On Cynicism

I work with wonderful students. A few, a very few, affect a fashionable -- tiresome -- cynicism. Others proclaim a cynicism they never really exhibit. Cynicism takes some energy and a lot of it. Here’s what I’ve written to students striving toward or trying on some cynicism in my English classes:

You are very able students. You’re imaginative, insightful, and able. Regrettably, like many in America caught up with this fashion, you can also be quite cynical, cynicism being the province of smart teens and not-so-smart, but badly embittered elders.

Cynicism offers a form of intellectual and emotional independence to teens who find themselves hankering for the complete independence that awaits after high school. The resistance to intellectual or emotional engagement on any terms other than your own may feel like it's founded in a better wisdom, but experience indicates that cynicism is a rationalization for avoiding the effort that engagement requires.

As a result, it seems that you sometimes dismiss the material not because it's difficult, but because it's unworthy of your attention. But minds less gifted than yours, and less experienced (I've taught Hamlet to the 8th graders), have dived into these texts only to dive deeply and then rise to the surface with much appreciated pearls. Your resistance is not an original approach; it is a tired, defeatist approach, too common among too many, that denies you some pretty interesting things that are within your grasp.

I think that you instinctively sense that there's a much greater depth to these texts than you're prepared to plumb. It's true, you can get lost in them trying to dive after some motif, trying to dredge the author's intent, trying to see if your interpretation can be supported by the text. Maybe you'll want to do just that someday -- get lost in Shakespeare or some other author.

For purely aesthetic reasons, you're unwilling to suspend your cynicism. But that's what you must do in order to deal with these texts. Joyce’s and Woolf’s abilities, their knowledge, their imagination will remain beyond the grasp of any imagination stifled or bum-rushed by cynicism. But it is available to anyone who reaches for them. This goes for a great many other authors you'll come across in your lifetime, too. True, most authors write on the surface and may add a teaser a little bit below, but Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Homer, Allende, Siedelman, Vonnegut, Garcia Marques, Morrison, Tan, and countless others -- these people write not just on the surface, but deeply below the surface, too.

Because it is intellectual cowardice, cynicism is unworthy of you.

Don't be afraid of the water. Dive.