TED THE HEALING POWER OF READING

读书的治愈力
Sức mạnh gắn kết của việc đọc sách

I want to talk today about how reading can change our lives
and about the limits of that change. I want to talk to you
about how reading can give us a shareable world of
powerful human connection. But also about how that
connection is always partial. How reading is ultimately a
lonely, idiosyncratic undertaking.

The writer who changed my life was the great African

American novelist James Baldwin. When I was growing up in
Western Michigan in the 1980s, there weren't many Asian
American writers interested in social change. And so I think I
turned to James Baldwin as a way to fill this void, as a way
to feel racially conscious. But perhaps because I knew I
wasn't myself African American, I also felt challenged and
indicted by his words. Especially these words: "There are
liberals who have all the proper attitudes, but no real
convictions. When the chips are down and you somehow
expect them to deliver, they are somehow not there." They
are somehow not there. I took those words very literally.
Where should I put myself?
I went to the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions in
the United States. This is a place shaped by a powerful
history. In the 1960s, African Americans risked their lives to
fight for education, to fight for the right to vote. I wanted to
be a part of that change, to help young teenagers graduate
and go to college. When I got to the Mississippi Delta, it was
a place that was still poor, still segregated, still dramatically
in need of change.

My school, where I was placed, had no library, no guidance

counselor, but it did have a police officer. Half the teachers
were substitutes and when students got into fights, the
school would send them to the local county jail.
This is the school where I met Patrick. He was 15 and held
back twice, he was in the eighth grade. He was quiet,
introspective, like he was always in deep thought. And he
hated seeing other people fight. I saw him once jump
between two girls when they got into a fight and he got
himself knocked to the ground. Patrick had just one
problem. He wouldn't come to school. He said that
sometimes school was just too depressing because people
were always fighting and teachers were quitting. And also,
his mother worked two jobs and was just too tired to make
him come. So I made it my job to get him to come to school.
And because I was crazy and 22 and zealously optimistic, my
strategy was just to show up at his house and say, "Hey, why
don't you come to school?" And this strategy actually
worked, he started to come to school every day. And he
started to flourish in my class. He was writing poetry, he was
reading books. He was coming to school every day.

Around the same time that I had figured out how to connect
to Patrick, I got into law school at Harvard. I once again
faced this question, where should I put myself, where do I
put my body? And I thought to myself that the Mississippi
Delta was a place where people with money, people with
opportunity, those people leave. And the people who stay
behind are the people who don't have the chance to leave. I
didn't want to be a person who left. I wanted to be a person
who stayed. On the other hand, I was lonely and tired. And
so I convinced myself that I could do more change on a
larger scale if I had a prestigious law degree. So I left.

Three years later, when I was about to graduate from law

school, my friend called me and told me that Patrick had got
into a fight and killed someone. I was devastated. Part of me
didn't believe it, but part of me also knew that it was true. I
flew down to see Patrick. I visited him in jail. And he told me
that it was true. That he had killed someone. And he didn't
want to talk more about it. I asked him what had happened
with school and he said that he had dropped out the year
after I left. And then he wanted to tell me something else.
He looked down and he said that he had had a baby
daughter who was just born. And he felt like he had let her
down. That was it, our conversation was rushed and
awkward.

When I stepped outside the jail, a voice inside me said,

"Come back. If you don't come back now, you'll never come
back." So I graduated from law school and I went back. I
went back to see Patrick, I went back to see if I could help
him with his legal case. And this time, when I saw him a
second time, I thought I had this great idea, I said, "Hey,
Patrick, why don't you write a letter to your daughter, so
that you can keep her on your mind?" And I handed him a
pen and a piece of paper, and he started to write.

But when I saw the paper that he handed back to me, I was
shocked. I didn't recognize his handwriting, he had made
simple spelling mistakes. And I thought to myself that as a
teacher, I knew that a student could dramatically improve in
a very quick amount of time, but I never thought that a
student could dramatically regress. What even pained me
more, was seeing what he had written to his daughter. He
had written, "I'm sorry for my mistakes, I'm sorry for not
being there for you." And this was all he felt he had to say to
her. And I asked myself how can I convince him that he has
more to say, parts of himself that he doesn't need to
apologize for. I wanted him to feel that he had something
worthwhile to share with his daughter.

For every day the next seven months, I visited him and
brought books. My tote bag became a little library. I brought
James Baldwin, I brought Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis. I
brought guidebooks to trees, to birds, and what would
become his favorite book, the dictionary. On some days, we
would sit for hours in silence, both of us reading. And on
other days, we would read together, we would read poetry.

We started by reading haikus, hundreds of haikus, a

deceptively simple masterpiece. And I would ask him,
"Share with me your favorite haikus." And some of them are
quite funny. So there's this by Issa: "Don't worry, spiders, I
keep house casually." And this: "Napped half the day, no
one punished me!" And this gorgeous one, which is about
the first day of snow falling, "Deer licking first frost from
each other's coats." There's something mysterious and
gorgeous just about the way a poem looks. The empty space
is as important as the words themselves.

We read this poem by W.S. Merwin, which he wrote after he

saw his wife working in the garden and realized that they
would spend the rest of their lives together. "Let me
imagine that we will come again when we want to and it will
be spring We will be no older than we ever were The worn
griefs will have eased like the early cloud through which
morning slowly comes to itself" I asked Patrick what his
favorite line was, and he said, "We will be no older than we
ever were." He said it reminded him of a place where time
just stops, where time doesn't matter anymore. And I asked
him if he had a place like that, where time lasts forever. And
he said, "My mother." When you read a poem alongside
someone else, the poem changes in meaning. Because it
becomes personal to that person, becomes personal to you.

We then read books, we read so many books, we read the

memoir of Frederick Douglass, an American slave who
taught himself to read and write and who escaped to
freedom because of his literacy. I had grown up thinking of
Frederick Douglass as a hero and I thought of this story as
one of uplift and hope. But this book put Patrick in a kind of
panic. He fixated on a story Douglass told of how, over
Christmas, masters give slaves gin as a way to prove to them
that they can't handle freedom. Because slaves would be
stumbling on the fields. Patrick said he related to this. He
said that there are people in jail who, like slaves, don't want
to think about their condition, because it's too painful. Too
painful to think about the past, too painful to think about
how far we have to go.
His favorite line was this line: "Anything, no matter what, to
get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my
condition that tormented me." Patrick said that Douglass
was brave to write, to keep thinking. But Patrick would
never know how much he seemed like Douglass to me. How
he kept reading, even though it put him in a panic. He
finished the book before I did, reading it in a concrete
stairway with no light.

And then we went on to read one of my favorite books,

Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead," which is an extended letter
from a father to his son. He loved this line: "I'm writing this
in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done
in your life ... you have been God's grace to me, a miracle,
something more than a miracle."

Something about this language, its love, its longing, its

voice, rekindled Patrick's desire to write. And he would fill
notebooks upon notebooks with letters to his daughter. In
these beautiful, intricate letters, he would imagine him and
his daughter going canoeing down the Mississippi river. He
would imagine them finding a mountain stream with
perfectly clear water. As I watched Patrick write, I thought to
myself, and I now ask all of you, how many of you have
written a letter to somebody you feel you have let down? It
is just much easier to put those people out of your mind.
But Patrick showed up every day, facing his daughter,
holding himself accountable to her, word by word with
intense concentration.

I wanted in my own life to put myself at risk in that way.

Because that risk reveals the strength of one's heart. Let me
take a step back and just ask an uncomfortable question.
Who am I to tell this story, as in this Patrick story? Patrick's
the one who lived with this pain and I have never been
hungry a day in my life. I thought about this question a lot,
but what I want to say is that this story is not just about
Patrick. It's about us, it's about the inequality between us.
The world of plenty that Patrick and his parents and his
grandparents have been shut out of. In this story, I represent
that world of plenty. And in telling this story, I didn't want to
hide myself. Hide the power that I do have.

In telling this story, I wanted to expose that power and then

to ask, how do we diminish the distance between us?
Reading is one way to close that distance. It gives us a quiet
universe that we can share together, that we can share in
equally.

You're probably wondering now what happened to Patrick.

Did reading save his life? It did and it didn't. When Patrick
got out of prison, his journey was excruciating. Employers
turned him away because of his record, his best friend, his
mother, died at age 43 from heart disease and diabetes.
He's been homeless, he's been hungry.

So people say a lot of things about reading that feel

exaggerated to me. Being literate didn't stop him form being
discriminated against. It didn't stop his mother from dying.
So what can reading do? I have a few answers to end with
today.

Reading charged his inner life with mystery, with

imagination, with beauty. Reading gave him images that
gave him joy: mountain, ocean, deer, frost. Words that taste
of a free, natural world. Reading gave him a language for
what he had lost. How precious are these lines from the
poet Derek Walcott? Patrick memorized this poem. "Days
that I have held, days that I have lost, days that outgrow, like
daughters, my harboring arms."

Reading taught him his own courage. Remember that he

kept reading Frederick Douglass, even though it was painful.
He kept being conscious, even though being conscious
hurts. Reading is a form of thinking, that's why it's difficult
to read because we have to think. And Patrick chose to
think, rather than to not think. And last, reading gave him a
language to speak to his daughter. Reading inspired him to
want to write. The link between reading and writing is so
powerful. When we begin to read, we begin to find the
words. And he found the words to imagine the two of them
together. He found the words to tell her how much he loved
her.

Reading also changed our relationship with each other. It

gave us an occasion for intimacy, to see beyond our points
of view. And reading took an unequal relationship and gave
us a momentary equality. When you meet somebody as a
reader, you meet him for the first time, newly, freshly. There
is no way you can know what his favorite line will be. What
memories and private griefs he has. And you face the
ultimate privacy of his inner life. And then you start to
wonder, "Well, what is my inner life made of? What do I
have that's worthwhile to share with another?"

I want to close on some of my favorite lines from Patrick's

letters to his daughter. "The river is shadowy in some places
but the light shines through the cracks of trees ... On some
branches hang plenty of mulberries. You stretch your arm
straight out to grab some." And this lovely letter, where he
writes, "Close your eyes and listen to the sounds of the
words. I know this poem by heart and I would like you to
know it, too."。