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I want to talk today
about how reading can change our lives
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and about the limits of that change.
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I want to talk to you about how reading
can give us a shareable world
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of powerful human connection.
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But also about how that connection
is always partial.
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How reading is ultimately
a lonely, idiosyncratic undertaking.
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The writer who changed my life
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was the great African American
novelist James Baldwin.
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When I was growing up
in Western Michigan in the 1980s,
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there weren't many Asian American writers
interested in social change.
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And so I think I turned to James Baldwin
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as a way to fill this void,
as a way to feel racially conscious.
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But perhaps because I knew
I wasn't myself African American,
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I also felt challenged
and indicted by his words.
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Especially these words:
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"There are liberals
who have all the proper attitudes,
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but no real convictions.
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When the chips are down
and you somehow expect them to deliver,
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they are somehow not there."
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They are somehow not there.
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I took those words very literally.
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Where should I put myself?
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I went to the Mississippi Delta,
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one of the poorest regions
in the United States.
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This is a place shaped
by a powerful history.
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In the 1960s, African Americans
risked their lives to fight for education,
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to fight for the right to vote.
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I wanted to be a part of that change,
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to help young teenagers graduate
and go to college.
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When I got to the Mississippi Delta,
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it was a place that was still poor,
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still segregated,
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still dramatically in need of change.
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My school, where I was placed,
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had no library, no guidance counselor,
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but it did have a police officer.
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Half the teachers were substitutes
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and when students got into fights,
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the school would send them
to the local county jail.
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This is the school where I met Patrick.
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He was 15 and held back twice,
he was in the eighth grade.
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He was quiet, introspective,
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like he was always in deep thought.
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And he hated seeing other people fight.
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I saw him once jump between two girls
when they got into a fight
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and he got himself knocked to the ground.
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Patrick had just one problem.
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He wouldn't come to school.
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He said that sometimes
school was just too depressing
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because people were always fighting
and teachers were quitting.
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And also, his mother worked two jobs
and was just too tired to make him come.
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So I made it my job
to get him to come to school.
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And because I was crazy and 22
and zealously optimistic,
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my strategy was
just to show up at his house
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and say, "Hey, why don't you
come to school?"
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And this strategy actually worked,
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he started to come to school every day.
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And he started to flourish in my class.
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He was writing poetry,
he was reading books.
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He was coming to school every day.
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Around the same time
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that I had figured out
how to connect to Patrick,
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I got into law school at Harvard.
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I once again faced this question,
where should I put myself,
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where do I put my body?
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And I thought to myself
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that the Mississippi Delta
was a place where people with money,
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people with opportunity,
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those people leave.
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And the people who stay behind
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are the people who don't have
the chance to leave.
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I didn't want to be a person who left.
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I wanted to be a person who stayed.
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On the other hand, I was lonely and tired.
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And so I convinced myself
that I could do more change
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on a larger scale if I had
a prestigious law degree.
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So I left.
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Three years later,
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when I was about
to graduate from law school,
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my friend called me
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and told me that Patrick
had got into a fight and killed someone.
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I was devastated.
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Part of me didn't believe it,
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but part of me also knew that it was true.
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I flew down to see Patrick.
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I visited him in jail.
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And he told me that it was true.
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That he had killed someone.
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And he didn't want to talk more about it.
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I asked him what had happened with school
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and he said that he had dropped out
the year after I left.
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And then he wanted
to tell me something else.
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He looked down and he said
that he had had a baby daughter
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who was just born.
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And he felt like he had let her down.
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That was it, our conversation
was rushed and awkward.
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When I stepped outside the jail,
a voice inside me said,
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"Come back.
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If you don't come back now,
you'll never come back."
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So I graduated from law school
and I went back.
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I went back to see Patrick,
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I went back to see if I could help him
with his legal case.
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And this time,
when I saw him a second time,
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I thought I had this great idea, I said,
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"Hey, Patrick, why don't you
write a letter to your daughter,
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so that you can keep her on your mind?"
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And I handed him a pen
and a piece of paper,
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and he started to write.
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But when I saw the paper
that he handed back to me,
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I was shocked.
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I didn't recognize his handwriting,
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he had made simple spelling mistakes.
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And I thought to myself that as a teacher,
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I knew that a student
could dramatically improve
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in a very quick amount of time,
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but I never thought that a student
could dramatically regress.
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What even pained me more,
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was seeing what he had written
to his daughter.
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He had written,
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"I'm sorry for my mistakes,
I'm sorry for not being there for you."
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And this was all he felt
he had to say to her.
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And I asked myself how can I convince him
that he has more to say,
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parts of himself that
he doesn't need to apologize for.
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I wanted him to feel
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that he had something worthwhile
to share with his daughter.
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For every day the next seven months,
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I visited him and brought books.
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My tote bag became a little library.
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I brought James Baldwin,
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I brought Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis.
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I brought guidebooks to trees, to birds,
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and what would become
his favorite book, the dictionary.
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On some days,
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we would sit for hours in silence,
both of us reading.
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And on other days,
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we would read together,
we would read poetry.
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We started by reading haikus,
hundreds of haikus,
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a deceptively simple masterpiece.
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And I would ask him,
"Share with me your favorite haikus."
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And some of them are quite funny.
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So there's this by Issa:
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"Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house casually."
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And this: "Napped half the day,
no one punished me!"
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And this gorgeous one, which is
about the first day of snow falling,
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"Deer licking first frost
from each other's coats."
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There's something mysterious and gorgeous
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just about the way a poem looks.
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The empty space is as important
as the words themselves.
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We read this poem by W.S. Merwin,
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which he wrote after he saw
his wife working in the garden
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and realized that they would spend
the rest of their lives together.
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"Let me imagine that we will come again
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when we want to and it will be spring
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We will be no older than we ever were
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The worn griefs will have eased
like the early cloud
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through which morning
slowly comes to itself"
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I asked Patrick what his favorite
line was, and he said,
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"We will be no older than we ever were."
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He said it reminded him
of a place where time just stops,
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where time doesn't matter anymore.
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And I asked him
if he had a place like that,
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where time lasts forever.
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And he said, "My mother."
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When you read a poem
alongside someone else,
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the poem changes in meaning.
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Because it becomes personal
to that person, becomes personal to you.
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We then read books, we read so many books,
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we read the memoir of Frederick Douglass,
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an American slave who taught
himself to read and write
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and who escaped to freedom
because of his literacy.
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I had grown up thinking
of Frederick Douglass as a hero
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and I thought of this story
as one of uplift and hope.
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But this book put Patrick
in a kind of panic.
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He fixated on a story Douglass told
of how, over Christmas,
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masters give slaves gin
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as a way to prove to them
that they can't handle freedom.
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Because slaves would be
stumbling on the fields.
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Patrick said he related to this.
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He said that there are people in jail
who, like slaves,
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don't want to think about their condition,
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because it's too painful.
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Too painful to think about the past,
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too painful to think
about how far we have to go.
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His favorite line was this line:
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"Anything, no matter what,
to get rid of thinking!
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It was this everlasting thinking
of my condition that tormented me."
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Patrick said that Douglass was brave
to write, to keep thinking.
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But Patrick would never know
how much he seemed like Douglass to me.
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How he kept reading,
even though it put him in a panic.
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He finished the book before I did,
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reading it in a concrete
stairway with no light.
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And then we went on
to read one of my favorite books,
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Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead,"
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which is an extended letter
from a father to his son.
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He loved this line:
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"I'm writing this in part to tell you
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that if you ever wonder
what you've done in your life ...
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you have been God's grace to me,
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a miracle, something more than a miracle."
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Something about this language,
its love, its longing, its voice,
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rekindled Patrick's desire to write.
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And he would fill notebooks upon notebooks
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with letters to his daughter.
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In these beautiful, intricate letters,
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he would imagine him and his daughter
going canoeing down the Mississippi river.
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He would imagine them
finding a mountain stream
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with perfectly clear water.
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As I watched Patrick write,
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I though to myself,
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and I now ask all of you,
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how many of you have written a letter
to somebody you feel you have let down?
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It is just much easier
to put those people out of your mind.
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But Patrick showed up every day,
facing his daughter,
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holding himself accountable to her,
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word by word with intense concentration.
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I wanted in my own life
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to put myself at risk in that way.
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Because that risk reveals
the strength of one's heart.
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Let me take a step back
and just ask an uncomfortable question.
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Who am I to tell this story,
as in this Patrick story?
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Patrick's the one who lived with this pain
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and I have never been hungry
a day in my life.
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I thought about this question a lot,
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but what I want to say is that this story
is not just about Patrick.
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It's about us,
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it's about the inequality between us.
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The world of plenty
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that Patrick and his parents
and his grandparents
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have been shut out of.
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In this story, I represent
that world of plenty.
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And in telling this story,
I didn't want to hide myself.
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Hide the power that I do have.
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In telling this story,
I wanted to expose that power
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and then to ask,
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how do we diminish
the distance between us?
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Reading is one way to close that distance.
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It gives us a quiet universe
that we can share together,
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that we can share in equally.
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You're probably wondering now
what happened to Patrick.
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Did reading save his life?
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It did and it didn't.
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When Patrick got out of prison,
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his journey was excruciating.
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Employers turned him away
because of his record,
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his best friend, his mother,
died at age 43
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from heart disease and diabetes.
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He's been homeless, he's been hungry.
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So people say a lot of things
about reading that feel exaggerated to me.
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Being literate didn't stop him
form being discriminated against.
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It didn't stop his mother from dying.
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So what can reading do?
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I have a few answers to end with today.
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Reading charged his inner life
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with mystery, with imagination,
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with beauty.
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Reading gave him images that gave him joy:
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mountain, ocean, deer, frost.
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Words that taste of a free, natural world.
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Reading gave him a language
for what he had lost.
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How precious are these lines
from the poet Derek Walcott?
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Patrick memorized this poem.
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"Days that I have held,
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days that I have lost,
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days that outgrow, like daughters,
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my harboring arms."
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Reading taught him his own courage.
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Remember that he kept reading
Frederick Douglass,
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even though it was painful.
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He kept being conscious,
even though being conscious hurts.
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Reading is a form of thinking,
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that's why it's difficult to read
because we have to think.
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And Patrick chose to think,
rather than to not think.
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And last, reading gave him a language
to speak to his daughter.
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Reading inspired him to want to write.
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The link between reading
and writing is so powerful.
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When we begin to read,
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we begin to find the words.
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And he found the words
to imagine the two of them together.
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He found the words
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to tell her how much he loved her.
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Reading also changed
our relationship with each other.
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It gave us an occasion for intimacy,
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to see beyond our points of view.
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And reading took an unequal relationship
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and gave us a momentary equality.
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When you meet somebody as a reader,
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you meet him for the first time,
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newly, freshly.
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There is no way you can know
what his favorite line will be.
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What memories and private griefs he has.
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And you face the ultimate privacy
of his inner life.
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And then you start to wonder,
"Well, what is my inner life made of?
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What do I have that's worthwhile
to share with another?"
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I want to close
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on some of my favorite lines
from Patrick's letters to his daughter.
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"The river is shadowy in some places
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but the light shines
through the cracks of trees ...
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On some branches
hang plenty of mulberries.
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You stretch your arm
straight out to grab some."
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And this lovely letter, where he writes,
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"Close your eyes and listen
to the sounds of the words.
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I know this poem by heart
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and I would like you to know it, too."
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Thank you so much everyone.
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(Applause)