Yet each time those glass tubes drop me at DeGaulle Airport’s door, I find myself switching not only languages, but personalities as well. My American persona just won’t do.

The taxi driver swivels his head, expecting precision in my direction-giving. I close down my open-mouthed smile — the French consider smiles goofy — set my forehead in furrowed-brow position, and move my lips vigorously as I respond. I stop at a French cafe for a drink and when the waiter greets me with a terse “Vous voulez, madame?” I take care to pronounce “citron presse” in four distinct syllables and to end my request with a period, rather than the Valley Girl question mark: “Lemonade, please?” — The French make their desires known as commands.

I’m careful to order items by the proper name of each item — not water but Evian, Badoit, or Perrier. Not bread but baguette, pain de campagne, ficelle, or boule. Not simply cheese but chevre, crotin, gruyere, or St. Andre. A vague “celui-la” (that over there) won’t do.

Leaving the cafe, I adjust my stride, as well. Back home, my walking style is a comfortable side-to-side lurch, arms churning, head tilted forward because I’m usually in a rush. In France, you may be in a rush but never show it. When I stroll along Parisian streets — “flaner dans les rues” — I pull myself erect, place each foot before the other, and sweep forward like a model on a runway.

I feel obliged to dress for France, as well. Parisian cafe loungers expect passersby to please the eye. One’s dress, hairdo and locomotive style must be chic enough to satisfy those seated. Sloppy Americans are an affront to the French — akin to tossed candy wrappers. My Navaho jewelry attracts attention although I try, like the French, to project indifference to that fact.

When it comes to fine dining, restraint may no longer be the rule. When the chef emerges from his kitchen to tour the dining hall, diners who approve of his art are expected to say so in dramatic terms. I once insulted a chef with a sincere “tres bon.” as the French diners called out “formidable,” “magnifique” and “bravo” as if to an opera star.

Silence, however, is de rigueur on guided tours. I learned this rule a few years ago when we took a tour of a silk mill that once doubled, during the 17 century, as a refuge for fleeing Protestants. Our guides spoke in elegant French and the tourists — all French except us, listened in respectful silence. I, however, responded like an American, gasping or laughing appreciatively at each amazing factor or amusing story. I even asked a question or two. The guide was disconcerted. She blanched, She lost track of her prepared remarks. The French tourists turned at stared. At me, the rude American.

Whether you’re expected to talk — or not — is not always clear to us Americans. In Vanves, a Paris suburb where I once briefly lived, I went to the neighborhood cafe each morning to call my husband — our apartment had no phone. Each time I’d enter the cafe, I’d feel a chill. The patronne, always busy with her customers, usually had her back to me. I’d wait silently until she turned around, then smile (big mistake), and request a “un jeton” (a telephone token). I’d make my call and leave quietly, trying to be no trouble.

After a month, I learned that cafe phones aren’t considered public amenities, but a customer-only service. To merit their use, I ought to have ordered at least a cup coffee. I then realized that her other customers called out “Bonjour mesdames, messieurs” upon entering, and “R’voir, ‘dames et ’sieurs” upon leaving. I tried using their call and response ritual — ordering “un expres” before using the phone. The patronne, back turned or not, returned my greeting. The chill melted.

The cafe regulars, in fact, turned out to be eager to talk. My grin just hadn’t been the right opener. I discovered conversational gambits that would suffice despite my minimal language skills: I’d offer an intriguing observation accompanied by a thoughtful frown o my face. Since all French people study philosophy in high school, they loved, as adults, pondering unanswerable questions. The cafe crowd and I soon launched into daily repartee.

Now, when I got to France, I slip smoothly into my French persona. By now, I know how to behave “comme il faut.”

But as soon as I step back onto American soil, I happily return to my American self, and revert once again to my loose-limbed walk, my casual talk, and my wide-mouthed, all-American grin.

Andrea Godshalk – www.azumera.com

I speak Americans for your own good. We must and shall be free, in spite of you. You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery, to enrich you and your children, but God will deliver us from under you. And woe, woe, will be, to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting. Throw away your fears and prejudices then and enlighten us and treat us like men, and we will like you more than we do now hate you. - David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 1830

People of color have written essays and memoirs about growing up with African, Latino/a, Native, Arab, Asian, South Asian, or Pacific Islander heritages in a country dominated by “white” (European heritage) people.

White people, however, rarely look at or write about the experience — and privileges of growing up White in America.

Bernestine Singley’s When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront their Personal Histories (Lawrence Hill Books: 2002) showed me that both white people and people of color are willing to examine their lives with regard to race, racism, and white skin privilege. So I started this grassroots project to collect these stories and I invite you to contribute yours.

As a co-facilitator of the adult education workshop, “White People Challenging Racism: Moving From Talk to Action,” I encourage participants, both white people and people of color, to write about their personal experiences in order to start the process of looking at racism and white skin privilege straight in they eye. I ask their permission to share their writings, and several have agreed to posting their pieces on this website as inspiration to others.

I welcome people of all heritages, ages, genders (men: please contribute!), and levels of writing expertise. Pieces can be short or long, as you can see from the pieces below that I’ve already collected. If you are interested in putting your experience down “in black and white,” please contact me at beckwithb@aol.com

His The People’s History of the United States, published in 1980, documents grassroots struggles for economic and racial justice, democracy, free speech, led by the people whom textbooks ordinarily describe as either mere victims or as dangerous agitators: women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. His 1994 memoir You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train chronicles his experience as a World War II Air Force bombardier, an historian, a Civil Rights and anti-war activist. Zinn spoke at our National Writers Union annual book party in 2005, focussing on the increasing challenges for writers in the face of wartime censorship, and encouraging writers to send 700-word op-ed pieces for the Progressive Media Project, which distributes them to publications around the country. As he said in his 1993 book, Failure to Quit, “When one voice speaks out against the conventional wisdom and is recognized as speaking truth, people are drawn out of their previous silence.”

He was both fierce and funny – and people listened and were moved to action. Howard would get up in front of an audience of 100 or 1000 or 100,000 with scraps of paper in his hands, mostly news items from the morning’s paper — and then he’d talk. He’d ponder aloud the deep import of such small news items, dig out the falsities and name the power dynamics. He would appear amused — and was always amusing — but also fierce in his belief that ordinary people are powerful and their voice must and will be heard. Here’s a quote from his memoir, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train:
No pitifully small picket line, no poorly attended meeting, no tossing out of an idea to an audience and even to an individual, should be scorned as insignificant.

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies but the complacency of their friends are precious catalysts for change.

When I think about why Zinn is so important to me, I think of how he often describes his own experience, his own complicity, his own gradual understanding of “what’s going on” (eg as WWII Air Force bomber, bombing people he couldn’t see, including the first napalm drops ever to be used in war, bombs that killed German soldiers AND french civilians), which is what I do when I speak about racism and white privilege.

I remember reading Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman’s 1978 A History of Women in America and realizing: ah, so women, 50% of the population, are part of history too, and the story of what most of us were doing over our country’s history is worthy of documentation.
That’s what Zinn did in his The People’s History of the United States. But he went further: he showed people seeking justice, building democracy, resisting warmongering. He was both fierce and funny – and people listened and were moved to action.

Howard would get up in front of an audience of 100 or 1000, with scraps of paper in his hands, mostly news items from the morning’s paper — and then he’d talk. He’d ponder aloud the deep import of such small news items, dig out the falsities and name the power dynamics. He would appear amused — and was always amusing — but also fierce in his belief that ordinary people are powerful and their voice must and will be heard.

When Zinn spoke at our book party in 2005, he focussed on the increasing challenges for writers in the face of wartime censorship. He also encouraged writers to send 700-word oped pieces for the Progressive Media Project, which distributes them to publications around the country.

Here’s a quote from his memoir, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train:

No pitifully small picket line,
no poorly attended meeting,
no tossing out of an idea
to an audience and even to an individual,
should be scorned as insignifiant.

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly
in defiance of dominant opinion
cannot be easily measured.
Those special people who speak out
in such a way as to shake up
not only the self-assurance of their enemies
but the complacency of their friends
are precious catalysts for change.

National Writers Union Treasurer and Boston Chapter Steering Committee member Jeanne Harnois posted on her blog a small incident from our 2005 book party
http://steadyblue.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/howard-zinn-omg/

Howard Zinn died Wednesday, January 26, 2010.

When I think about why Zinn is so important to me, I think of how he often describes his own experience, his own complicity, his own gradual understanding of “what’s going on” (eg as WWII Air Force bomber, bombing people he couldn’t see, including the first napalm drops ever to be used in war, bombs that killed German soldiers AND french civilians), which is what I do when I speak about racism and white privilege.

I remember reading Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman’s 1978 A History of Women in America and realizing: ah, so women, 50% of the population, are part of history too, and the story of what most of us were doing over our country’s history is worthy of documentation.
That’s what Zinn did in his The People’s History of the United States. But he went further: he showed people seeking justice, building democracy, resisting warmongering. He was both fierce and funny – and people listened and were moved to action.

Howard would get up in front of an audience of 100 or 1000, with scraps of paper in his hands, mostly news items from the morning’s paper — and then he’d talk. He’d ponder aloud the deep import of such small news items, dig out the falsities and name the power dynamics. He would appear amused — and was always amusing — but also fierce in his belief that ordinary people are powerful and their voice must and will be heard.

When Zinn spoke at our book party in 2005, he focussed on the increasing challenges for writers in the face of wartime censorship. He also encouraged writers to send 700-word oped pieces for the Progressive Media Project, which distributes them to publications around the country.

Here’s a quote from his memoir, You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train:

No pitifully small picket line,
no poorly attended meeting,
no tossing out of an idea
to an audience and even to an individual,
should be scorned as insignifiant.

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly
in defiance of dominant opinion
cannot be easily measured.
Those special people who speak out
in such a way as to shake up
not only the self-assurance of their enemies
but the complacency of their friends
are precious catalysts for change.

National Writers Union Treasurer and Boston Chapter Steering Committee member Jeanne Harnois posted on her blog a small incident from our 2005 book party
http://steadyblue.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/howard-zinn-omg/

Her large white home in Lowell brims with possessions. Old and new, large and small, bought and handcrafted. As the clutter grows, her spirits sink. She has no idea how to clear it out.

Doreen Doyle bounds up the steps of Solomont’s house on crisp autum, wearing white pants, white sneakers, white t-shirt and carrying a white bag. She looks like a visiting nurse but she’s not one: she does not see Solomont as sick. De-cluttering, Doyle believes, is a learnable skill. Doreen Doyle is a professional organizer of homes and offices. Her t-shirt, printed with the words “Get Organized,” declares her intent. She’s here to clear things up and out.

Solomont opens the door with a friendly smile that collapses into a weak sigh. “It’s too much,” she says, like a patient reporting symptoms. “I’m overwhelmed.” Her words bounce off Doyle, who’s immune to despair.

Doyle sweeps through the foyer, glancing sideways at her handiwork, as Solomont trails behind her. For years, 5-foot stacks of boxes, files and clothes teetered here. Visitors would come and Solomont would throw a blanket over the heap. The floor now gleams bright and empty. Doyle worked with Solomont to clear this space on an earlier visit. This is visit six, at $135 a session.

Solomont clears the diningroom table by shoving a jumble of papers and craftwork to the floor. Doyle spreads out a calendar — she figures that Solomont, an artist and craftsperson, needs visuals, not lists. Doyle maps a 6-month plan like a general plotting a troop advance. Solomont watches as intently as a patient awaiting a life-saving treatment.

Doyle ignores Solomont’s angst. She focusses instead on Solomont’s most pressing reason to clean up. She and her husband and three children are moving to Brookline to be closer to Boston. Their new house is smaller and more expensive. They must sell this place for top dollar. Cluttered property won’t sell, their real estate agent warned them. “Space sells,” he said.

“Let’s concentrate on that,” says Doyle. Solomont leans her head against the chair. Across the table, 100 costumed dolls crowd a 5-tiered cabinet. Next to her, a throng of photographs, craft pieces, and candlesticks jostle for space on a sidebar. Behind her, silver and china obscure one another behind the glass of a large cabinet. She’s exhausted already, at 9 a.m., by the burden of her overflowing worldly goods.

Each surface of Solomont’s house, except for areas Doyle has tackled on previous visits, is over-occupied. All good stuff, just too much of it.

“Today we attack the attic,” Doyle announces. She pulls on white rubber gloves as if preparing for surgery. She climbs up past boxes and bags that block the stairs. Solmont follows her, shoulders slumped.

On the landing, Doyle surveys what’s visible of the scene. Boxes and furniture parts fill the chilly space, in some places, halfway to the ceiling. “I’ve never opened the boxes over there,” says Solmont. “My grandparents sent me family stuff; I have to keep them.”

Doyle picks out a single dusty box, the one closest to her. “Sort this,” she says. “I will make a walkaround.” She thrusts a clean empty box into Solomont’s hand “for keepers” and a large black garbage bag for throwaways.

Solomont is a keeper. Her husband, Ari, is not. “What he’s got is what he uses,” says Sarah Solomont. “He’s got no problem getting rid of things.” During the first years of their marriage, they argued about the messy house. “I told Ari,” says Solmont, “‘That’s who I am. You have to live with it.’” He loved her, he accepted her, he stopped complaining.

Recently, however, her overstocked started to weigh on Sarah Solomont. She decided to pare things down. Theoretically, at least.

Doyle wades into the central thicket of boxes and bags. She grabs the nearest containers, opens their flaps, calculates their contents, and lines them up by category in separate corners where she will place others of each sort. Within minutes, she’s created order from chaos.

Solomont, planted before her assigned box, holds up a set of Barbie dolls. Doyle watches from across the room. “Their head’s are missing,” Doyle points out. “But they’re my Barbies!” says Solomont. “I would never throw them out!” She places each headless torso in the “keep” box. She adds a sewing box from her junior high home ec class, her collection of Seventeen magazines (”some seventh grade girls came over and saw these — they were in heaven!”), and a pile of “skinny clothes” that she wants to keep “in case I lose weight.” She holds up a teddy bear dressed in frayed lace, a wedding present, she says. “Too bad I didn’t keep it nice.” Perhaps she can mend it. She finds some tissue and lays it carefully beside the “skinny clothes.”

Solomont is not a careless person. She keeps a kosher kitchen, carefully separating two sets of dishes, cutlery, cooking pans and utensils, with which she separately prepares meat and dairy dishes. Last May, she earned a Masters Degree in expressive therapies, a program she pursued for five years while raising her son and two daughters and volunteering for a Visiting Moms program. Her thesis illustrates several of her own art work — dynamic, colorful, well-constructed pieces, none cluttered.

Doyle is a do-er. She delights in sorting, filing, throwing out. “It’s my Irish nature,” she says. Her father would tell her, “All you need is two dresses: one to wear, and one to wash.” As for keeping things for memory’s sake, he’d say, “Who cares. We’ll all be dead tomorrow.”

Solomont ponders an album whose pages are stiff and mildewed. Droppings coat its cover. She gives it up to the discard bag. Next, she ponders a tangle of old pantihose. After a wistful remark — “I could make sock dolls of these” — she lets them fall atop the album. Two small victories for decluttering.

“This can go, right?” Doyle says as she lugs a broken bamboo screen into view. “That’s from my childhood,” says Solomont. “We lived in Thailand until I was three. When we left, we couldn’t get the screen out of the house, so my father sawed it in half. I can’t let THAT go.”

Dustballs cling to Doyle’s t-shirt. She’s sweating, but the attic looks larger than it did an hour ago. She’s separated china from toys from clothes from furniture. She’s cleared a path for Solomont to move through. Doyle points out three boxes: “That’s your homework for next week,” she says, reassuring Solmont that they’re only half full.

Solomont has picked up a sheaf of her children’s schoolwork. She slowly scans each paper. She keeps her kids’ handwritten stories,discarding only rote “color-this-circle” projects. The rejected papers drift from her reluctant fingers into the box like petals thrown into a coffin. “It breaks my heart to do this,” she says.

Doyle sneezes. Solomont mourns. Her “keep box” is full; her garbage bag of throwaways is not.

It’s hard for an outsider to see progress. But Solomont is satisfied. She’s “done” the sock drawer, the mitten drawer, and the canned goods bin. She’s organized the medicine cabinet, cleared the basement playroom of broken toys. She’s transformed a junk-filled kitchen corner into an efficient “messaging center.” She’s organized her 100 hats.

Now Solomont worries that her children are copying her packrat habits. Her daughters, who are five and seven years old, have been walking around the house with bags full of other bags, purses, dolls, papers, utensils. “They look like bag ladies,” she says. Last night, her 11-year-old son grabbed a used-up glue container she was about to drop in the trash. “I can use this for a project!” he declared. She’s alarmed.

Sarah Solomont is not Doreen Doyle’s most cluttered client. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d put Sarah at three or four,” shesays. “But she’s high on the anxiety scale.”

It’s easy to psychologize. Clutterers are holding onto ghosts. They’re stuck in the past. They substitute things for feelings. They’re afraid to face the future — or themselves.

Doreen Doyle does not assume pathology. Howard Hughes, she says, may have qualified for psychiatric help — he hoarded his fingernail and saved his urine, but only a small percentage of her clients need therapy more than practical help.

Solomont says her messiness is left-over rebellion. Her mother, she says, was a perfectionist who would “ground” her when she left her room a mess. “Messy was bad to her, and I internalized that,” says Solomont. Doyle listens but doesn’t judge her, says Solomont, so she’s getting over that adolescent rebellion. “It’s just like therapy,” says Solomont, “except you can see the results.”

For craftspeople like Solomont, things ARE important. Momentoes — including sawed-up screens and Barbie dolls — conjure up memories. The stuff our grandparents gave us to keep cannot be discarded lightly. The things our children make are to be cherished.

Lately, however, Solomont has gotten a glimpse of the pleasures of spaciousness. She wrote her thesis not in her home, which she found to distracting, but in the foyer of the nearby Sheraton Hotel, where she discovered she concentrated best in empty spaces. Writing that thesis on the relationship between her life and her art also forced her to pare down. At first, she says, “I wanted to put everything in.” Later, she dared to select, organize, prune. She likes the results.

Where IS her art work? Is it those two sculptures on the
sidebar? No, says Solomont. “A 14-year-old boy I worked with who was very depressed, made these.” The boy used to break any of his creations that drew praise. “He would have destroyed these as well, if I hadn’t kept them. They’re precious to me.”

Sarah Solomont’s own art work is on display in her home, but it’s almost impossible to see. She placed two thesis project pieces — a clay figure and an assemblage of tree branches, shells, clay and ribbon — on her livingroom mantlepiece. But she arranged a family photo in front that blocks her art from view.

Doreen Doyle sees that mantlepiece, that photograph, that art. The livingroom is part of her 6-month plan. Meanwhile, she watches as Sarah Solomont very slowly and in her own time, falls in love with space.

Each year at holiday gift-buying time, my husband and I debate list-swapping, and I win. Lists make me feel like I’m grocery shopping — get me some toothpaste, will you, dear? I let my husband and sons swap lists, and watch them check off each item bought, highlighting those as yet unpurchased. To me, the fun of giving gifts lies in intuiting what the other person might like.

Each year, I set my jaw and refuse to THINK about shopping until December first, resisting stores attempts to start the Christmas shopping season two weeks before Thanksgiving. Then, I panic, picturing crows of shoppers and serpentine UPS lines — will my packages reach family members in Florida, Pennsylvania and Oregon in time?

Then there’s the decision to make: do I give my relative something I know they can use — more golf balls for my golf-loving father, or do I give something of myself? The latter can backfire: I sent my sister my favorite novels for years until she finally told me she reads only non-fiction and they’d stayed unread.

That’s the trouble with far-flung family. You lose track of the whole. Younger sister: art teacher, mother of two, too buys to read, house full of stuff, amateur photographer. Do I buy her film, paint brushes, an advice book on parenting on clearing your house of junk? No, my sister is more than categories. And what she and I have between us can’t be reduced to commercial exchange. It’s sitting over coffee after the kids have gone to bed. It’s swapping gossip until we break through to new perspectives. It’s laughing loud and late into the night.

So I skip the mall and instead scour crafts fairs, where people at least have sewed the pillows they’re selling, baked the cakes in their own ovens, grown the herbs in their gardens. But I find that even that won’t do. I don’t want to piece of someone else’s family. I want my OWN family together again.

So I create something to bring my family close. One year, I made a family cookbook, which got me calling each family member to get their recipes. Another year I asked each relative to write down what they do on an ordinary day, and made a booklet, called Our Ordinary Days, that brought us close to each other’s daily, if far-flung, lives. A third time I gathered funny things we all said as kids and made a “Smart & Silly Book” drawn covering four generations. The next year I made a music tape, with my parents’ harmonizing caught on 1940s on vinyl, to piano, flute and recorder pieces, both amateur and professional, to the melodic babble of our newest family member. And one year I sent each family member cloth and directions for making a quilt square , then sewed them into a family-made quilt.

We may have scattered across the country and settled down in a half-dozen states. But at holiday time, I keep finding ways to sew the patchwork of us back together into a seamless whole.

Clearly, I’m no undergraduate: that was decades ago. Yet I am drawn to this place. At least twice a year I wander its aisles, looking for what I may be missing.

The no-frills warehouse look pleases me: its makeshift shelving, florescent lights, noisy air conditioner, absence of musak, the plastic signs on which are stamped cryptic course codes: EC, DIP, REL – most of which designate fields I neglected to explore during my four English literature focussed years.

Overhead lights expose my every move, so I stride through the aisles as if with purpose, and scan the shelves as if looking for my professor’s course code. My actual goal is obscure, even to me.

I lift a thick textbook as if to gauge its depth by its heft. I finger the glossy edition of a classic. I run my hands over thin monographs, lovely as silk scarves. I admire even the spartan jackets of academic press books. They can afford to be plain: they’re required reading.

This place reminds me of the cramped dorm room where I puzzled over Chaucer’s Middle English. It invokes the mechanical whir of the laundryroom where I considered Sartre, Blake and Montaigne while my blouses tossed. It conjures up the tree on campus where propped on my favorite branch, I wrestled with realism, idealism, and existentialism.

I no longer read in trees. I’m busy and earthbound. I read now by choice and whim. As a writer, I skim for background on topics that vary from month to month. I’m a generalist: I know just a little about a lot. But here in Cambridge, surrounded by specialists, I sometimes question my chosen route. So I come here, periodically, to peer over the shoulders of scholars who spend a lifetime exploring a single subject — as I have not.

I scan the textbooks on subjects I bypassed in college: botany, physics, Chinese, astronomy. Molecular biology — my husband’s inscrutable field. I ponder the assigned reading for courses not offered in my era: The Medieval Torah, The Afrocentric Ideal, Environmental Ethics, and Arabic for Beginners.

I spot a “coursepack” for Harvard’s Thinking About Thinking course: 300 pages badly copied from two dozen journals. I’d love to have to read this dense prose — but I would need the pressure of a professor’s next day questions to get me to do so.

Finally, I drift to familiar grounds — the literature shelves. I recognize the authors — Aeschylus, Moliere, Yeats, Woolf — but not the book jackets. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs no longer is bound by the plain grey cover I remember — this new edition’s lush watercolor landscape misleads. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom’s hologram-like cover, eye-catching, does not suit. The jacket of Walden II has been changed to attract 1990s readers, a practical adaptation of the sort B.F. Skinner would approve, but I don’t.

Thirty years ago, I was forced by “distribution requirements” to see the world in new ways. In my four college years, I looked through the lens of philosophers, sociologists, artists. I tasted Beethoveen’s symphonies, tackled Olde English, delved deep into modern theater. My mind stretched and strained. Then I joined the general public.

Books are no longer homework. I read now for relaxation, inspiration, personal passions. For 30 years, I’ve indulged my prejudices, pro and con. I give a book just a few pages to entice. If the opening scene does not draw me in, I chuck it, often shunning, along with it, the rest of its genre. After a single irritating encounter with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez years ago, I abandoned magical realism for decades, which I realize led me to be ignorant of Isabel Allende and Toni Morrison, as well. After rejecting suburban life for the city, I abandoned Updike and Cheever.

I read out of passion for a topic that seizes my attention and time. The French Resistance during World War II, with its questions about who acts and who doesn’t. I dig into library recesses, struggle with academic theory, work through, dictionary at my side, books written in french, pursuing the human drama. Then my passion wanes, and is taken up by the mysteries of Anasazi rock art. I study maps, track down monographs, survive a flash flood in pursuit of desert pictograph mysteries. After each of my love affairs of the mind, I am a different person.

But part of me yearns for a syllabus. On my own, I can so easily ignore wide swaths of knowledge with impunity. I know that the mind is a muscle: it gets stronger when pressed by an outside force, against which it resists before it gives in. I want Required Reading’s rigor.

The literature section hold books by some writers whose works I have uncovered on my own over the years: Edith Wharton, Paule Marshall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chinua Achebe, all now certified as Great Literature by their presence here. I spot a book I have not read, Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, and note that it appears on the Literature, Psychology, and European History shelves. I like that. I want this book. I must have it.

After an hour academic voyeurism, I find myself carrying a half-dozen books in my arms, as if my body might absorb their contents. Most I return to their shelves, but three I keep: the testimony of a Resistance fighter, a textbook on environmental ethics, and a novel by a Dutch writer whose name I have never until now encountered. The book’s dull academic cover stands out from the gaudy trades — but holds, perhaps, my next discovery.

I approach the check-out desk shyly, but the cashier does not ask me for my student i.d. I’ve passed. Maybe I am a scholar, after all.