READING, THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

By Harold Brodkey

READING is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because
of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another that is involved in it, and because
it is the level of mind at which feelings and hopes are dealt in by consciousness and words.

Reading a good book is not much different from a love affair, from love, complete with shyness
and odd assertions of power and of independence and with many sorts of incompleteness in the
experience. One can marry the book: reread it, add it to one's life, live with it. Or it might be
compared to pregnancy - serious reading even if you're reading trash: one is inside the
experience and is about to be born; and one is carrying something, a sort of self inside oneself
that one is about to give birth to, perhaps a monster. Of course, for men this is always verging on
something else (part of which is a primitive rage with being masculine, a dismay felt toward
women and the world, a reader's odd sense of women).

The act of reading as it really occurs is obscure: the decision to read a book in a real minute, how
one selects the book, how one flirts with the choice, how one dawdles on the odd path of getting
it read and then reread, the oddities of rereading, the extreme oddities of the procedures of
continuing with or without interruptions to read, getting ready to read a middle chapter in its turn
after going off for a while, then getting hold of the book physically, having it in one's hand,
letting one's mind fill with thoughts in a sort of warm-up for the exercise of mind to come -one
riffles through remembered scenes from this and other books, one diddles with half-memories of
other pleasures and usefulnesses, one wonders if one can afford to read, one considers the
limitations and possibilities of this book, one is humiliated in anticipation or superior or thrilled
in anticipation, or nauseated in retrospect or as one reads. One has a sense of talk and of reviews
and essays and of anticipation or dread and the will to be affected by the thing of reading,
affected lightly or seriously. One settles one's body to some varying degree, and then one enters
on the altered tempos of reading, the subjection to being played upon, one passes through phases,
starting with reacting to or ignoring the cover of the book and the opening lines. THE piercing
things, the stabbingly emotional stuff involved in reading, leads to envy, worse even than in
sibling or neighborhood rivalry, and it leads to jealousy and possessiveness. If a book is not
religious or trashy, the problem of salesmanship, always partly a con, arises in relation to it, to all
the problems it presents. A good reader of Proust complains constantly as a man might complain
of a wife or a woman of her husband. And Proust perhaps had such a marriage in mind with the
reader. A good book, like pregnancy or a woman known to arouse love, or a man, is something
you praise in the light of a general reluctance to risk the experience; and the quality of praise
warns people against the book, warns them to take it seriously; you warn them about it, not
wanting to be evangelical, a matchmaker or a malicious pimp for a troubled and troubling view
of the world.

I can't imagine how a real text can be taught in a school. Even minor masterpieces, ''Huckleberry
Finn'' or ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' are too much for a classroom, too real an experience. No one
likes a good book if they have actually read it. One is fanatically attached, restlessly attached,
criminally attached, violently and criminally opposed, sickened, unable to bear it. In Europe,
reading is known to be dangerous. Reading always leads to personal metamorphosis, sometimes
irreversible, sometimes temporary, sometimes large-scale, sometimes less than that. A good
book leads to alterations in one's sensibility and often becomes a premise in one's beliefs. One
associates truth with texts, with impressive texts anyway; and when trashy books vanish from
sight, it is because they lie too much and too badly and are not worth one's intimacy with them.
Print has so much authority, however, that sometimes it is only at the beginning of an attempt at
a second reading or at the end of it, and only then, if one is self-assured, that one can see whether
a book was not really worth reading the first time; one tells by how alterable the truth in it seems
in this more familiar light and how effective the book remains or, contrarily, how amazingly
empty of meaning it now shows itself to be. It is a strange feeling to be a practiced enough reader
and writer to see in some books that there is nothing there. It is eerie: why did the writer bother?
What reward is there in being a fraud in one's language and in one's ideas? To believe they just
didn't know is more unsettling than to doubt oneself or to claim to be superficial or prejudiced or
to give up reading entirely, at least for a while.

Or, in our country, we deny what we see of this and even reverse it: fraud is presented as
happiness; an empty book is said to be well constructed; a foolish argument is called innovative.
This is a kind of bliss; but lying of that sort, when it is nearly universal, wrecks the possibility of
our having a literary culture or even of our talking about books with each other with any real
pleasure. It is like being phony yachtsmen who only know smooth water and who use their
motors whenever they can. This guarantees an immense personal wretchedness, actually.

Of course, in Europe, cultural patterns exist which slow the rate of change in you as a reader (as
well as supplying evidence to use in comprehending what happens and will happen to you if you
change because of a book). Of course, such change is never entirely good or wise. In our
country, we have nothing to hold us back from responding to any sort of idea. With us
everything is for sale - everything is up for grabs, including ourselves - and we have very little
tradition worth hanging onto except the antic.

The country is organized not by religion or political machinery but by what are seen as economic
realities, but which are fashions in making money and spending money. We are an army
marching in the largest conceivable mass so entirely within cultural immediacy that it can be said
this is new in the history in the world, emotionally new in that while this has been true of other
cultures for brief periods in the past, it was never true as completely or for such a large part of
the population or so continuously, with so few periods of stasis. We pretend to tradition but
really, nothing prevents us changing. AND we do change.

Divorce, born-again

Christianity, the computer revolution, a return to the farm, a move to the city. In Boston, at
college at Harvard, I first knew people who claimed to be cultivated to the degree they remained
unchanged not only in spite of the reading they claimed to have done but with the help of it.
They did not realize what an imbecile and provincial notion that was - it was simply untrue: you
could see it, the untruth of it. A rule of thumb about culture is that personal or public yearning
for a better time to come or one in the past and nostalgia of any sort are reliable signs of the
counterfeit. The past is there to be studied in its reality, moment by moment, and the future can
be discussed in its reality to come, which will be a reality moment by moment; but doing that
means being honest just as doing it makes you too busy to yearn; and doing it shows you that
nostalgia is a swindler's trick. A sense of the real is what is meant by good sense. And because of
the nature of time and because of how relentlessly change occurs, good sense has to contain a
good deal of the visionary as well as of ironic apology to cover the inevitable mistakes. And this
is doubly so with us, in the United States. Reality here is special. And part of reality here or
elsewhere is that novels, plays, essays, fact pieces, poems, through conversion or in the process
of argument with them, change you or else - to use an idiom - you haven't listened.

If the reader is not at risk, he is not reading. And if the writer is not at risk, he is not writing. As a
rule, a writer and a book or a poem are no good if the writer is essentially unchanged morally
after having written it. If the work is really a holding operation, this will show in a closed or flat
quality in the prose and in the scheme of the thing, a logiclessness, if you will pardon the
neologism, in the writing. Writing always tends toward a kind of moral stance - this is because of
the weight of logic and of truth in it - but judging the ways in which it is moral is hard for people
who are not cultivated. Profoundly educated persons make the best judges. THE general risk in
being a man or woman of cultivation is then very high, and this is so in any culture, and perhaps
requires too much strength for even a small group to practice in ours. But should such a guerrilla
group arise, it will have to say that cultivation and judgment issue from the mouths of books and
can come from no other source. Over a period of centuries, ignorance has come, justifiably, to
mean a state of booklessness. Movie-educated people are strained; they are decontextualized;
they are cultivated in a lesser way. Television and contemporary music are haunted by the search
for messiahs; the usual sign of mass inauthenticity is a false prophet (which usually means a war
will shortly break out and be lost). The absence of good sense signals the decline of a people and
of a civilization. Shrewdness without good sense is hell unleashed.

I would propose as a social cure that in fourth grade and in the first year at college, this society
mandate that we undergo a year of reading with or without argument as the soul can bear,
including argument with teachers and parents and local philosophers if there are any. Of course
something like this happens anyway but we probably ought to institutionalize it in our faddish
way.

After all, if you don't know what's in good books, how can your life not be utterly miserable all
in all? Won't it fall apart with fearsome frequency? The best of what this species knows is in
books. Without their help, how can you manage?
If I intend for my life to matter to me, I had better read seriously, starting with newspapers and
working up to philosophy and novels. And a book in what it teaches, and in what it does in
comforting and amusing us, in what it does in granting asylum to us for a while, had better be
roughly equivalent to, or greater in worth than, an event involving other people in reality that
teaches us or that grants us asylum for a while in some similar way, or there is no reason to
bother with it. And I am careful toward books that offer refuge to my ego or my bad conscience.
A writer who is opposed to notions of value and instruction is telling you he or she does not want
to have to display loyalty or insight or sensitivity - to prose or to people: that would limit his or
her maneuverability; and someone who does not believe that loyalty or insight or sensitivity or
meaning has any meaning is hardly worth knowing in books or on the page although such people
are unavoidable in an active life.

The procedures of real reading, if I may call it that, are not essentially shrewd, although certain
writers, Twain and Proust for instance, often do play to the practice of shrewdness in their
readers.

But the disappearance from the immediate world of one's attention, that infidelity to one's
alertness toward outside attack, and then the gullibility required for a prolonged act of attention
to something not directly inferior to one's own methods and experiences, something that
emanates from someone else, that and the risk of conversion, the certainty that if the book is
good, one will take on ideas and theories, a sense of style, a sense of things different from those
one had before - if you think of those, you can see the elements of middle-class leisure and
freedom, or upper-class insolence and power, or lower-class rebelliousness and hiddenness and
disloyalty to one's surroundings, that are required for real reading.

And you can also see what the real nature of literature is - it is a matter of one's attention being
removed from the real world and regarding nature and the world verbally: it is a messy
mathematics in its way; it is a kind of science dealing in images and language, and it has to be
right in the things it says; it has to be right about things.

I learned very early that when you were infatuated with someone, you read the same books the
other person read or you read the books that had shaped the other person or you committed an
infidelity and read for yourself and it was the beginning of trouble. I think reading and writing
are the most dangerous human things because they operate on and from that part of the mind in
which judgments of reality are made; and because of the authority language has from when we
learn to speak and use its power as a family matter, as an immediate matter, and from when we
learn to read and see its modern, middle-class power as a public matter establishing our rank in
the world. When a book is technically uninteresting, when such a book is not a kind of comically
enraged protest against the pretensions of false technique and ludicrously misconceived subject
matter, it is bound to be a phony. The democratic subversion of objects, of techniques, can never
without real dishonesty stray far from its ostensible purpose, which is the democratic necessity of
making our lives interesting to us. Folk art is, inevitably, a kind of baby talk in relation to high
art - and this is shaming, but so is much in life, including one's odor giving one's secrets away
(showing one's nervousness or one's lechery), but it is better to do that than live messageless and
without nerves or desire. The moral extravagance of reading - its spiritual element and its class
element - is bound to reflect both an absence of humility and a new kind of humility and both in
odd ways. Two of our most conceited writers, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, overtly
wrote baby talk. Nowadays the young like financial reporting as a window on the world, and
television and the interview. They are pursuing fact in the plethora of baby talk, and they are
trying to exercise judgment in the middle of the overenthusiastic marketing of trash. A
MERICAN colleges have taught our intellectuals to read politically in order to enter and stay in a
group or on a track. One reads skimmingly then, and one keeps placing the authority for what
one reads outside oneself. But actually people cannot read in a two-souled way, shrewdly, and
with a capacity to feel and learn. Learning involves fear and sometimes awe and just plain
factually is not shrewd - it is supershrewd if you like, it is a very grand speculation indeed; and
graduate school stuff won't open out into awe and discovery or recognition or personal
knowledge of events but only onto academic hustling. I mean when you stop theorizing and think
about what is really there. Do I need to go on? One of the primary rules of language is that there
must be a good reason for the listener to attend to a second sentence after the first one; to supply
a good reason is called ''being interesting.'' Not to attend to the second sentence is called ''not
listening.'' The reasons to listen are always selfish, but that does not mean they are only selfish.
It is hard to listen. It is also hard to write well and to think. These ought not to be unfamiliar
statements. This ought not to be news.

See you in the bookstores soon.

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME

Harold Brodkey

Alecs Elinor Rivera Amoguis

October 25, 2019

 Harold Brodkey was born in Stauton, III, US on October 25, 1930 and died in New York
as an author of the New Yorker on January 26, 1996. He was an American novelist and short-story
writer whose fiction is said to avoid plots and focus rather on the description of feeling. He was a
graduate of Harvard University, Bachelor of arts in Communication, Cum-Laude. Aside from
fiction, he later then published short stories in magazines and one of his firsts collections is First
Love and Other Sorrows (1957). He taught at several universities and became a staff writer for the
New Yorker that often publishes his fictions. One of his articles is entitled “Reading: The Most
Dangerous Game” that was published in New York Times newspaper during the 1985. The article
tackled about how important, yet dangerous reading is that gives different experiences, feelings
and clouds the judgement of the readers. He emphasized reading as something dangerous.

In the reading Brodkey gave emphasis on how reading for him is important yet the most
dangerous human act for reading can cloud and change one’s belief and principles, it can give
judgement to the reality. He has a rule that if the reader is not at risk, he is not reading and if the
writer is not at risk, he is not writing. A published article or book by the author should leave a
mark on impact to the reader and him as the writer. There should be a persuasion in between
reading and analyzing the book for it to be credited as a good book. Reading, for Brodkey, is what
matters in life. Though in Europe, reading is something dangerous. It leads people to be fanatically
attached, restlessly attached, and violently attached. He compared reading to two things, love affair
and pregnancy. Love affair because he sees many sorts of incompleteness in the experience of
reading. Reading is hard to understand, how one commits and entertains the book with a freedom
of choice to select a book, continue to read the book or to reread something specific. One day you
are interested, the next day you are not. One has a sense of talk and reviews and the will to be
affected or persuaded by reading. Pregnancy is no different from reading, as what Brodkey stated.
He elaborated that reading gives birth to experiences. Although these experiences are all in our
heads, we tend to be immersed in that mental experience for that is what reading gives us. It is the
nature of literature that the attention of the reader is pulled out from the reality and see things
verbally. Being fond with a book gives the reader so much feelings and fantasy thoughts that
Brodkey coined reading as an intimate act where own ideas are intensely exposed to others and
feelings and hopes are consciously settled by words. Reading is hard to understand but judgements
and cultivation can come from no other source but books. He stated that he cannot picture how a
real text can be taught in school, for there are texts that are too real for an experience. But a part
of the article has said that he would propose as a social cure that in fourth grade and in the first
year at college, the society mandate to undergo a year of reading with or without argument as the
soul can bear. This includes the participation of teacher and parents and local philosophers, but it
probably ought to institutionalize. The article also stated that the best of what species knows know
came from books. A reader cannot be immersed in the book if there is no reason for the reader to
continue after reading the first part, implying that there is nothing interesting that would keep the
reader going. One is said to be listening if it caught its attention. It is hard to listen. It is also hard
to write and think. These ought not to be unfamiliar statements. This ought not to be news. This is
the ending statement of the article. In my point of view listening, writing and thinking comes
together. These three works together to create our own imagination, beliefs and principles. The
article has persuaded me about reading being something dangerous. He wrote in a way that he was
agreeing that reading is indeed dangerous yet reading is something essential and no matter how
dangerous it is, it gives us most of the knowledge we have. It takes our knowledge to a whole new
level. Reading is coined as dangerous due to the sole reason that reading is a great influencer and
persuader. Anything you read can change your own views and opinions. You would either end up
agreeing to what you read or contradicting what the author has written. Reading gives us
experiences that only runs in our own imagination and yet we became attached and feel like we
have somehow experienced what we have read. Just like reading romance-genre fictions. We tend
to dream about having that prince charming every romance fiction describes and depicts. Yet we
all know fictions are just fictions. But even so, we drown ourselves in our fantasy for the
convenience and the feeling it offers us.

Being a reader, I’ve never seen reading as something dangerous. Mysterious yes, but never
dangerous. Reading brings me to a different world either I would go to the past to reminisce the
same thing written or I would go to an unknown world that would give me something I could
mentally experience. But upon reading Brodkey’s article, realization hit me that indeed reading is
dangerous without me realizing it. My judgements have been clouded and influenced by the things
I read, just like how I was upon reading this article. I come to see reading as something essential
and important, but never did it cross that it was very dangerous. But then again, no matter the
danger it offers, without reading, our knowledge and experiences are limited to what we physically
experience.