Reading Outside Your Time
A guide for the perplexed
With the election coming up next week, I wanted to share a short piece I wrote this summer for The Washington Post for a parenting roundtable. Letters editor Alyssa Rosenberg asked me and five other parents how we talk about political violence with our kids.
Her question was sparked by the first assassination attempt on former President Trump, and ran about a month later. Here’s what I said:
Our kids, 4 and 2, are small and have minimal exposure to TV news, so we haven’t had to address political violence or the presidential election directly. But we’re laying some of the groundwork for discussions of current events by exploring stories of the past. We’re Catholic, and we have a number of children’s stories about the saints, particularly Meg Hunter-Kilmer’s “Saints Around the World” and my husband’s “Saintly Creatures,” around the house.
Our kids have already heard stories of political violence and persecution, so it won’t come as a surprise that they persist in the present day. Our focus is on how to live bravely and generously in a difficult world. The stories of the saints that our girls love, whether Saint Eulalia (a child who defied an unjust Roman governor) or Saint Rita (who ended a family feud that killed her husband) are people who were willing to give their lives for the truth but never acted out of contempt for those opposing them or willed their destruction. Just as the story of Herod they’ve seen in our Tomie dePaola books is part of the larger story of Christ’s birth, if I were talking to them about the assassination attempt, I’d juxtapose it with the gift Corey Comperatore made of his life to his family.
You can read the other parents’ responses here.
Our most recent conversation about human evil was sparked by reading a story about St. Josephine Bakhita for young readers. The story doesn’t say slavery, but says people bought and sold Josephine, which prompted a discussion about treating people like things. Which meant I had Granny Weatherwax echoing in my head, though the kids are many years from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’
‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’
‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
As someone who currently works in policy and has previously worked in news, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten is to read outside my time.
The person who told me this said that, first, anything deeply discussed right now is often already running dry. If you want to contribute something useful, you’re looking to draw on something outside the current conversation that can leaven it.
But also that reading outside the present puts things in perspective. I know that can sound like it makes the present smaller, easier to tolerate, but I think of it as making the present a still-urgent part of a longer story.
Our times are rarely unprecedented, but that doesn’t make our choices trivial. It’s by building up our examples of ways to live well in difficult times that it becomes easier to see what might be a way to live generously today.
I’m curious what works from outside your current time or culture you find most form you to be a good steward of your present. Definitely on my list:
The past, they say, is like an other country - they do things differently there.
One of the things that reading about and from the past brings you is a sense about the contingency of today's culture - it could be different, things we take for granted and eternal generally aren't, and different people think differently and care about different things. It doesn't have to particularly relate to your current situation to be useful.
Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, Ovid, Apuleius, Homer. Also just finished the Prelude by Wordsworth, who was wrestling with the horror unleashed by the French Revolution. Reading works like this really does give you ballast; my frame of reference is larger, so each dip and rise in contemporary events doesn't seem as all-encompassing.