Last night I was talking to the person who brought me into the program, and it occurred to me that I have been awfully bitchy about program literature this week, and I started to question why that was. Short Answer: I have not been going to my daily meetings, but have been reading more as I catch up on lots of work stuff around the house.
And, well, the writings of the program really aren’t literature per se. Are they profound to me as an addict? Yes. Are they indispensable guides to my life in recovery? Yes. But are they literature? Meh. I can say for certain that my undergrad literature professors would certainly say No. The abundance of exclamation points alone would have failed the writers of the big book where I went to school.
So I’m going to get my sorry butt back into some meetings and leave the program literature alone for a while.
A few minutes ago while looking online for something totally unrelated to recovery, I ran across this post: Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why. It has given me pause about my approach to reading the writings of the program, particularly this quotation from Francis Bacon: “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”
And that is what I’m going to try to do from now on.
Also: If you have never read Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, it’s mighty awesome.