Earlier this week I was reading an essay were the author explained how books were an inefficient medium for knowledge, largely due to the fact that books are dense and the content in them is easy to forget, but also because transmission of information does not necessarily mean understanding of information.
While all of this is true, and I can certainly see myself as one of the people who can easily forget the details of any book I've read, there's a certain aspect of the books that is easy to overlook. Let's call it, inception.
"How do you live?" is a book shaped by the ideology of its author, Yoshino Genzaburo. Who wrote it amid the political changes inside Japan its foreign policy with WW2 fast approaching.
His book, we're let known by the translator, was originally meant to be a textbook on Ethics. However Genzaburo thought that a textbook wasn't the proper medium to convey the ideology by which young students should learn how to become a better person. The solution was to turn it into a story.
There are many books we're forced to read when we are young. I can remember clearly about a few dozen I hated reading. Studying in Mexico it meant almost certainly to read books like Don Quixote. It wasn't a fun experience and I can barely remember scenes out of them. For a few of them, the most tedious of them all, I can't deny I just looked up online for a summary. Reading is time consuming, let alone when the books are actually written in Spanish of 4 centuries ago.
However there's a few books I really hold close to my heart that I was "forced" to read. One of them, "Las Muertas" by Jorge Ibargüengoitia narrated a depressing story of a Mexico I hadn't yet met. A Mexico hidden in little towns of people just scrapping by, where justice is never served fairly and completely forgotten by the rest of the world.
Genzaburo had to overcome hardships throughout his life. Coming from a privileged position he studied philosophy, learned writing, joined activism. At his time the ideas he fought for were cause of prosecution, he had to endure jail and lose his position in society. He had to stare at how the Japanese leaders turned their society to authoritarianism and the expansionist desires turned into tense relations with the rest of the world. As a pacifist, a world history fanatic, one could say a "world citizen", it is no wonder he put down into his book the ideals he strived for.
"How do you live" is a very simple story. I could write a full synopsis in a few lines:
Copper, a well-off kid in 1938's Japan goes to junior high school. Makes new friends. Meets new people from different backgrounds. Some character conflict happens which I won't spoil. Finds resolution. Learns something about himself and about who he wants to be from that.
But this is a disservice to the story, because the story is not only Copper's, nor his friends. The conflicts in this story are kids conflicts, not world changing levels of conflicts. These are things that happened to me when I was in junior high, these are things that can happen to all of us.
The story is a slice of life of a kid in junior high. There's a not very hidden deep meaning to the story though. Along the book there are short essays that Copper's uncle writes to him. These essays are philosophical in nature: What does it mean to be great? How do we overcome the differences between us? What can you learn from other people? How do you learn from your mistakes? How do you overcome your fears? These are not metaphorical messages, . It is after all a book for kids growing up. But an interesting thing happens when you juxtapose a simple story with the philosophical thoughts of an academic: The disconnect between philosophy and everyday life starts to disappear.
It is easy to disregard philosophy as something you learn but can barely apply to the real life. But this book lets you know that even the simplest of the acts grow your character and show off the morals that you live by. Somehow this book with its simpleness of story, so bare in its teachings, is greater than the sum of its parts.
The problem with thinking that books are merely vehicles for data is that it disregards the value of storytelling. Genzaburo knew this, hence why he choose against a simple textbook. The deeper concepts of philosophy are not explored here, yet the idea is incepted into the reader. How do you live? This is barely a surface exploration, meant for the reader to ruminate about and explore on her own. This is the actual value of reading, even for purely non-fiction books, the inner change that cause on the receptors. It is easy to undervalue books as we cannot capture their whole information in our simple minds, but we are not computers, even so books are not meant for them either. Books are meant to reconfigure our connections. They add pieces to our mind puzzles, we add the connections to our lives and our interests, we never end up being the same after a book, even those which we didn't enjoy.
Genzaburo didn't hide the morals that shaped his thinking: that we are equals, regardless of our backgrounds. That we live in a world, connected to each other and that we should strive for growing that connection, instead of inventing hierarchies. That at the end of the day we are just but a speck of dust in the grander timeline of humanity, but this isn't a reason to disregard the consequences of our actions. All to the contrary, it is a call to make the most out of our lives, to live by our strong beliefs of doing the best for humanity. From the smallest to the biggest of our actions we should strive to leave a better world than the one we had.
Humanity's progress is relentless. Big actors, those good and bad will shape the world in ways we might not like. Genzaburo couldn't stop the fall of Japan into a fascism, he was just but a tiny actor in a greater tide. But this was just a deviation in history, as Genzaburo says someone cannot stop the flow of the river of humanity's progress, human values will triumph in the end. We are not to disregard ourselves, or think of us as tiny actors unable to play a part in the currents of events, but think of our lives as the potential to make good on the world. From the smallest to the biggest of our actions the way we can live remarkable lives if we devote our lives to keep pushing the flow.
Cast your inner eye once over this vast landscape, look back at the people called great and heroic in the midst of that faraway flow, and what kinds of things might you come to see? First, you might notice that the great people and heroes that loomed so large in your eyes until now were, ultimately, no more than drops of water drifting in that great stream. Next, you’d surely see that no matter what things those extraordinary people did, they were exceptionally fleeting, unless their work was firmly bound to the current of the stream.
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