On Reading Hard Things

I've mentioned my friend's blog here before.

I've recommended it because it's a good read, but it's a hard read.

But perhaps that "but" is out of place.  It's a hard read.  And that's part of why it's a good read.

Not all hard reads are good reads.  Heidegger was a hard read, but I never really broke past the "hard" to any sort of "good."  Nietzsche was a hard read, but I'm pretty sure Augustine already said it all, and better.  Derrida was a hard read, but I'm very sure my time was better spent reading Sarah Coakley.  I remember picking up some book at the library--I can't remember the title or author--that was hard because it was the memoir of an adult survivor of childhood abuse.  I think it was meant to break on through to "good," because the woman did survive.  But she was still so profoundly broken that I was left with nothing to do but weep for her.  Her very survival was nihilistic, dead.

But some hard reads are good reads.  Thomas is a hard read, until you read him enough that he's all of a sudden wonderful and not hard at all (until you read some Thomists, who manage to make Thomas almost impossible to read).  David Bentley Hart is a hard read if you don't have your unabridged OED handy, but if you persevere, you learn something, and it's nice to be able actually to feel your brain cells growing.

I don't think I've done nearly enough hard reading lately.

Except for my friend's blog.  My friend's blog is a hard read, because honesty is hard.  It's a hard read because suffering--real suffering, the kind you don't normally want to blog about--is hard.  It's a hard read because living in a world where babies don't always outlive their mamas is hard.

Many of the things I read that talk about hard things don't talk about them in the way that hard things deserve.

They move too quickly to a moral, to advice, to victim-blaming or -shaming of the sort that is meant to make us readers feel good about ourselves, to feel confident in our ability to avoid that sort of trouble, to write our internal story so that we are all always the hero who lives happily ever after, to assert our intellectual dominance over whatever biological or historical or theological reality may hold sway over us.

They give us the option of continuing on in our daily lives without really having to confront life.  The opiate of the masses is dispensed in blog entries and hip "news" outlets, from popular pulpits and the lecterns of elite universities, through moralizing television and patronizing cinema, and it consists in the experience of playing around with the idea of death just long enough to titillate us (whether with our fear of it, like a roller coaster, or with our lust to control it, like porn).  And then we are herded off to the moral, to the political platform, or to the smug contemplation of our superiority over those backwards folks who need the comfort of a moral or a political platform--children, all of us, doing our assigned worksheets after the teacher's lesson, busywork to keep us from the dread moment of contemplation.

There is nothing titillating about my friend's blog.  There's no playing around there.  Honesty like that does not allow for busywork after.