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:
Yes! You've put this well. I've always found it helpful to read stories from various time periods. It gives context and perspective when thinking about the challenges of today.
I love historical costuming (sewing, reenacting, English Country Dancing), and it makes me crazy when movies and shows use a historical setting and yet put into the mouths of the characters opinions and belief systems that could only have come from the current day of the show's release. (I'm looking at you, every movie with the "liberated woman character complaining about corset tight lacing" trope; at LARP (medieval fantasy setting), I've hiked for hours and fought with swords in corsets just fine! This is especially distressing when the trope is put in an era like the regency (Jane Austen) when they didn't wear corsets!!). The past is a foreign country and it should feel like it!
I also love stories that show a whole life or multiple generations. I used to think the sins of the father visited down three generations was awful, and then I got older and realized, that's life, that's just how God built the world. Your decisions affect your children, and your children -shaped by your decisions- raise your grandchildren. It's natural consequences. If your book or movie takes place over a few months, you can't see the impact of a bad decision by a character in the same way you can in Kristin Lavransdatter which covers her whole life or The Forsyte Saga which shows a story unfold through a free generations.
Stories that ground me in a timeline of history bigger than my lived experience include lives of the saints (Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset was great); biographies and histories (my favorites recently have been the Teddy Roosevelt three volume biography by Edmund Morris, Hamilton and Washington by Chernow, The Last Lion (three volume biography about Churchill) by William Manchester, Napoleon by Roberts and The Power Broker by Robert Caro) plus Albion's Seed by Fisher; personal recollections (Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter Ciszek, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt); and classics (in no order and off the top of my head: Middlemarch, Cranford, Kristin Lavransdatter, Martin Chuzzlewit, Northanger Abbey, The Power and the Glory, Master and Commander, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Moonstone, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind...)
You find so many human emotions and actions to connect with or that are always the same, and you get a peek into totally different worldviews and contexts and historical situations.
Last year when there was lawfare against a former president and a discussion about if a sitting president was too old to run again, I said, the party tried to get Taft to step down from running for reelection because he was too old and in too poor of health to run and many people wanted Teddy Roosevelt to run again, then lawfare was deployed against Teddy Roosevelt to try to make him unelectable. In that case, Taft ran anyway, Teddy Roosevelt ran third party and the other party (Wilson) won. And what a different timeline it would have been if Teddy Roosevelt had been president of the US during World War One! And, separately, imagine if you worked in Washington when there were three presidential assassinations in under 40 years!
I live my life within the tapestry of history!
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.