Grasping at Enlightenment

I’m just outside of Hartford, the halfway point on a routine drive from New York to Boston, when it dawns on me that I can’t listen to one more minute of the 12-CD box I’ve brought along to while away the time: “The Kings and Queens of England: A Thousand-Year History.” For the last two hours, plummy-voiced narrators have been droning on about Henry IV and Charles II and James I; I can’t keep them straight. The dutiful student in me, trained to finish any book I’ve started, finally rebels. I eject CD No. 4 -- “The Restoration” -- and turn the dial to a soft-rock station. It’s great to hear the Bee Gees again, but I’m sore at myself: two hours of “reading” time lost. In Boston, I hustle to the nearest Barnes & Noble and pick up Walter Isaacson’s “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” for the trip home.

I belong to the baby boomer demographic that seems to set the cultural agenda these days, and a books-on-CD mania is abroad in the land. “I just finished ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ ” my brother announces. “Jeremy Irons is fantastic.” My friend Pauline has been listening to Proust as she jogs. “Have you read ‘Atonement’?” I ask a colleague over lunch. “I’ve been listening to it when I walk the dog,” she replies. “It’s the only time in my life I can remember wanting her to have to go.”

The attraction of this auditory fad is obvious. Strapped for time, we can multi-task. Reading while driving or paying bills accomplishes two things at once. It enables us to work at self-improvement every hour of the day and night -- a big priority in my ambitious cohort -- and reduces the humiliation that afflicts the over-privileged whenever they have to perform a menial task. I just appear to be doing the laundry: If you notice the little white gadget hung around my neck, you’ll see that I’m tuned in to Audible.com, which allows you to download an entire book from your PC. I’m re-listening to “Dombey and Son.”

But listening to books is only the symptom of a larger trend -- a technological means of addressing a social phenomenon. Every 40- and 50-something I know seems to have a book group. My brother and sister-in-law meet once a month with a circle of neighbors. I come home from work to find 10 earnest women sitting around the living room deep in a discussion of “The Leopard” by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. There’s even a book group in my apartment building. Their most recent assignment, I learn from a notice by the elevator, is Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.” (I wonder what Mrs. Lapidus in 14C, chairperson of the lobby floral arrangement committee, will make of this dark tale of homoerotic love.)

Covetous of everyone else’s book clubs, Howard, my neighbor at work, suggests we start one of our own. Like me, Howard is an English major gone awry; 35 years out of college, we miss our books. “What’s the most important book you’ve never read?” Howard asks one day, leaning in the door of my office. I pause a moment, wondering if I should tell the truth, then blurt out “Pride and Prejudice.” He shakes his head. “That needs to be rectified right away.” A week later, we stand around the water cooler, assessing whether we had known all along that Elizabeth Bennet would marry Mr. Darcy. I admit I wasn’t sure; Howard admits to having seen the “Masterpiece Theatre” version on TV, so the plot was fresh in his mind.

We linger a while, reluctant to go back to work. Then Howard says shyly, “Let’s do ‘Northanger Abbey’ next.” How to account for this midlife reading fever? My theory is that, like so many other crises that beset us as we approach the threshold of old age, it’s a struggle to cram as much experience as possible into the time that’s left. The expectation is that people shut down as they get older -- they grow crotchety, conservative, intolerant. But just as often they open up, becoming more curious, more observant, more eager to learn. By the time we reach late middle age, we no longer have anything to prove. We’re free.

On my next road trip, I listen to Leo Damrosch, a professor at Harvard, lecture on “The Enlightenment: the Invention of the Modern Self,” a set of CDs I ordered from the Teaching Company. Serene in the knowledge that I won’t be tested on Locke’s concept of natural law -- I won’t even remember it in a month -- I listen with hungry attention, Buddhist-like, living in the now. At last I know what it means to achieve Enlightenment.