You Are What You Eat…And Read by Mark Hatmaker

 

[Non-Fighty. Skippable. Consider this one a sibling of the prior offerings…

Recreational Reading as a Laboratory for Honor & Warrior Poets & Ethical Rhymers.]

This essay’s metaphor only goes so far.

We are not literally what we eat.

If I eat an entire bag of cheese-puffs, beyond fluorescing fingertips, I do not become a friable bit of dubious cheese dust.

I do, of course, receive what nourishment is to be had from the consumption of these orange curiosities.

So, I am what I eat in the sense of nourishing value.

We are also not what we read until it has been digested and turned into fuel.

Say I read every book on competitive swimming shelved in the Library of Congress, or every fight tome or “Can Do/Rangers All the Way!” bit of puffery also housed there…

The mere reading of this material does less for me than the consumption of my bag of Cheetos.

While my cheese snacks may not be optimum fuel, they will still be used to fire the chemical processes within.

Consumed cheese puffs will not lie inert even if we are couch potatoes, or couch puffs.

Whereas food intake will metabolize via automatic processes, reading/viewing/entertainment choices will not be metabolized without conscious willful application.

Reading without motivation or action is nutritiously passive.

Our swimming, combat, “Hoo-Ah!” texts must be used or they lie dormant on the palate of the mind.

If [if] we take seriously the notion that all we ingest [food to what our eyeballs alight upon] is meant for useful sustenance, we might give greater thought to what we consume in all spheres.

See to it that good hearty fare fills the plate more often than cheese puffs.

Literary critic F. L. Lucas offers…

“Much of our criticism[tastes/choices], obsessed with pleasure-values and blind to influence values, seems to me frivolously irresponsible towards the vital effect of books in making their reads saner or sillier, more balanced or more unbalanced, more civilized or more barbarian.”

In other words, is your reading nourishing cordon bleu or crumbs that you might find inside the discarded wrappers beneath an adolescent’s bed.

This is NOT an argument for the “classics,” nor is it one against.

It is a mere finger on the menu looking to the stick-to-the ribs meat-and-potatoes side staying off the kid’s menu.

I offer that hearty and emulative fare can be found in unlikely places.

What follows are several extracts from Ernest Haycox’s 1940 novel Rim of the Desert. The title appears on no “classics” or college curricula and yet to one who has read it you would also not classify it as cheese puffs.

I’ll shut up and allow the extracts to develop the theme.

He was bold enough for anything, but sufficiently smart to take his good time to read what he saw.

·        Not a bad prescription for, well, any of us.

Keene watched Aurora disappear beyond the opposite rim of the river bluff, attracted by the shape she made in the sun, in the golden haze of dust. These were the things, though he didn’t know it, his senses forever awaited in eagerness---sounds and blends of fragrance and scenes which took fugitive shape and left their unforgettable impressions: the single moment when a campfire flamed formed a perfect taper against the heart of night; the echo of one word spoken by a women from the depths of her soul; the cold and immaculate deadliness of a diamond-back coiled at the instant of striking; the thread of some strange smell in the spring wind which, caught briefly and by accident, broke every old thread of a man’s career and set him off on strange roads. These were the fragments of a greater mystery, the revealed pieces of an unrevealed puzzle whose answer he sought—yet he knew not what he sought. All the cold ashes of his campfires made an unerring line of search. Some duty, some labor, some love. Somewhere---

·        Do you see and sense as intensely as what is described here?

·        If so, Good on You!

·        If not, what a fine aspiration to pursue!

She spoke in complete candor. “It would be that way if I married you, Cleve. A bargain between us, and no love. I don’t love trust very much. I know how it should be but I never really see it. Half of the women in this world marry without it and some of the others lie to themselves when they think they have it. I don’t like that. I’d rather not have any of it than to have a miserable little bit to dole out here and there over a whole life.”

·        I wager as you read that you thought of couples you know [hopefully not yourself.] Folks you’ve classified as “a fine match” or “They settled.”

·        Awake to reading our fellow humans in all seems like a useful skill-set to me.

He was flat on his back, long and boneless, soaking in the night’s comfort. He had the ability to seize whatever goodness the current moment offered, to enjoy it before it vanished.

·        A lesson to take to heart.

·        Now unhunch those shoulders, breathe from the gut, and unfurrow that brow, Reader.

He walked forward, his hand extended, and when Keene took his hand Stewart said, “Well, it was none of my business.” He ran the flat of a palm across his mouth, staring strangely at the blood there. “I didn’t feel you land that blow. Odd.” He wanted to say something to Keene, but he could not bring himself to admit the depth of fear that had been in him—the fear of being afraid. Nothing but the bitterest torture of soul had driven him to this fight, nothing but the insufferable agony of a man who had to know about himself at last. Now he was silently saying: “The worst of it is the thinking of it—afterwards there is nothing to be afraid of,” and a great load rolled off Cleve Stewart’s heart and he was a bigger man than he had ever been.

Or…

“I want to tell you something. I followed the trail for many years. When you get to the other side of the hill—remember this, son—the only thing you’ll find there is just what you brought with you.”

·        Don’t like where you are now?

·        Before you move on, ask if it’s the company—external or internal.

He swung to the saddle and for a moment his eyes admired her. She showed no fear and she said none of those things that disturbed a man or tried to take him away from the things that had to be done. She had will, she had composure.

·        My, my, my…

“The harder life is,” she murmured, “the less people ask of it. People who don’t know fear or hunger or pain want a lot. Those that face those things are happy if they have one small break. Terror makes us all very humble. How quickly pride falls.”

·        “First world problems” ie., not real problems.

·        Our grit is measured by the gravity of our whining.

“You never worry about the future, do you?”

“No use. All things come in time.”

“So, then,” she said, “it is today you love. Yesterday’s gone and tomorrow isn’t here—and it is just today that counts.”

“Best that way,” he answered. “Feels fine to eat when you’re hungry, to watch the ground turn color when the sun goes down. Maybe to smell water when you’re thirsty, or see lights shining over the flats when you’re tired of riding. If you look too far ahead you miss what goes on now. You never stop to enjoy the present.”

“But pretty soon the present is gone and then you are old and alone and what do you have?”

“That comes too,” he admitted. For me and for you, for everybody. Makes no difference, does it? The thing is, what can you look back on when you’re old? What can you remember?”

·        So, what have you noticed today that you forgot to notice yesterday?

He found more in Keene to admire at this moment than ever before. It was not a simple thing to fight. It was not easy to move blindly through snow, playing hide and seek with trouble. It took courage, but it took something more as well—it took a sound knowledge of other men, the ability to read in their eyes the things they would do; it took a hard-gained experience in all the clever tricks of living, an ability to listen into the wind, to read the patterns on the earth, to make a story out of dust and distant motion. As an educated man, possessing the prejudices of education, Cleve Stewart always had felt a certain contempt for men whose lives were confined to action; to him they were half-blind, knowing nothing of the great and gentle philosophies which made life understandable.

But somewhere in the last twenty-four hours Stewart’s world had come down about him; a complete change had occurred in him. The wisdom which came from earthy men, the wisdom of survival and bitter wind beating into a man’s bones, of hunger suffered and thirst endured—this was the real wisdom, gained not from books or the tales of other travelers but personally experienced so that a man got it into his spirit and nerves and blood. A man had to know of what he was made. Knowing that, he knew everything.

·        Philosophy, creeds, credos, agendas are fine for yammering [for a bit—maybe—probably not] but deeds, man, deeds.

Fiction can be our laboratory for running character experiments.

We can’t lead ALL lives, but we can sample more lives than we’ll ever have via reading and try on bits and pieces or pick up flavors here and there that we may want to add to our own walking talking stew of a life. See which ones add to the quality of our here and now.

Which ones make us saner or sillier.

Anyone who’s read this far and found themselves simpatico, likely you’re my cuppa, so, one more form Haycox’s novel, from me to you, and I mean it Brothers & Sisters!

“Any time you pass my house, now and twenty years from now, there’s a chair at the table.”