, more possible, when you flip through the magazines and read those articles about the twenty-something entrepreneurs who carved a life out of practically nothing, or the start-up company that survived a succession of embarrassing mistakes. Fast Company’s May cover story about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was more than inspiring; it reaffirmed my belief that anyone who is talented and works hard will succeed, undoubtedly and inevitably. These are subscriptions not only to two worthwhile magazines, but to a powerful mindset.

‘Literary reading in dramatic decline’

I continue to bemoan the fact that almost no one I know reads books anymore. So has the National Endowment for the Arts, which reported in 2004 that “fewer than half of American adults” read literature today. The study, the NEA said, represented a “loss of 20 million potential readers.”

This is absolutely terrifying.

I love books. I love reading. I cannot imagine a world without books. I guarantee you that all of our great leaders would tell you that the knowledge gained through reading helped them, in some way or another, get to where they are today.

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”

– Barbara Tuchman

The NEA has taken action by forming The Big Read, an initiative to bring reading back to the center of American culture.