Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil
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a copy of the poem taped to the back of his diary. He said, ‘Sometimes, if things are very hard, I can take it out and read it.’ And he added, ‘I can see that Hopkins managed to get it down, what I feel, in the lines. He got it all in an order: it’s not the chaos. And that helps. Could you read it out?’
I read:
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing –
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
I read the poem with seven pairs of eyes on me, and felt my voice crack as if I would cry at the lines ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’. Such powerful, revealing language to be using at a meeting table in this NHS building; such true, painful thoughts to be putting to senior mental-health practitioners and managers: ‘Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there’. And to be reading it to John, whose eyes were locked onto my face as I read, the eyes of a man awaiting, what …? The public exposure of some customarily unadmitted truth. As when Pat read ‘I Am’, it seemed almost dangerous, as if the air again were cracking with human electricity, or John had handed me some sad powerful magic, and I’d set it off by reading it aloud, a sort of spell. Despite the institutional furniture, we are primitive creatures in a cave. We have the magic of language. It is frightening and good. When I look up again some people around the table have tears in their eyes.
I don’t expect many NHS meetings go like that. But we got the contract, and still work in that innovative NHS Trust, where many clinicians, nurses, service users, occupational therapists and NHS administrators now run weekly shared-reading groups – thirty-eight reading groups every week, at the last count. Should we keep it light? John would say we should keep it truthful.
Over the last 100 or so years the loss of the religious as a reputable discourse in common life has led to a poverty of language, and thus to a poverty of contemplative thought and feeling about what we are, and what we need. We need some inner stuff, scaffolding to help us get around our inside space, something to help us map, explore and even settle those places where we are still primitive. Beliefs help in the so-called well-being indices: people who are members of faith-groups are more likely to flourish than those who are not. For the rest of us, what are we to do with that unnamed place, space, sense? What is that part of being human which is touched by silence, which recognises an intense atmosphere when people are moved, which gets scared or exhilarated when alone in a big space, or when faced with a newborn baby? Science may gradually work this out: that is our mainstream model these days for accredited seriousness, for what we can be confident in believing. But literature – too often now dismissed or misplaced – has always known that buried part, and in thousands of ways.
It is not the medics or the psychologists who refuse to see this – on the contrary, the problem is that the best literature has been for too long (affluently) ghettoised on courses and in high culture, with too little human meaning actually acknowledged. One example: a well-known broadcaster can say this, of all things, in the
Observer
:
Being brutally honest, the only thing reading literary fiction qualifies you for is
I read:
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing –
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
I read the poem with seven pairs of eyes on me, and felt my voice crack as if I would cry at the lines ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’. Such powerful, revealing language to be using at a meeting table in this NHS building; such true, painful thoughts to be putting to senior mental-health practitioners and managers: ‘Hold them cheap may who ne’er hung there’. And to be reading it to John, whose eyes were locked onto my face as I read, the eyes of a man awaiting, what …? The public exposure of some customarily unadmitted truth. As when Pat read ‘I Am’, it seemed almost dangerous, as if the air again were cracking with human electricity, or John had handed me some sad powerful magic, and I’d set it off by reading it aloud, a sort of spell. Despite the institutional furniture, we are primitive creatures in a cave. We have the magic of language. It is frightening and good. When I look up again some people around the table have tears in their eyes.
I don’t expect many NHS meetings go like that. But we got the contract, and still work in that innovative NHS Trust, where many clinicians, nurses, service users, occupational therapists and NHS administrators now run weekly shared-reading groups – thirty-eight reading groups every week, at the last count. Should we keep it light? John would say we should keep it truthful.
Over the last 100 or so years the loss of the religious as a reputable discourse in common life has led to a poverty of language, and thus to a poverty of contemplative thought and feeling about what we are, and what we need. We need some inner stuff, scaffolding to help us get around our inside space, something to help us map, explore and even settle those places where we are still primitive. Beliefs help in the so-called well-being indices: people who are members of faith-groups are more likely to flourish than those who are not. For the rest of us, what are we to do with that unnamed place, space, sense? What is that part of being human which is touched by silence, which recognises an intense atmosphere when people are moved, which gets scared or exhilarated when alone in a big space, or when faced with a newborn baby? Science may gradually work this out: that is our mainstream model these days for accredited seriousness, for what we can be confident in believing. But literature – too often now dismissed or misplaced – has always known that buried part, and in thousands of ways.
It is not the medics or the psychologists who refuse to see this – on the contrary, the problem is that the best literature has been for too long (affluently) ghettoised on courses and in high culture, with too little human meaning actually acknowledged. One example: a well-known broadcaster can say this, of all things, in the
Observer
:
Being brutally honest, the only thing reading literary fiction qualifies you for is
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