Rebecca Solnit exhorts “critical reading” at Berkeley commencement

What would summer be without at least one electronically reproduced, Internet-circulated graduation speech to inspire those of us who are staring at computer monitors indoors instead of basking in UV rays outdoors?

In her recent commencement address for the English department at U.C. Berkeley, author Rebecca Solnit extolled the virtues of reading—not just the act of picking up a book and absorbing its contents, but actively deciphering books and the world outside their covers:

To make meaning, to change the world, or just to read it thoughtfully (which can itself be insurrectionary)… And never has our world been so overloaded, so rapidly changing, and so full of surprises that require us to change our minds, rethink possibilities, and then do so again; never has it required such careful reading. In my own case, the kind of critical reading I first learned to do with books, then with works of art, turned out to be transferable to national parks, atomic bombs, revolutions, marches, the act of walking—a skill transferred not only to feed my writing but my larger path through the world.

Solnit’s comments are literary, opinionated, and refreshing. You can read them at English Education Professor, a blog for, well, exactly what the name says.

Her address is peppered with literary references, beginning with 1984 (representing the year when many of the graduates were born). She then ranges from books that changed the world, like The Jungle, to books that changed the English language, like The Monkey Wrench Gang, to books that changed perspectives of impossible things, like Through the Looking-Glass. She mentions Dickens and Fitzgerald. Yes, it’s safe to say that Rebecca Solnit, an author, is a lover and advocate of books. “Books matter,” she said. “Stories matter. People die of pernicious stories, are reinvented by new stories, and make stories to shelter themselves.”

Some readers may not appreciate Solnit’s politics, and her address, at times, is surely political. But it’s so much larger than that. It’s intelligent. It’s passionate. It’s hopeful. And, as in its following conclusion, it reminds us all of the power bound up in books and those of us who champion the printed word:

…Go tell it on your mountain or internship or wherever you’re headed, but never forget that you know how to dismantle stories, how to question them, how to compare and contrast them, and maybe sometimes how to invent or reinvent them. This is vital, since your task as the young being cut loose at this moment of graduation from what we, the old, have to give is to reinvent the universe, the universe made out of stories—to change the stories, to tell them, to bury them, and to give birth to them. A difficult task, but not an impossible one. Not if you remember, as readers and scholars might, that we are living in an impossible world already.