Education

On the consequences of Cornel West

A book documenting the experience of a rich Brazilian woman staring at a cockroach is more important to me than any American president. That’s what literature provides: life extricated from its practical failures. I care more about poetry than systems because art quickens life and power deadens it. The Janus of now is money and law, concepts whose lies bar us from knowing our needs and capacities, those facts whose nexus is our given gift: that always-upwelling font of images: dreams. I read because a wakeful sleep is not enough. I read to feel truths cupped in my palms, passed to us ragged and broken by our bleeding predecessors.

A young friend recently argued that her peers have no imagination. Afraid, I urged precision: how could she tell? She explained: there are many college-age people for whom the core quality of all positive experiences—with art, sex, psychedelics—is “cool,” funny,” or both. She described people with no desire to dig into the past’s treasuries of art, who engage only with algorithm-served media. She reported asking friends what kinds of clothing they like and hearing nothing in response because those friends have only ever considered a garment in the context of full outfits diagrammed, labeled, and linked in social media posts. “To be interesting, you have to think about your life and you have to read books,” my young friend said, her eyes wide with shock at the vacuousness cultivated by lifelong addictions to screens. While I don’t believe one must read books to be interesting, I know the act of reading helps because reading remains the most accessible method of thinking about things for a sustained period of time. A book solicits the world’s secrets on your behalf. The poetic complaints of a 10th century Chinese bureaucrat can be read and metabolized by a white girl in Idaho, and such a possibility indexes the fullness of our future. The technologies that centrifugally separate our lives threaten this.

By forcing trillions of calculations upon digitized existence, we made stones speak back to us so well that some mistake mirrored silicon for a new face. A few thousand people designed and built a bomb powerful enough to indict the very prerequisites of ordered inquiry, and then did it again, and again, and again, and again, and thousands of times more until the conditions by which most species sustain on this earth became guaranteed only by the murder-suicide pact of a handful of rich freaks. The most terrible truth of history is that it has always felt insane to strictly advocate for not destroying other people. No long-lasting tradition or community has abrogated this fact. Paul’s disfigurement of Jesus’ teachings turns us toward the past: if the body is the seat of evil, why not destroy it preemptively? It stands to reason that as long as war continues, Lazarus cannot wake. Justice and compassion have not yet had their age.

I recently sat in a large room at my workplace and alma mater to witness Cornel West speak. He is a joyful and associative thinker, grand and passionate in the mode of Black American churches, and unrepentant in his love for humanity and its works. He is old but his memory is prodigious. He grounded his address in praise for his mentors—teachers and their texts, living and dead—in order to bolster the spirits of the students and educators in the room; his speech felt personal and generous. He didn’t make one clear argument, a fact which centered the criticism of some students with whom I spoke days after, but deeming solidity and centrality the principal qualities of intellectual integrity reduces one’s ability to understand a person engaged so deeply with jazz, literature, and political movements. The demands humanism places upon us are not so programmatic; they are often intuitive, rising up out of a primitive and intrinsic consideration, for oneself and another. The lives produced by such convictions should seem like music. Today a colleague recalled a college commencement whose speaker said he had met only a few genuinely educated people in his life. It seemed clear to me that Cornel West, or Brother West, is genuinely educated.

I went home that night vertiginous. Rilke’s imperative, you must change your life, felt very present to me, shining and retinal. West is a man who has taken seriously the call to remember and know, and is also man for whom the weight of all that work seems light as a feather, unburdensome, learning a kind of buoying. The next morning I felt the incredible ease of ignoring the internet to instead read a book. I read for hours and hours, freshly recommitted to the activity I loved most as a kid. From womb to tomb is the frame of our life, a phrase of West’s, and it seemed so plainly absurd to fill our brief run of light and sense with the automatic cannibalisms of power. Or, the most concise proof I can think of: if I were alone against the wall, would that death find me with a book against my chest.