Only What I Know

The Guardian recently reported that 88 year old author Harper Lee will publish this July a sequel to her classic work To Kill A Mockingbird. The new book will be called Go Set A Watchman. I took interest in this story about the long-overdue sequel because To Kill A Mockingbird long ago inspired my love of reading and it more than any other experience first got me thinking what it might be like to live as someone else, "to climb into someone's skin and walk around in it" as the book's Atticus Finch puts it.

I didn’t come to To Kill A Mockingbird in the usual way. My older sister had the book for her high school English class. When she was done with it, I found it on her dresser and read it. I didn’t read it because it was assigned to me or because it was a classic. I was eleven. I liked birds and the cover of the book had a bird on it, a mockingbird to be precise. It was that simple. But I was surprised to find that the book had little to do with birds.

Instead of birds I found a story about big problems told from the vantage point of a little girl. That girl, Scout, was the daughter of Atticus Finch, a small town lawyer and legislator who lived in the deep South during the height of Jim Crow. Like Scout, I was the youngest child in my house. Like Scout, I felt I was overly critiqued, always challenged. Unlike me, Scout at least was always heard.

Scout asked a lot of questions about the way the people in that world related to one another. I pondered the same kinds of questions, but never out loud. Atticus patiently answered Scout’s questions, explained what it meant to live in a world that presented hard choices. I did not have anyone like that in my life, so I leaned on Atticus and Scout. My conscience deepened because of To Kill A Mockingbird, because of the conversations between Atticus and Scout.

Today, I still read books that allow me to explore ideas of moral significance from vantage points foreign to my own. I teach this sort of book too to emphasize the importance of question and answer. Harper Lee not only influenced how I think, but how I teach reading, writing, listening, speaking and, most importantly, critical thinking. She once said a writer should write only what she knows, and should write truthfully. Well, that's what I plan to do here, with this blog. That's why I call it Only What I Know.