‘Here are ten goats’

"Here are ten goats." That’s all we could dig up from what a Syrian farmer handed down to us, yet it is because he wrote that that I can now refer to him and share this piece with you, 6,000 years after he carved that in stone. My Christmas columns are supposed to be reflective of something that I share with my readers so, whether you have room or not, it will be livestock this year.

The farmer wrote that over 6,000 years ago in two stone tablets in Syria. This was a number of millennia before it was written that men could have dominion over all, before lawyers thought of having legal documents to cover livestock, before the written fables, and long before any treatise on animal domestication. His "note" was among the oldest writings we have so far uncovered and it said, without any apparent flare: "Here are ten goats."

Yet, with that very act, human thought was represented, and from then became relentless, raging to be etched in whatever was the slate of the times, giving birth to the record of human experience and imagination. Through directed scratches in rocks and stones, and through the inked parade of thoughts that flowed in papyrus, parchment and pulp, in the shape and form of scrolls, codices, books, microfiche and now electronic hypertext that have withstood thousands of years of changing climes and fortunes, we gave the lives and thoughts of a given civilization an existence far beyond its own lifetime. And this was kept alive by its parallel human enterprise: reading.

Reading is the other side of the wall of real life – I have heard people say that. They seem to think that when one reads, it is only to escape, to amuse oneself or to kill time. Many also say that reading is a luxury that it is only for those who have money to feed one’s fancies with such inked expositions. And what about those who cannot read? What use are these recorded expressions of our humanity to them?

Yes, we read to escape – to escape the clutches of ignorance and the relentless assault of daily emergencies on our humanity. Yes, we read to amuse ourselves that the ones we have held so off-limits to human imagination are now within our reach, for our own self-discovery and understanding. We read to laugh at ourselves so that these same selves will not be slain by the gravity of our own self-pounding. We read to kill time – time that is being spent gossiping and talking about the inconsequential.

Owning books does not make one a reader, but dwelling in them does, engaging them with the mind that has come to evolve to read minds that come alive in print telling us how they lived, made love, rejoiced, rebelled, hated, slaughtered, forgave, sacrificed, how they imagined themselves and us, the ones they never met. Reading is an act acknowledging before ourselves that no matter how much we try to cling with every fiber of our being to the memories we hold dear, all our memories will eventually leave us. But they can be left for others to read. They can be left for others so they could live. "We read in order to live" – Gustav Flaubert said that, which made me think of reading as a breath that the mind takes. So if reading is breath, how can reading be a luxury?

A couple of years ago, I sat on a city park in Ecuador and saw Ecuadorian native Indians in their best Sunday clothes gathered around a wooden cart. These folk spend all the other days of the week tending to their mountain farms and livestock. But on Sundays, they would go to the park and rent a book to read all day for one peso. These people, with their calloused hands and sun-drenched skin all holding a book to read – to dwell in a piece of our humanity between covers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the hands of a Latin American peasant reader seemed ready to come out of his one-hundred-year solitude, with hands clasped near his heart triumphantly affirming what is so deep in our humanity – our need to know and imagine so much more than what our daily lives routinely offer.

And those who cannot read? Sometime in 1865, something that happened in a cigar factory called Figaro in Cuba showed us that illiteracy is not an excuse for not reading. Most of the cigar factory workers could not read but under the necessary toil to survive, they harbored the same yearning to know and understand more, either for pleasure or purpose. The factory then hired readers who would read literary works and news aloud to the factory workers as they worked. The workers even contributed out of their wages so that the practice would not stop. This says so much about how we can care for each other’s minds – we can read to each other.

And even in the worst of times like one October day in 1940 in London where three men were inside a bombed library, each frozen in an act of searching. I was looking at this picture spread in Alberto Manguel’s History of Reading (Penguin Books, NY: 1996) just as I learned so many of these things I am telling you now about "reading."  Manguel observed, "They are not turning their backs on the war, or ignoring the destruction. They are not choosing the books over life outside. They are trying to persist against the obvious odds; they are asserting a common right to ask; they are attempting to find once again – among the ruins, in the astonished recognition that reading sometimes grants – an understanding."

When we read, we assert that human life is so much richer than the stories we are told on television or by the realities that supposed reality TV shows render; that we do not need a camera and microphone in every life to confirm that our lives are worthwhile. When we read, we arrive at our own lives with every punctuation we encounter. When we read, we know that there is a whole chain of a struggle in history to understand the complexity of human lives and relationships and that despite how dark and murky the present seems to be, somewhere in the silent libraries, there is a breathing lesson of hope for the future of humanity with which we could inspire our own breaths.

I am writing and reading this piece to you as it is written in light, on my screen as you may all be reading all other messages of hope this season. I offer the remembrance of a Syrian farmer and his livestock and I offer hope, hope grounded on reading – the breaths our minds take – so we could understand ourselves, each other and the world more.

Read. Live.

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