26
DORIS LESSING
erable examination papers - and couldn't believe my eyes; sat in on
classes for teaching literature, and couldn't believe my ears.
You might be saying: "That is an exaggerated reaction, and
you have no right to it, because you say you have never been part
of the system." But I think it is not at all exaggerated, and that the
reaction of someone from outside is valuable simply because it is
fresh and not biased by allegiance to a particular education.
But after this investigation, I had no difficulty in answering my
own questions: Why are they so parochial, so personal, so small–
minded? Why do they always atomize, and belittle, why are they so
fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole? Why is their in–
terpretation of the word "critic" always to find fault? Why are they
always seeing writers as in conflict with each other, rather than
ccmplementing each other? Simple, this is how they are trained to
think. That valuable person who understands what you are doing,
what you are aiming for, and can give you advice and real criticism,
is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even out–
side the university system; it may be a student just beginning, and
still in love with literature, or perhaps it may be a thoughtful person
who reads a great deal, following his own instinct.
I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writ–
ing theses about one book: "There is only one way to read, which
is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract
you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping
the parts that drag - and never, never reading anything because
you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or
thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -and vice
versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you. Remember
that for all the books we have in print, there are as many that have
never reached print, have never been written down; even now, in this
age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social
ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been
conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written - and un–
fortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do
no more than this - are missing what is before their eyes. For in–
stance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black story–
tellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal
