Around Christmas, I read a streak of really well-written books that were also pretty brutal and gutwrenching to read (I’m thinking especially of House of Sand and Fog which I reviewed here). Just recently, I finished The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner is a story about the bonds of father-son love and of friendship, set against the backdrop of the fall of the monarchy and the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. My mother was a US history teacher for many years and my degrees are in American Studies, so I often find that current events will throw a spotlight on a part of the world that I know nothing about, and when that happens, fiction is the easiest way for me to begin to grasp a foreign part of the world. Of course, as an English teacher, I think that’s one of the great values of literature, that it can at once show us the particularities of a life we haven’t lived but also show us what is transcendent or universal about the human experience. Great novels do both at once, and so does The Kite Runner.
In economic times like these, there has been a lot of talk about the worth of the humanities, which don’t directly translate into a career the way other disciplines seem to. There’s also a lot of talk about the dominance of new media and how it has made the world smaller, but for me, reading a book like The Kite Runner brings me in closer contact with the history and people of Afghanistan that any one webpage could. I also don’t mean to imply that reading can substitute for activism, or that I know all there is to know now about the Afghan experience. But the ability to communicate your experiences to people whose lives are enriched and benefited from knowing them is an incredible gift, and I do believe we are all better for it.
In my English 11 class, we are about to begin studying John Donne, one of the great metaphysical poets who often studied the great paradoxes of morality and religion and attempted to explore them poetically. Of course, for many he is best known for his lines in his “Meditation XVII”:
No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
When I read a book like The Kite Runner, I am reminded again that we are involved in mankind, and that the tolling bell rings for us all. The power of literature to bring that truth home to us is one of the greatest powers there is, and especially in these economic times, what more powerful lesson can there be?
