There was a time when I believed that books - novels, in particular - could change the way people thought about their world. Children from good homes in this day and age are raised with books; my house was certainly no exception. I wasn’t permitted to watch TV, and as a result I looked to the printed word for entertainment. I was a voracious reader because I had few other options - I owned no video game systems, and if I wanted to watch one of the few VHS tapes we owned I’d have to fiddle around with a TV that was a few years older than me. I was the sort of child whose bibliophile parents would have to scold me for reading too much, reading when I was supposed to be cleaning my room or eating dinner or doing my homework. And while they’d confiscate the books, it was always surprisingly easy to find them again.

Although my parents were probably stricter than most when it came to buying toys or clothes, I can’t recall a time when I did not order more books from the monthly book club than any other kid in the class - or probably the school. If it were a new game or air of ever-wider jeans my parents would generally stall until I’d given up - they weren’t tightfisted, but they would have preferred Brooks Brothers to JNCO. (JNCO, for those who missed it, was a jeans company that for a brief period in the 90’s was responsible for the unbelievably baggy jeans seen on so many otherwise intelligent children). Books, however, were a different story. I’d bring them a form from the mail order book service or take a trip to the bookstore, and on top of whatever I wanted to order or buy my father would circle or pick a few he knew I’d like. My mother’s role in all this was generally to fret about shelf space and threaten to give all my books away to the library, but I could tell that for both of them, the luxury of infinite books - not something they ever experienced as children - was the best gift they knew to give.

So for me books were always something to be respected and cherished. Like many kids of my age, I imagine, I snuck money out of my dad’s wallet or my mom’s purse, and like most I spent a good deal of it on candy (absolutely forbidden at my house). The rest, however - the rest I spent at the bookstore, buying classics that I had difficulty understanding but that I loved holding and striving to comprehend. I knew that most people didn’t look at books with the same awe as I did, though I’ve been fortunate throughout my life to meet friends who do, but it took me until late in my college career to realize how powerless books are. Certainly there have been books that have inspired action - entire generations of thinkers spent their lives trying to enact the concepts first discussed in Das Kapital, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been cited, perhaps apocryphally, as a cause of the Civil War. But there was a time, even fairly recently, that I believed that with a good novel people would see the world differently, that after experiencing Catch-22 they could never look at war as a rational enterprise or that after reading On The Road they wouldn’t feel a bit of wanderlust, of dissatisfaction with their day-to-day. W.H. Auden, in his beautiful elegy for Yeats, includes a beautiful defense of poetry - something I wish could be shouted at all the skeptics who’ve ever demanded to know the value of an English degree, or who insist upon the supremecy of the so-called “real world” over the world of books. “For poetry makes nothing happen,” he says, “it survives”

In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

What better defense can there be for any product of human endeavor than sheer survival and relevance? We still study the scientific findings of the ancient Greeks, but as a historical curiosity - yet any interested person, from any country, can open up a translation of Aristophanes and laugh without coaching. The ruins of great walls may still stand, testament to political divisions long since forgotten - but stories and poems from these times are enjoyed today with little more than a good historical foundation to pave the way. Good art needs to do nothing but physically survive the ravages of time in order to be appreciated anew.

Now I’m a young professional, and I feel a gulf between myself and my coworkers, something I can’t articulate. I am not generally sympathetic to the perennially unhappy or the cynical - most people are good people, they mean no harm - but I feel sometimes that I do not belong. I know the reason, I think. I know that I am most likely to enjoy spending time with those who have read books and who read books still, who prefer bookstores to cocktail parties, and such people are hard to find, even though I work amongst the literate and well educated. I’d like to shake the person next to me and give them a copy of a good book - not just any book but maybe a Tropic of Cancer or a Portrait of the Artist - and see the scales fall from their eyes. I’d like them to see that titles and salary rarely beget anything but more longing for the same, that life is short and best enjoyed with little expectation of one’s future. But I know no book exists that could do this. Poetry, after all, makes nothing happen. It just survives so that those of us who enjoy it can love it while we last.