I think T.S. Eliot might have been mistaken. This year, February has been the cruelest month. Particularly, the nineteenth of February, which was the day the world lost both Harper Lee and Umberto Eco, two giants in the literary world, and both truly good human beings, who did much to make us all better human beings.
Pulitzer Prize winner Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, AL, which severed as the model for Maycomb, the home of Scout and Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It was in Monroeville that Lee not only learned to love reading, but through reading develop the beautifully simple, honest empathy that marked her book, which remains one of the undisputed classics of American literature. In a letter to Oprah in 2006 (excerpted here from Letters of Note), Lee described how the children of her neighborhood shared books, since they were all too far from a library or store to get new ones–and what a privilege that was:
Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again….
We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them.
And it wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.
We covered the enormous international interest (and speculation) over the release of Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman last summer; there were many who believed that Lee was coerced into publishing, and others who were horror-struck by the evolution of the characters that generations of readers who had grown up loving Atticus and Scout.
The book’s release has indubitably changed Lee’s legacy, mostly in a way that strikingly mirrors her two published works…Just as the heroic, the untouchable, and the incorruptible Atticus Finch was revealed to be shockingly human, so was Harper Lee herself revealed as a writer of enormous talent, and human shortcomings, whose work was both time-stoppingly haunting and, it has to be said, somewhat clunky and awkward, at times, too. But, in this past year, what we learned about Harper Lee was not that “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy”; but that their voice–her voice–can make us accept the humanity in ourselves, and work ever harder to see it in those around us, too.
In addition to giving us a wealth of books to read, Eco also made him name by helping us learn how to read. His work on Interpretation helped change the way that scholars read texts, and his surprisingly approachable lectures continue to open our eyes to how writing and reading can change our lives and our world. In this excerpt from a lecture given at Columbia University in 1996, for example Eco makes the startling and brilliant point that books–specifically printed books–can teach us more about life than any other medium:
Let me conclude with a praise of the finite and limited world that books provide us.
Suppose you are reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace: you are desperately wishing that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel who is Anatolij; you desperately wish that that marvellous person who is prince Andrej will not die, and that he and Natasha could live together happy forever. If you had War and Peace in a hypertextual and interactive CD-rom you could rewrite your own story, according to your desires, you could invent innumerable War and Peaces, where Pierre Besuchov succeeds in killing Napoleon or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov.
Alas, with a book you cannot. You are obliged to accept the laws of Fate, and to realise that you cannot change Destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such a kind of inventive activity will be practised in the schools of the future. But the written War and Peace does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of Freedom, but with the severe law of Necessity. In order to be free persons we also need to learn this lesson about Life and Death, and only books can still provide us with such a wisdom.
We’ve discussed this very topic here–that sometimes, books end in ways that make you sad. And while I railed against cruel fate, and retreated to a world where book endings grew like wildflowers, Eco’s insight teaches us that sometimes, life–and death–is beyond our control. And learning to accept that lesson through the act of reading, and in the safety of a book, may make us better an wiser than the text of that book ever could.
There aren’t good words to sum up what these two human beings did with their lives, or what their lives have meant to all that they touched with their words and their ideas. But those words and those ideas are far more durable than flesh, and for that, we can only be grateful.