Never Punk

Approximately three months of my high school freshman year were spent dating a junior who had a car, listened to Led Zeppelin, and encouraged me to cut class for morning trips to McDonald's. His family had much less money than mine. He referred to his father as his "old man." He lived with his old man in a small, vinyl-sided house, and his brother lived with their mother about eight blocks away in an equally small, clapboard-sided house. His life was messy. Everything was messy with his friends, too, and there were hours of driving to this or that person's house to pick up people, drop them off, find someone who could buy alcohol. All of them were already having sex. His friends knew I wouldn't last long—inexperienced, sheltered, and slumming as I was—and they didn't bother talking to me. I quickly found this world disappointing, but I also thought of it as the gritty "real" world.

So, by the beginning of my sophomore year, I was already disillusioned with a significant segment of the experiences I had marked out as real life when Mr. Hobbes took our English class to the school library for an exercise locating books using the card catalog. We were given titles to find while Mr. Hobbes gazed out the second-story windows, down onto the small groups of students traversing the front lawn toward the parking lot, the initial task when cutting class. I believe that surely he fixed his eyes on the punk kids, resplendent and slouching under the weight of heavy boots and studded jackets, chains running every which way, and safety pins lined up in unexpectedly tidy rows along the seams and rips in their jeans; they seemed to attend school largely for the pleasure of leaving it without permission. Mr. Hobbes was weary of high school instruction long before us; I remember his of lack starch—a doughy form in rumpled clothing with worn-in lesson plans.

After Led Zeppelin, but before the demise of the card catalog—this was 1987. Mr. Hobbes eventually turned from the window and passed out a mimeographed sheet. The mimeograph is a sad, bygone cousin to the Xerox; the blue ink bled out in a halo around each letter. There was a certain guesswork involved when reading a particularly poor copy. I'd say mimeographs taught you to read by instinct, but that would romanticize them.

The sheet he handed out was an extensive list of the great books we should read. Mr. Hobbes said that if we wanted to be educated individuals, we needed to tackle the list. He didn't bother to sell the concept, and he didn't assign any of the reading. He did not give the impression of caring whether we bothered to become educated individuals.

The List began with Aristotle and wrapped up somewhere in the front half of the twentieth century. I placed it delicately in my folder and proceeded to guard it carefully for the next twenty-five years. I needed that List. I needed the human experience to be deep—deeper than what I'd seen so far. These books held the promise of being about something important. From that moment, and well into my adult life, one of my satisfactions became the act of penciling a tiny check next to titles on The List.

I cherry-picked The List. I quickly knocked out all the Jane Austen, both Brontës, the Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Salinger. After East of Eden I developed the smug idea that the point of biblical knowledge was its service to the educated reader in recognizing intertextual references. I was assigned The Odyssey, but electively took on The Iliad. Beowulf, The Scarlet Letter, and The Great Gatsby were consumed and essayed out for classes, but I had to embrace The Communist Manifesto and Kafka's The Trial by force of will and the mandate of The List. There were groupings I stubbornly avoided—classical philosophers, Faulkner, books with especially dull-sounding glosses on the back cover. Books that were celebrated as "influential" almost always...