reading my future

"I'm a prosecutor.


"I'm part of the business of accusing, judging, and punishing.


"I explore the evidence of a crime and determine who is charged, who is brought to this room to be tried before his peers. I present my evidence to the jury and they deliberate upon it. They must determine what really happened.


"If they cannot, we will not know whether the accused deserves to be freed or should be punished.


"If they cannot find the truth, what is our hope of justice?"


The voice is Rudy Sabich's.  Created by Scott Turow in Presumed Innocent.  One of the books that accurately portrays the moral ambiguities of the law.  Where lawyers try to act nobly, but do not always succeed. 


Just like the rest of us. 


Just like real life.


But there was a day when the dew coated my eyes.  When law was nothing more than a statue of Justice come alive.


A book was one of the two reasons I became an attorney. 


In 1961 a neighbor lady gave me her copy of a recently-published book.  She knew reading was one of my favorite activities because I would frequently walk  past her house with my nose in a book.


The book was new to me.  By Harper Lee.  (A man, I thought.  Not knowing the eccentricity of southern names.)  To Kill a Mockingbird.


I read it in one sitting.  Flipping page after page as a young girl narrated the tale of her family in Alabama during The Depression -- especially, the tale of her noble lawyer father, Atticus Fitch.  A man who would stand up to prejudice to defend the concept of law.  He was as heroic as any caped crusader.


The seed was planted.  How better to put my faith into practice than by being a defender of justice?  Within three years, my course was set.  And I never swerved from it.


I wish I could say that I was consistent in my ultimate goal.  Over the years, I became a bit more cynical.  A bit more sarcastic.  Until I seemed to be swimming in a sea of irony.


But I never regretted the choice. To Kill a Mockingbird has had a very special place in my life.


Now that my ankle is strengthening and I can move around, I started straightening up some piles in my library.  And there was the book I received from my neighbor.  I pulled it down, vowing to re-read it during the next week.


At least, that was my plan.


In the late 1970s, James Burke hosted a television series entitled "Connections."  In each episode, he would examine how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events built off one another in an interconnected way to give us some sort of modern technological advancement.  Each episode was consistently clever and interesting.


I felt a similar connection on Thursday.  Felipe posted an essay on how his lawn was "mocking" him.  Connection number one.


Then I received an email about a recent Wall Street Journal review of To Kill a Mockingbird.  Connection number two.


The review is best summed up in Flannery O'Connor's observation:  "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book." 


Here is the core of the review:

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

A portion of me -- the more sardonic part -- wants to say, you bet.  That is the guy who attends Philip Glass concerts, mocks inappropriate dress, turns up his nose at Miracle Whip.  The kind of guy you would find at an elite political fundraiser.


Fortunately, the boy who read To Kill a Mockingbird is still alive.  I know Scott Turow writes better literature.  That moral ambiguity is the way the world works.  That Atticus Finch is a cardboard figure from a comic book.


But, so what?


So what if there is no ambiguity in the novel?  So what if we learn nothing new from it?  So what if it merely reinforces the obvious.


Sometimes we need heroes with unalloyed virtues.  Heroes who make us look at our better nature.  And what better narrative than how a young girl sees her father?

 

I cannot say the review is entirely wrong.  It simply misses the point of the novel.  Harper Lee wants us to see a world that may never have existed.  But it is a world where hurt, justice, and Doing the Right Thing all come together wrapped in the adhesive of true family values.  That when we start looking at the world through the eyes of others, we learn kindness -- and what it means to be part of a functioning society.


So, I am going to pick up the book.  Read it through.


And see if I can find that boy who found a map for his life in books.