A Reader on Reading

in reply, “for fear they should forget them before the end of

the trial.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 11

AS OUR READING TEACHES us, our history is the story of a long night of injustice: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, the South Africa of apartheid, Ceausescu’s Romania, the China of Tiananmen Square, Senator McCarthy’s America, Castro’s Cuba, Pinochet’s Chile, Stroessner’s Paraguay, endless others form the map of our time. We seem to live either within or just on this side of despotic societies. We are never secure, even in our small democracies. When we think of how little it took for upright French citizens to jeer at convoys of Jewish children being herded into trucks, or for educated Canadians to throw stones at women and old men in the reservation of Oka when the natives protested the building of a golf course, then we have no right to feel safe.

The trappings with which we rig our society so that it will remain a society must be solid, but they must also be flexible. That which we exclude and outlaw or condemn must also remain visible, must always be in front of our eyes so that we can live by making the daily choice of not breaking these social bonds. The horrors of dictatorship are not inhuman horrors: they are profoundly human — and therein lies their power. “There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny,” wrote optimistically Samuel Johnson, “that will keep us safe under every form of government.” And yet any system of government based on arbitrary laws, extortion, torture, slavery lies at a mere hand’s grasp from every so-called democratic system.

Chile has a curious motto, “By Reason or by Force.” It can be read in at least two ways: as a bully’s threat, with an accent on the second part of the equation, or as an honest recognition of the precariousness of any social system, adrift (as the Mexican poet Amado Nervo said) “between the clashing seas of force and reason.” We, in most Western societies, believe we have chosen reason over force, and for the time being we can depend on that conviction. But we are never entirely free from the temptation of power. At best, our society will survive by upholding a few common notions of humanity and justice, dangerously sailing, as our Canadian motto has it, “A mari usque ad mare,” between those two symbolic seas.

Auden declared that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” I don’t believe that to be true (nor, probably, did he). Not every book is an epiphany, but many times we have sailed guided by a luminous page or a beacon of verse. What role poets and storytellers have on our precarious journeys may not be immediately clear, but perhaps some form of an answer emerged in the aftermath of one particular dictatorship, one that I followed closely over the bloody decade of its rule.