Bookish Diversions: Reading as Help for Living

Summary

¶ Decisions, decisions! ’s 2018 book Farsighted presents a method for processing decisions—not the easy kind (cherry pie or apple?) but the tough, –y, wild kind, with all the considerations and contingencies that spool out like thirty-seven balls of yarn rolling downhill. Do I:marry Sally?put Dad in the nursing home?change a policy that affects my coworkers’ retirement?move to Montreal?chuck it all and go into the car-wash business with my cousin Earl?Good luck!Wild problems often involve simple, binary choices—yes or no—but they contain countless concerns and consequences. Sally, Dad, coworkers, Montreal, Earl: to one degree or another, the variables multiple as we consider them and ramify in ways we can’t fully corral. To decide, says Johnson, we must manage to map the variables and then predict the outcomes. We’ll do so imperfectly, and we’ll get more wrong than right—whether the extent of our errors proves material or not. (The future ain’t easy, friends.)One help in this fraught and feeble process? Surprisingly, Johnson suggests novels, pointing to George Eliot’s Middlemarch as his primary example. The tortured decisions with which Dorothea and Lydgate contend involve multiple dimensions and layers, and Eliot takes us inside their minds as they messily try mapping the variables and predicting their outcomes. Novels are for their readers, in other words, practice. “When we read those novels,” says Johnson, “we are not just entertaining ourselves; we are also rehearsing for our own real-world experiences.”But the practice extends beyond personal considerations. ¶ Thinking across dimensions. I recently returned to Johnson’s Farsighted because Johnson did. In an essay here at Substack he mentioned reading a tweet in which Stripe CEO Patrick Collison recounted the experience of reading ten classic novels during the year: Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëMiddlemarch by George EliotTo the Lighthouse by Virginia WoolfBleak House by Charles DickensPortrait of a Lady by Henr...