I Will Live a Thousand Times Before I Die: Reading as a way of Life

How to Know How

George R.R. Martin wrote in his book A Dance With Dragons: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”

I constantly read and because I try to imagine what I am reading so that in a way I live it. I have been to places that have never traveled to before and on entering them I know exactly where everything is and what happened there. I remember leading a group from my Army chapel in Wurzburg Germany to Wittenberg, where Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation. As I led the group through the town a couple of people asked me how many times I had been there. I told them, “physically, never until today, but I have been here a thousand times before because of books. I saw Wittenberg in my minds eye before I ever saw the city.” They were surprised and both said that it seemed like I had been there many times.

I have had the same thing happen other places that I have visited, and again, it is because I read, and as I read, I imagine and occasionally dream.

I have a huge number of my books in my office most dealing with the history, especially the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the World Wars, and the insurgencies and counter-insurgency wars of the past seventy or so years. I have a lot of biographies, books on American history, military theory, sociology, philosophy, psychology related to war and PTSD, and a few theological works.

Coupled with mementos of my military career, other militaria, artwork, and baseball memorabilia the sight and smell can be both overwhelming and comforting at the same time.

When had room for an office library when I was still in the military, my visitors would tell me that they were amazed at what they saw. Those books told my visitors volumes about me without them ever asking a question or me telling them. Occasionally, someone would ask to borrow a book, and most of the time I would lend them the book, or if I had multiple copies even give it to them. I still give books to my students.

In a sense my books are kind of a window to my soul, the topics, and even how I have them organized, and they are not for decoration. Many times while I am reflecting on a topic, a conversation, or something that I read in the news I peruse my books and pull one or more out to help me better understand it, or relate it to history. sometimes when in conversation something will come up and I can pull out a book. One of my Chaplains said that he should “apply for graduate credit” for what he learns in our often off the cuff talks. But, for me that is because I read so much and absorb it.

Likewise my memorabilia is there to remind me of all the people in my past who I have served with. I don’t have all my medals, honors, and diplomas up for everyone to see, instead I have pictures and collages, many signed by people who made a difference in my life. When I see the signatures and often all too kind words on them I am humbled, and in some cases a tear will come to my eye, but I digress…

I always try to read a decent amount everyday. In the past few months I have read a number of works, most approaching what amount to be tomes. Unfortunately, in the month leading up to the election and the month since I got wrapped up in reading every about it, and when I resumed writing here after months off, most of what I wrote dealt with politics and political controversy. Much of this is because I was an am very concerned about the tyranny to come, but trying to write about it and draw lessons from history to use in writing about it was exhausting. I realized that I need to pace those articles out and be more strategic rather than reacting to every new crisis that occur daily. But that is what Trump wants us to do. There will never be an end to the outrages he provokes, they are all designed to wear us down and make us numb. We all need to be strategic in how we resist. If we wear ourselves out before Trump even takes office, we will be in no shape for continued resistance, and the we will need to be even more on guard and be able to make our resistance count. We have to be like the Marquis in Vichy France or the Viet Minh in French Indochina,

I will continue to write, but more on history with some forays into the political situation and crises that we face and will continue to face in the coming weeks, months, and years. In order to do that I need to spend more time reading. I do a lot, but it is frequently at the end of the day when I am exhausted. That is no way to learn. In spite of that I have read quite a few books over the past few months.

I am currently reading Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom, which is a must read for people in our country today, and Dominic Lieven’s book Russia Against Napoleon: the True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace, which is a must read in order to understand Vladimir Putin’s Russia today. I read Richard Evans book Hitler’s People: the Faces of the Third Reich which can help us understand the faces of those absolutely committed to Donald Trump, and what they will be willing to do over the coming years, as well as William Shirer’s The Nightmare Years 1930-1940 about his experiences as a reporter in Europe and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We need to be able to see the big picture of how authoritarian movements and dictatorships arose in Europe to see how it could happen here. I read Michael Broers’ three volume biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc: the Dictators Who Want to Run the World, in order to better understand the authoritarianism that is taking over countries in Europe, and now the United States. James McGregor Burns’ Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed our World, Timothy Snyder’s Our Malady: Lessons on Liberty from a Hospital Bed, a book that we need to understand how healthcare promotes freedom, and how that is not how our healthcare system works, and reread William Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic: an Inquiry into the Fall of France, 1940, as well as Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny.

I love complex characters, people who may be heroes and at the same time scoundrels. I like the contradictions and the feet of clay of people, because I am filled with my own, and truthfully saints are pretty boring. Unfortunately I haven’t read any biographies of late, although most of my reading deals a lot with biography as the characters weave their way through history.

The student who gave me the gift with the wonderful inscription who I wrote about yesterday asked how I had such a deep understanding and knowledge of so many different periods of history, and I told him that it is because that I cannot stop reading and because I deep dive about every subject I read about and research. He compared me to many historians who stick to one field. Like Barbara Tuchman, I cannot be that specialized, I want to know a lot about everything and be able to teach and write about them in depth. Maybe I’m weird that way, but I am okay with that. In the coming years, so long as Trump’s MAGA goon squads don’t hunt me down, I want to continue to work on my existing Civil War manuscripts, expand my drafts on the Holocaust and the post World War Two War Crimes trials, military strategy, ethics, and authoritarian government. I also want to continue to teach, and expand the minds of my students. Today, after reviewing their latest tests with all of them, I detoured from our lesson plans and taught them about Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, and the speech that he gave to Congress in 1979. I read it to them and assigned them to write an essay about him and compare his speech to the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence and Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech, and for my international students, similar speeches from people in their country’s history.

That is why books are so important to me, and why they are far more important than anything that is shouted at me on television. Historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his little but profound book, On Tyranny:

“Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.”

Barbara Tuchman wrote:

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”

But anyway, I am late getting this out. So have a great day and a better tomorrow.