Thoreau and His `Titmen'

Apropos of my posting yesterday on libraries and their willingness to pander to popular tastes, Thoreau again comes to my aid. This is from the chapter titled “Reading” in Walden:

“I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating of a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.”

Thoreau can be a prig. He is certainly a classic New England crank – a breed I know well and remain fond of. His tone here skirts snottiness but his reasoning remains sound. Those who, having read the Bible, feel no need to enjoy other worthy, worldly volumes can be usefully likened to readers who confine themselves to science fiction, automobile repair manuals or the novels of Anthony Trollope. These books have their merits. In fact, I love Trollope – a taste I developed only in middle age, and a good taste to have for he was hugely prolific. But I would never devote my attention exclusively to his novels.

Our culture faces a reading crisis – not merely the ability to translate symbols on a page, but to recognize which combinations of symbols are useful and beautiful and worthy of our attention. We are in danger of losing our past, that which is best about us. Libraries, once a redoubt of reading culture, have increasingly become part of the problem they, seemingly out of the best of intentions, purport to address. Extra copies of Stephen King and more computer screens tuned to video games – all at taxpayers’ expense -- solve nothing. A few pages later in “Reading,” Thoreau goes on:

“We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of titmen, and soar but little higher than the columns of the daily paper.”

First, a lexical clarification: My Webster’s Third defines “titman” as “a puny person; one stunted physically or mentally.” Thoreau, to my knowledge, was not a breast fetishist. “Titman” derives from “titmouse,” the small arboreal bird. Thoreau the naturalist obviously knew the avian connection, for he extends the metaphor by having his titmen “soar.”

When I read “children and feeble intellects,” I flash on the baffling phenomenon that is Harry Potter. In an age when librarians, teachers and parents point with self-satisfaction to Rowling’s swollen volumes as evidence of a renaissance in reading, I’m reminded, unexpectedly, of Karl Marx, who reasoned that quantity becomes quality in the later stages of capitalism. So as not to leave the impression that I am in any sense a Marxist, let us conclude with Thoreau:

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!”

If a flinty New Englander like Thoreau resorts to an exclamation point, we ought to pay attention.