Clarissa's Blog

By the time I graduated from high school, I had read the entire collected works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kuprin, and Chekhov. I had some difficulties with the parts of Brothers Karamazov that had to do with religion. My father had to explain them to me.

Other than that, I had no problem understanding and massively enjoying these books. That a Harvard professor would be so defeated by a novel by Toni Morrison is strange.

It’s become fashionable to pretend to be a moron who comes from a family of utter illiterates. Jason Arday is the perfect example. He didn’t pretend that he was more well-read than he truly was. To the contrary, he pretended that he couldn’t even read until age 18.

If you haven’t read anything until that age, you’re hopelessly behind. You will never be an intellectual because you have no foundation in the reading culture. It’s a very bad sign that Arday bragged about reading nothing and not about reading everything and it worked.

There is a big problem with creating falsely democratic and anti-hierarchical environments. The reality doesn’t care about our feelings. We can pretend all we want that it doesn’t matter who your parents are and whether they created a culture of reading, thinking, and enjoying art in the home. We can pretend that it’s possible to read nothing until adulthood and still catch up, but this pretence doesn’t change reality.