This week, I graded my freshmen’s analyses of short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies.
Making my way through them, I felt two things: disappointment in the students’ readings and deep respect for Lahiri’s stories to withstand those poor readings and actually become deeper and more well-constructed than I had thought. I kept going back to the stories to see if they had the evidence that I felt was lacking in the students’ papers. Not only was the evidence there, it was always aesthetically handled. The stories were so much richer than the students were giving them credit for.
I thought of Zadie Smith’s line about reading as a way of playing a piece of music. You want your playing to match the beauty of the piece that’s been written. Here, to borrow a David Foster Wallace line, it appeared my students were being handed a piece fit for a Stradivarius and were using their glorious instrument to hammer nails.
True, violins can make nails go deeper into the surface you want them to go into…but it’s not efficient and it permanently damages the violin so that when you want to actually play music with it, you’re lost.
But in the midst of those feelings, I wondered about my own reading of scriptures. I believe that it’s true that God’s word always accomplishes its work, whether it brings us closer to God through the work of the Holy Spirit or confirms in our cold response to it just how much we need God. If I was honest about the way I read and used scripture on a day to day basis, I think I would be hammering away at nails with something far more valuable than a Stradivarius.
I pray for the wisdom to read God’s words well even more than I pray for my students to gain the ability to read a short story well. More than that, I pray for the power to live it out after reading it well.