This, I think, is our real problem with audio books, and it is also Esposito’s and Birkerts’s and Bloom’s. When these critics demand “active listening,” when they insist that the internal cognitive analytic effort they valorize must have an external manifestation (that only the motion of the eyes can render a person “open to wisdom”), they are saying that audio books are middlebrow. They don’t care whether you listen to Tracy Morgan’s I Am the New Black or Keith Richards’s Life; that stuff is already beneath their concern. What they don’t like is when you try to listen to Père Goriot. Reading is only reading, by this account, when it requires the constant assertion of will. Reading is that heroic and dignified effort of the raccoon resisting the shiny objects and paying sustained attention to the page. Novels that do not require effort, once-highbrow books suddenly made accessible even to raccoons and the dyslexic and people without the willpower to finish or even begin them in hardback, are art for strivers. They’re simply too easy to swallow.
Not long ago, in my sister’s elementary-school classroom, I met a second grader who seemed well on his way to a doctoral degree in Egyptology. After describing the mummification process in recondite detail—not only why the brain was removed through the nose but how exactly natron dried out the rest of the body—the child drew an elaborate cartouche with the hieroglyphs used to spell my name. He then proceeded to tell me more about the pharaoh Tutankhamun than most of the other students could tell me about their own grandfathers.
It makes sense that a boy king would have an enduring hold over boys, but it is less clear why so many of the rest of us are still enthralled by Tutankhamun more than three thousand years after he ruled over the New Kingdom and a hundred years after the excavation of his tomb, in the Valley of the Kings. Tutankhamun represents an extremely narrow slice of Egyptian history; imagine if, in the year 4850, the world understood the United States largely through the Presidency of Millard Fillmore. Yet the anniversary of the excavation has occasioned everything from new histories and documentaries to travelling exhibitions and children’s books, each of which contains its own implicit argument about Tutankhamun’s appeal.
The 2017 novel by Korean American author Min Jin Lee tells the story of a Korean family over 80 years and four generations. Sunja, the novel’s protagonist and the family’s matriarch, is born in the 1910s in Japanese-colonized Busan, Korea, and migrates to Osaka, Japan. The family are Zainichi, Koreans living in Japan, who are subject to discrimination and bullying. Pachinko, which gets its name from the arcade-style gambling game (Sunja’s family ultimately ends up operating pachinko parlors in Osaka), was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times. It was a finalist for a National Book Award. Hugh was aware of the buzz, and even though she is a Korean American herself, something held her back from reading it.
“I think a part of you is afraid to crack open the book because it would be sort of having to reckon with that pain, the generational trauma, and the family’s experiences of the past hundred years,” she says. But on a flight from London to New York, she decided to give it a shot.
The simplest theory of human nature is that we work as hard as we can to avoid such experiences. We pursue pleasure and comfort; we hope to make it through life unscathed. Suffering and pain are, by their very nature, to be avoided. The tidying guru Marie Kondo became famous by telling people to throw away possessions that don’t “spark joy,” and many would see such purging as excellent life advice in general.
But this theory is incomplete. Under the right circumstances and in the right doses, physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for.
Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve on a plot. Such a bump is the unmistakable signature of “resonance,” one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in nature.
Resonance underlies aspects of the world as diverse as music, nuclear fusion in dying stars, and even the very existence of subatomic particles. Here’s how the same effect manifests in such varied settings, from everyday life down to the smallest scales.