I think for most of us, when we think back to high school, a big thing we think about is our aesthetic sensibilities. Many of us will have a very specific memory of listening to a certain song, watching a certain movie or show, reading a particular book or an especially embarrassing fashion choice. For me it’s listening to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac while driving to school in the early fall on one of those hazy, greenish days, where it’s somehow both humid and cool, and you imagine a tornado is on its way. It’s watching all five seasons of “Six Feet Under” on rented DVDs when I was out sick from school before winter break. It’s reading “A Confederacy of Dunces” while riding a stationary bike and having to stop pedaling for several minutes because I was laughing. And regrettably, it’s choosing to wear a fedora while protesting Act 10 at the Capitol, which makes me identifiable in a few photos of the crowded rotunda that were published in newspapers and books.
I think one of the reasons our tastes are so salient in our memories of high school is that they were (and probably still are) a huge component of our identities. Because in high school, our sense of self was in such flux, the art we liked served as a way to anchor and shape ourselves and as well as a way to feel less alone. Whether it was through finding friends with common tastes, or relating to something in the art that we haven’t seen represented anywhere else. In some cases, however, rather than having the art lead to a particular sense of self, people know what kind of identity they want to have and seek out the art that will confirm that identity. That’s how it was with me and books.
For a variety of reasons, some clear and some unclear, I got it in my head that I wanted to be a reader and I wanted to have good tastes. This meant that I continually sought out critically successful books, and rather than engaging with the book on a genuine, personal level, I almost always was looking for things that were “good” about it to confirm by sense of good tastes. Even worse, I wasn’t even looking that hard. I was mostly speed-reading as much as I could so I could have another award-winner or another classic checked off my list as something I could say I read, as if at a job interview someday I might rattle off the list, alongside my skills at managing time and my proficiency with the Microsoft Office Suite.
One of the destructive things this habit did was that it created distance between me and my peers, or at least gave me the opportunity to arrogantly explain the distance to myself as being a result of something lacking in them, which was of course not actually the case. Furthermore, my shallow perceptions of what was good or bad writing meant that I avoided a lot of books that I prejudged as clichés, which I might’ve actually enjoyed because I myself was a bit of an angsty teen cliché at the time. It also meant that I never really attempted writing anything personal for fear of it being a confirmation of that.
Things got worse when I started college and became really aware of how fraudulent so much of my persona relating to reading was. My freshman year, I labored through David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”, which sort of seemed like the holy grail of literacy, only to think about it later and wonder if I really liked it or even understood it at all, despite the fact that I had only said good things about it to other people.
Ironically, it was another David Foster Wallace short story, called “Good Old Neon” from his collection “Oblivion: Stories” that provided one of my earliest and most genuine connections to literature. “Good Old Neon” is narrated in the first person and begins: “My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”
The story continues as the narrator details his life of fraudulence, with a couple plot twists throughout. While it’s far from my personal experience, the story resonated with me in a way that probably no other work of fiction ever had.
Since reading that story, I’ve been making a much more concerted effort to find literature that appeals to me in the same sort of way. I am trying to find my own reasons for liking things rather than their being “objectively good”, if there even is such a thing when it comes to art. While yes, I will use language about the quality of books, I’m trying be mindful of the fact that it is subjective and to remember that the quality of a book says little to nothing about those who like it or the person who wrote it. Most of all, I’m trying to remember that having an honest reaction to a book is much better than reacting to it the way you think you’re supposed to.
