Lead a Man to Water?

It's a mix of several idioms, those figures of speech I admonish my students to use with the utmost caution when only really nothing else will do. If I don't, it's a year about reading how we shouldn't judge books by their covers and how Rome wasn't built in day, how what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and if you aren't first, you're last. Actually that last one is from the movie Talledega Nights, which is appropriate for a number of reasons that will quickly become clear; also, it's the only saying there that isn't actually true, but the point, really is that when we rely on others' words to do our thinking for us, we very quickly stop thinking. Anyway, this has more of a patchwork purpose, so here are the contributors:

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."

(Michael Franti added, not at all un-originally, "You can put a man through school, but you can't make him think.")

"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he will eat all the days of his life."

There may be more. They all involve sustenance, learning, survival, self determination. They are blanket statements that cover many stories. And the stories are good ones, human ones. I'd like to hear them, but I'd also like to write my own. I suppose borrowing from cliches is a bit hypocritical from a writing teacher, but we're all hypocrites, aren't we, to some degree? Hey, "do as I say, not as I do." See--did it again. But in some ways, this blog is about overcoming just that. Because if I can't lead this man to the (proverbial) water, how can I be an English teacher? And if I don't write, what gives me the gall to tell others how to do it?


My partner Larry (not his real name, but that of a man he greatly admires) does not enjoy reading. He reads for information, direction, review. I don't think he even read my whole match.com profile, because it clearly stated that being a reader was somewhere close to "bipedalism" and "not racist" in my list of potentially attractive qualities in a mate. I chose my ridiculously underpaid and appreciated path in life--that which places me in the financial pecking order far below a garbage collector, even though I collect all sorts of garbage and have to read it!--simply because words and language and other people, our shared stories, has been a central pillar of my life. As a kid-an only child--I lived in books, devouring them with a hungry intensity that filled the long hours of summer afternoons, and many hours I should have been doing math homework. There are characters I still think of often as we do of old friends we don't get to see anymore. Anne Lamont's Rosie was a childhood buddy. Pippi Longstocking was my idol. Books are not objects to stack on a shelf or fix a wobbly table. Books are places. Books are people. Books are magical. Because books contain us like nothing else. You don't like reading? No. Impossible. You can not like a book. But not liking reading is like not liking food or music. I firmly believe that people who not like reading have just not met the right book. Period.


He's a smart, well-educated man. He delights me. Larry (whose real name is much sexier) teaches people how to drive race cars for a living and is one of those hyper kinetic people who is loath to stand still. As I have been sitting here pouring over cliches and wondering if this is good fodder for public domain and if people might actually think this is worth even addressing, he has busted though last night's dishes at light speed, packed a suitcase, done his laundry, is now vacuuming the house and likely, in his head, is planning to accomplish ten more items on an internal game plan that extends into the evening. He is highly productive, whereas I am often not. We teach each other a lot. He's made me slightly better with money, and I have introduced him to "feelings." We both have a ways to go, but we seem to be going the same way, and despite the fact that he glazes over and looks at me like I'm developing an alarming rash when I talk about books, and laughs outright when I try to introduce him to one intimately, our relationship works. I can forgive him for not reading my whole profile, which also said that if you voted for Bush you'd never share my bed, but he voted right instead of right-wing last year, and so I have a transitive hope that "change" is more than a slogan, but an actual verb. If we are going to grow old together, the shared landscape of literature is a journey I am asking him to make, still as it may ask him to be. And because he actually loves me in a way I haven't experienced before--meaning a healthy and long-sustaining manner--he's willing to take it on. For the next year, as we mesh our lives into one small living space, set up family with dog, cat and bookshelf, he is going to read. Or so he says. And I am going to write about this process.

My good friend Khephra, as we travelled to Emily's wedding last week, described the unsettling panic she once felt upon arriving on a (non-English speaking) island, having forgotten to bring books. It is the intellectual equivalent to heading into the desert without water if you are a reader. Books--but more than the body that contains them, the stories books contain--are as essential to the well-being of my soul as water to a thirsty man.

And still. You can lead a man to water, but you can't make him drink. Or think. But if you help him to love reading, he will drink freely and with great satisfaction and joy, all of his days. Of course, he must first be thirsty.