Against the Spread

 

In the Glass household, the winter holidays are full of books. Library books checked out, new books unwrapped, trips to the bookstore for that just right volume, aspirational piles sorted and old favorites revisited. We have the good fortune of living near family, so rather than a break filled with travel and plane connections, we get to visit close to home, which leaves more hours in the wan December sunlight to curl up and read. This year while at our local bookstore I picked up Ben Lerner’s new novel, The Topeka School —another entry in the growing genre of autofiction, fictionalized autobiography, and the third in a series that Lerner has written. I knew Lerner first as a poet, when he visited Davis while I was there as a graduate student—over the course of a long drive from Berkeley to Davis, and over dinner together, he came across as being as sharp and obsessive as his main characters, but humbler than they read in his prose. 

 

In The Topeka School, Lerner describes a practice in high-level debate called “spreading,” in which debaters train themselves to speak at “nearly unintelligible speed,” in order to lay out as many arguments as possible, making it difficult for their opponents to negate them all. Lerner connects the spread to other forms of information overload: the disclosures rushed through at the end of prescription drug commercials, or the “terms of service” we regularly click our agreement to without reading. 

 

In the quiet of the year's end, from the cozy confines of a couch, it feels easy to look at such information overload with a critical eye. And yet I know, we all know on some level, that the return to the school-work-parenting juggling act of normal life brings with it a deluge of news and needs, life at the pace of Twitter rather than the slow unfolding of a novel. The world spreads us. How can we create space for specificity, attention, presence?

 

Jewish tradition reminds us to be amazed by the world around us: to greet each day, each experience new and old, with gratitude and wonder. When our students practice mindfulness in morning meeting, they are stopping to appreciate the weight of air as they exchange breath with the earth. In so doing, they are also learning to focus their attention and grow their capacity for learning, allowing them to meet the rigors of our challenging academic program (a connection scholarly research continues to underscore).

 

In 2020, I hope you’ll find an opportunity to join us in a parent minyan, weekly meditation, or Torah study—thirty minutes from your week that will help you strengthen your own powers of attention and presence.