How to Read, How to Feel (Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, editor Joshua Bennett discusses the cover of the Norton Library edition, approaching the text as history and as literature, how Douglass teaches us to read, the musicality of the book, a Narrative-inspired playlist, and more!

Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative non-fiction, including The Sobbing School and Being Property Once Myself.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NarrativeOfFrederickDouglassNL.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4tZk5AIohQcQFJvVOCiRo1?si=54de7b3bf0774d72.

Episode transcript at https://seagull.wwnorton.com/NarrativeFrederickDouglass/part2/transcript.

Transcript

[Joshua Bennett:] Frederick Douglass is dead

& might very well remain that way,
    despite the best attempts
 of our present overlord to resurrect

him without a single living
    black mother’s permission.
 If he should come, & be recognized

as anything other than the muted whisper
    of a body interred, I wish his return
 as some strange & ungovernable terror,

a ghost story turned live & direct ectoplasm
    without warning: Frederick in the White
 House kitchens, Frederick in the faucets,

Frederick posted up at every corner
    of the Oval office, shredding documents
 invisibly, a blade in each of his eighteen

laser hands. Go off, his more radical undead
    colleagues will exclaim. You better tell that man
 to keep your name out his mouth. But Frederick

Douglass doesn’t say a thing. Not yet.
    He’s waiting for you & me, my grandmother
 says. Frederick Douglass is irrevocably dead,

& refuses to ride until we are ready. Until
    our prayers are knives or sheets of flame:
 Hear us, O Beloved, Fugitive Saint: Defer

the rain. Grant us the strength of a rage
    we can barely fathom. Make us
 brave as the flock in the fist

of a storm. Unmoor every melody
    they built from our screams. Steady
 our dreams. Keep us warm.   

[music]

[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W.W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, as we speak with its editor Joshua Bennett. We just heard Joshua reading “Frederick Douglass Is Dead” from his 2020 poetry collection Owed, excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio. In the first episode, we discussed Douglass's Life and Times, the structure of the narrative, along with some of the famous episodes from Douglass's autobiography. In this second episode, we will learn more about Joshua Bennett's response to The Narrative, the music this text inspires, his favorite line from the book, and much more. Joshua Bennett is a professor of literature at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative non-fiction, including The Sobbing School and Being Property Once Myself. Joshua Bennett, welcome back to the Norton Library podcast.

[Joshua:] Mark, thanks so much for having me.

[Mark:] I'm looking forward to probing more about your wonderful edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and I want to start with the striking book cover. Is there a reason why the geniuses at the Norton Library created this scheme for the cover?

[Joshua:] Yeah, it's a great question, because originally it was a different color—it was just gold and blue, which would have been nice, I would appreciate that—but they did talk about the green popping off the shelf. I also like to think it's because the ecological vision of Frederick Douglass was a big part of what I emphasized in the book and so that growing, glowing greenness I think is part of what they wanted to reflect on this cover.

[Mark:] So we have green, gold, and a really deep blue.

[Joshua:] Like the ocean, yeah.

[Mark:] The ocean, there you go. Okay, so there's always a reason—what I've learned is there's always a reason—it doesn't just have to be attractive, there has to also be something behind it. Okay, so that's really good. Joshua, do you remember the first time you ever read this book?

[Joshua:] Oh yeah, so I was a junior in high school in AP English and I remember—and I feel kind of bad revisiting the book now because I worry people think I'm trying to roast my teacher but I wasn't, I mean, he really did outline something that was curious and it was what was on his mind at the time. Now that I lecture more I understand it, but he said I don't understand why I have to teach this to you for the AP—this is history, not literature.  And that was on my mind the entire time I was working on this introduction and revisiting the book. Also, because one of the editorial comments I got back while working on it was that I should really clarify—especially because we have a high school readership—that Douglass didn't quote unquote “make it up,” because there's a portion of the intro where I talk about him trying to craft his own origin myth, which obviously he was doing, which any of us are doing who engage in an act of memoir or autobiography. We're life writing, we're self-writing, and I just thought that was so curious—this idea that facticity, or the creation of a historical document, necessarily is oppositional to the usage of trope. Or, of organizing the elements a certain way to tell the kind of story you're trying to tell, like yeah, it's all true, these things happened. He even acknowledges the gaps! Where he says he doesn't know when his birthday is. I mean he actually does a great job of that. And so the first time I read it was my junior year of high school, but it stuck with me for many years.

[Mark:] Don't you think you could study this book in a history class one way and then in a literature class a different way?

[Joshua:] Oh for sure, you could study in a theory class on autoethnography, I mean there's a lot that you could do with this book because, again, he gives you a kind of affective portrait. It's one thing to know the dates and names and times. It's another to hear Frederick Douglass describe how it felt to be sold alongside sheep and oxen and his family members. It's a kind of granular description that's really important and that to my mind is inseparable from any history worth its salt. Now, on the literature side, I mean this this is what I do, it's really important that we study, again at a kind of formal level, what are the different sort of tropes and techniques Douglass is using to achieve that effect. Why are we drawn to certain passages? Even just having one of the chapters be much longer than all the others—the penultimate chapter which is much longer than the rest of them. I mean, it really does give you this sense of rising action, and like he says, you'll see how a man was made into a brute—now you'll see you know how a brute was made into a man. That kind of beautiful rhetorical flourish that that chiasmatic flip is really crucial. So yeah, you could teach it in history and in literature. It's a book for everyone.

[Mark:] Do you think there are challenges that are common to reading this book?

[Joshua:] Yes! The brutality, to be honest. I mean, having revisited and even thinking about,  really thinking about the ages, because Aunt Hester is a teenager right in the beginning of this book. There's also something too to thinking about him as a little boy in that first chapter experiencing those scenes. He's quite young and for most of the book. I mean, he's quite young when it's published, he’s in his 20s, late 20s, I believe 27 years old when the book comes out. So that, for me, is actually the real difficulty returning to it, all these years later to kind of revisit it before our conversation, I was just thinking about how young he was, the graphic nature of many of the scenes, the sexual violence of the text. And even, if I'm honest, sometimes the grace and mercy he shows to the people who were his captors. I mean, Douglass really did have this remarkable capacity that part of me admires but I don't really totally get it—part of me admires it part of me really doesn't like it—where he just makes so much room for the humanity of these people that he really does seem to believe have been hypnotized by this brutal spiritual force, this spiritual and material force that has taken a hold of them and convinced them that they are in the right, that they have somehow not committed this grave evil against humanity and against their God. So I think that is very difficult to read and to be an immediate audience for. It's all working together to make the book what it is and it's part of why it's timeless.

[Mark:] Would you say that Douglass as a stylist is challenging—you mentioned in the first episode that he's allusive to the Bible and other texts. Is that a challenge for students or do they find his writing pretty straightforward?

[Joshua:] I mean they have some endnotes to help in most of the editions you'll pick up, so I think that's good and important. You'll learn what endnotes are if you don't know. But I also just think—and I mentioned Morrison in the first episode too, Toni Morrison, but I love that she also says this about Beloved, so now we get two Morrison mentions, two Beloved mentions, but she when she's on Oprah talking about it and Oprah kind of says, to paraphrase, it's a difficult read, you have to read it a couple of times, and then Morrison just says, well, that's what I call reading. So there's also a way that in thinking through the subterranean layers of Douglass's prose, I think actually he's teaching us how to read. In a book that is in many ways about learning how to read and teaching others how to read he's doing the thing itself, even in the way the text is structured but, the times I've taught it or read it even in groups, there's a kind of lyrical sensibility to it, there's a musicality to it—you can tell that he's a great orator. It's almost written to be read aloud in certain senses and where it does get a bit dense, it's because you need to be rooted in the details. He really is trying to paint a picture for you which, for Douglass that’s the height of eloquence. He regards poets as picture makers. He'll say this over 30 years after the book is published when he's trying to think about photography in The Art of Photography he says, well, the great preachers, the great poets, they are picture makers of a certain kind. If you hear a great speech, you see the imagery in your mind, and that's important as a kind of democratic process. That there are certain people who can analyze a dense argument but the masses, we need pictures to be motivated, he says.

[Mark:] Joshua, let me ask you an unfair question and that is do you have a favorite line in this book?

[Joshua:] Oh my goodness, do I have a favorite line in this book? I have so many. Let me see. I underlined so much of it. Ah! This is it: chapter seven. So he's talking about—basically when he's thinking about Sheridan's speeches. It's two sentences—does that count as a line? Okay, it's three sentences.

[Mark:] That's allowed, no, three is allowed.

[Joshua:] Okay: “These were choice documents to me. I read them over and over again with unabated interest. They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul which had frequently flashed through my mind and died away for want of utterance.” I mean, look, for those of us who teach literature, it's like oh yeah, yo, that's it. You want a case for the humanities? That's it. It will give fuller expression for the things inside you that die away for want of utterance. You need other people's words to find your own words! Eloquence does not spring up out of the ground. If you want to be a good writer, you want to be a good speaker you have to read! It's just where it comes from! And I love that he says that. And I'm even interested in the fact that it's followed by a kind of sadness. Because he said—I touched on this a bit in the first episode—but he's like, man, I didn't even know I felt some of that stuff. But now that I've read more, I have language for my despair, and so I also have to come up against that and work these things out in the forge of my own heart. So reading is not just about being teleported elsewhere, it's not just about pleasure, or oh I really like this, I read about the things. I like it's about the great difficulty of the soul and having more instruments ready at hand to encounter it, to encounter your own pain, to encounter your own past. So I was very moved by that.

[Mark:] That's a great sequence where it's almost like his reading has increased his sensitivity, expanded his consciousness and it's so sad that he would say, if I were as insensate as a rock then I wouldn't feel pain. I'm paraphrasing of course but wow what a powerful moment that is. And I love the plug for the Humanities, too.

[Joshua:] It's crucial! And what wisdom, too, because there's something to it. It's like, look, I wasn't paying attention to anything. I might get along a bit better. It might be easier to move through the day.

[Mark:] And then by implication the vast majority of his fellow enslaved people would not have that power of literacy and so he’s looking at it in different levels.

[Joshua:] Well he's saying this is part of what's been kept from us, that this is our great inheritance. I think also even in alluding to something like the sorrow songs, I mean, he's also tipping his hat I think to other people who are enslaved. He's saying look at what we have created. Literacy is punishable by death, by dismemberment or death, and yet we have still created what will eventually become the foundation for gospel, the blues, some would say soul and Hip Hop. I mean it's remarkable what they're able to create and through the image again of the Sabbath school, which I think becomes symbolic in so many ways, but he you can almost see it that, it passes from person to person, that kind of sensitivity that you're describing, that literary sensibility which is also sensitivity. And it makes it such that there are some like Henry I believe who's just not afraid of death in the same way, he's just like you got to kill me. I have to be free now, I just know too much, I know too much, I'm not going back. You'll have to kill me and I'm not as afraid of it.

[Mark:] Joshua, I'm wondering if you have devices or favorite practices that you use for teaching this book or would recommend to other teachers of this.

[Joshua:] Yeah, it's been a while but honestly, I think one way to teach the book is to teach it alongside his speeches. So part of what I really love about Douglass is that he has these kind of bright lines that he carries through his career, around literacy, around technological progress which is super interesting, a commitment to nature. But also, you can see the way that some of the details change over time. When you learn for example that, I think it's like years into the future, where he eventually kind of forgives Auld for example, and this essay, I think it's called “Time Makes All Things Even,” and Thomas Auld is like 80 years old at that point and he essentially says, one, that he found out that he was a year younger than he thought he was from Auld, but also that he forgives this guy in a way. There's just really interesting things that happen when you read like portions from the later autobiographies as well as the speeches alongside this narrative, so you can see where he eventually fills in the gaps, but also this remarkable thematic consistency through his life. So that's something I would I would recommend, just sort of go chapter by chapter, think of them all as themed chapters, and then you can explore, thinking about slavery and brutality, thinking about his theory of labor and value that you see when he works on the docks. The chapters that really emphasize gardening. I mean, there's just a lot of really interesting things happening thematically so that's one way I would teach it because it gives the students a gem to latch on to as they're mapping out Douglass's argument across the book.

[Mark:] That's excellent and you're reading the book and chapter two is about those sorrow songs—

[Joshua:] Yes.

[Mark:] And it's almost unexpected that in an autobiography of somebody like Frederick Douglass, that's where he would put so much focus on at such an early time. So what do you think we could do with that? Why does that play such a prominent role?

[Joshua:] Well he's a lover of art, and he'll be a lover of art, lover of Shakespeare, lover of poetry for his entire life. I mean, it's also in that chapter where he outlines some of the other material conditions on the plantation like the exposure of the enslaved to cold, for instance. He talks about them all sleeping on the floor, talks about himself sleeping in kind of a sack with his feet exposed and how eventually you could put a pen in the cracks in his feet. I mean, just this brutal imagery. And he says, seemingly, that the sorrow songs emerge from that. That this is the artistic expression of what Ellison will eventually—he’ll describe the blues as personal catastrophe made lyrical. And Douglass seems to say this is that for the enslaved. The sorrow song emerge from this so I think that's part of what he's doing, he's saying it's not just kind of social death in some flat sense, like there are these signs of life, there are these glimmers of a not just hope but again a kind of blueness. It's almost this in between space between a hope and despair, that the enslaved are not only able to imagine for themselves, but to turn into music, to turn into these kind of fugitive practices, like schools they create preaching forms of literature that emerge out of it.

[Mark:] We ask our guests who come on the Norton Library podcast for a hot take or a counterintuitive reading. Is there something you find yourself thinking about this book that is contrary to what you hear most other interpretations?

[Joshua:] That's fantastic. I don't know if this is so much a hot take—and I do outline it in the intro—it really is the breadth of the ecology stuff. So even with him being kind of dragged through the woods by oxen, beginning with those horses, coming back to horses and other forms of animal life in his later speeches, it is shocking to me that we don't talk about Frederick Douglass more in animal rights discourse or think of him as a kind of eco-critic. It's clearly a major part of this, even the elements of conjure, the idea that with certain kinds of leaves that he can create spells and change material reality, bend the laws of nature, another rhetorical device, the adynaton. I mean there's something there that I think is quite powerful and it wasn't something I was super familiar with even when I was writing my dissertation, there wasn't a ton out there about thinking about Douglass as a kind of eco-critic and certainly not thinking about Douglass as one of our first robust theorists of the connections between human and animal life. And from multiple vantages, because he asserts that he is not an animal, distinctly, he does mark out that line, but he also says that animals are not what we think they are, that animals have an opacity to them, they have an interior life, and that he knows that because he lived and labored alongside the animals. So I actually think you miss something tremendous if, when you see the gardens in this book, where you see his interactions with the animals, where you see the way he talks about water, if you're not thinking about the kind of ecological metaphors as central, you're missing what he's up to and what he's trying to convey to us.

[Mark:] Yeah, that's a great point. In fact, the first point he makes in his entire narrative is that how he's treated because of the lack of knowledge of the birth date and his family, which is—what a wonderful connection. So, since this book was published, has it been repurposed or presented in a different way, in any other form that we can appreciate or that might allow us to learn more about Douglass and his narrative?

[Joshua:]  Yeah, I mean there are operas even, I mean, so something I've been really interested in for a while, based on The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and so part of what I've been thinking—about I mean that literally by the way, not as just like the title of the book, the actual life and times of Frederick Douglass—but part of what I've been trying to think about too, and there's a bit of this in the introduction, are the ways that poets across—I'm thinking about emcees too, I think of hip-hop as poetry maybe, we can save that for another podcast—but I'm interested in how groups like the Fugees, contemporary hip-hop artists like Denzel Curry, and even earlier 20th century poets like Robert Hayden kind of repurposed the central themes of Narrative of the Life to describe their own relationship to writing as such, appetite to write like Frederick Douglass with the slave hand. I mean, the idea that writing can become a kind of portal of entry into a deeper sense of human becoming. I mean, that's something that you see people picking up almost 200 years later from this book, and so that's one of the ways you can see its reverberations out into the world.

[Mark:] In our first episode you said that Douglass consciously constructed this as a hero's journey but I'm not sure there's been a movie. Seems like it would be given to a nice, incredibly power powerful film.

[Joshua:] Yeah, I mean I'd love to see the—I think the pitch for it would be super interesting. You can kind of see the three-act structure of it, and the scenes, they’re all there. He's made appearances in in movies like Lincoln. We've seen Douglass on screen, but yeah, never as the central figure, not the protagonist. At least a limited series, I think, would be super cool. And also his novella, The Heroic Slave I think would look really interesting on screen as well.

[Mark:] We've talked about music on both of these episodes. Do you have a Frederick Douglass playlist that you could recommend

[Joshua:] I don't, haha! I can put something together though.

[Mark:] What do you think?

[Joshua:] In my mind it would have a lot of jazz on it, like Kamasi Washington would be on there. You'd have to have Nas, you know “One Mic” thing, like all I need is one mic, all I need is this singular opportunity to put it all together and craft something wonderful. Stevie Wonder, “For Once in My Life” I guess. I'm thinking about too the fact that The Narrative ends in marriage is interesting and important. Love is central for Douglass, becomes a father and grandfather and sometimes his grandchildren would gather around him to hear him play the violin which is I think a beautiful image, it's one of my favorite images in the introduction. Who else would be in there? Yeah, give me a beat—I'll come back with a—I mean, “Everything is Everything” by Lauren Hill. I mean, there's so much that I would put on there because the core ethos of the thing is a love of freedom, the pursuit of it, and the fact that it's not a straight line. Douglass's journey kind of dips and curves, he hatches this elaborate plot, he's betrayed, he does eventually get free but we don't quite know how. And so there are all these apertures and absences that I think also really make the book come to life and there are so many moments again where he's utterly downtrodden. He just sort of says it, he's like, in that moment, I just thought I'm going to give up. And then there were others yet and still where he said, I resolved that day that I would be free and it took years! It's not that he resolved that day, I mean, this is part of how we know that this is a man located in history—he resolves that day but it takes years, it takes many attempts, it takes a kind of internal revolution before he can he can be freed, before he can help set himself free. So the playlist would definitely orbit around that kind of dream of freedom and the people who make it possible for us.

[Mark:] One more question about the music because when we had Jesse McCarthy on to talk about The Souls of Black Folk, his Norton Library Edition, in the beginning of each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk there's the sheet music and there's the spiritual to which it is associated. So, do you see a line throughout, well, let's say throughout African-American literature of W.E.B. DeBois, Langston Hughes, and that chapter two in The Narrative kind of is almost its Genesis point of how he's articulating what the importance was.

[Joshua:] Yeah, I mean Baldwin will take this up later, but the critique of chapter two is you all don't know how to hear the music properly. He says that a predominantly white audience, they see the songs as a sign, well, these people are content, look how happy they are, they're singing. He's like, it's because you don't understand the music and if you did, you would understand the deep sorrow that's its condition of possibility and emergence. So I think, yeah, it's absolutely crucial and key, the music is always there. One of the great, perhaps the greatest African-American novel ever written, is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. How does that begin? With a man underground, playing jazz, stealing power from a city, talking about the music that's made from being invisible. You can't get around the music, and thank goodness for that. It's crucial, it doesn't really swing and this, to me as a poet, like with poetic sensibility, there are parts of this that you could read out loud and they still totally swing, and that's part of the point, that when you read something out loud it, becomes a social occasion. When Langston Hughes talked about writing poetry, he said he wanted to write like the songs they sang on Seventh Street. Which, one, I think just sounds beautiful, you read it aloud, it's alliterative, but I think that when Sylvia Wynter says that her aim was to write theory that read the way Aretha Franklin sang, I mean, so many of us, if you've been around great musicians, music, the art aspires toward it. So I think Douglass understood that.

[Joshua:] Your interest in pretending—it seems like the sorrow songs feed into that where they're singing it in one mode, which is the depths of sorrow, and we're all hearing it, or the  overseers and owners were hearing it, as an expression of pleasure, how unhappy could they be? They're singing! They're wearing the mask, even in chapter two of The Narrative

[Mark:] Yeah, there's that Dunbar in there, we'll be reading Dunbar for sure. I guess I'm also interested in all of these fugitive lyric moments, so “Wade in the Water,” for instance,  which sounds like it's a hymn about baptism, which of course it is, but it's also about getting your scent off so the blood hounds can't capture you. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” is at once about a constellation but also mapping a pathway North to freedom. This idea of a doubleness— it's DuBois's double consciousness, but how that lends itself to a poetics. So, when Dunbar talks about us wearing the mask that grins and lies, the art isn't outside of that—the art is talking out of both sides of its mouth in a really powerful way. There's one mind for us, another for the master, fugitivity, masking. Even something like the pit school—I don't know if you're familiar with this this term, but during chattel slavery, there were these schools, again, that people would create out of holes in the ground. Like, enslaved people would literally dig holes in the ground, jump into those pits, and teach one another to read and write via candlelight. This is narrated in books like Nightjohn, Light in the Dark—in children's literature you see this narrated quite beautifully, and also in the Federal Writers Project interviews. And I'm just fascinated by that, that black education, black literature, black music is an underground affair.

[Mark:] When you're saying about Dunbar, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who wrote the poem “We Wear the Mask” and “we wear the mask that grins and lies”—how does that factor into Douglass's behavior? Does he grin and lie both in his writing of the book and his behavior when he was enslaved? Or is he defiant?

[Joshua:] You're helping me switch up my answer with that last word. I think the defiance is made manifest through the performance of pretending, and so he pretends simply in that he doesn't let anyone know he knows how to read. He hides it. The students of his Sabbath school hide it by necessity. So, this act of pretending, of disguising reality, of wearing a mask—that is resistance, it's a resistance in a world that's designed to crush you. And the other thing I think is that pretending is self-preservation. He pretends to keep himself literally biologically alive, but also because it's for him, it's this kind of treasure that he has stored up within himself that he's helping to cultivate in others, and so part of the defiance of the text that's made manifest in the historical truth of those parts of the narrative. But even this other point that we touched on already, that he doesn't give us everything. He says, there's a certain manner through which I escape that I must withhold because the cause of freedom is more important than this being a bestseller or with me completely being forthcoming with you. You don't need that. What you need is the truth that I've offered which is a beautiful moral truth and a historical truth all kind of bound up together. So yeah, I think the defiance comes through the act of subterfuge, through maintaining our opacity and a saying, like Glissant, that we have a right to it.

[Mark:] There's a power in that reserve that he's keeping in the narrative of this book that's fantastic. Joshua, the last question that I would love for you to comment on is, so, reading this narrative in 2024 is a particular set of circumstance, and I wonder if you could reflect on where we are as a society and how today's readers approach this book, and what it might mean for us particularly, as opposed to let's say when the book first came out or 100 years ago.

[Joshua:] Here's actually the main thing I want us to take away: Douglass's persistence as an actual flesh and blood person is a miracle. It's a miracle that he survived what he survived and that he lent his hand to the labor of writing these books. We should not forget that. We shouldn’t also forget that it's not that long ago that this happened, that the events of this book took place. So I think as we're thinking now about the structure of our society, the structure of the workplace, the structure of our schools and universities, we need to keep in mind that this infrastructure was built by people like Douglass, it was built by enslaved people, any number of whom were as brilliant as Frederick Douglass, people who labored and died and are in unmarked graves—we’ll never know their names. We have his book as a kind of artifact, but in many ways too it's this deeply sorrowful echo of the potential that all of those many millions held, as Baldin and others would phrase it the many thousands gone. Douglass, I think his narrative calls us to remember them and to think about them, and to think about their potential, to think about the potential of people now who are from historically marginalized communities, who may never have access to the forms of education and literature and teaching that helped make stories like Douglass's possible. I mean, his emphasis on education, he comes back to it over and over again, he says this helped open my mind and open my life was reading. I saw an article headline the other day about whether or not AI was heralding the end of reading, which I think that's overblown, but I also think Douglass reminds us of why reading is so crucial—it's not just a way to pass the time, it's a way to cultivate the self and that's utterly necessary,

[Mark:] Joshua Bennett, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast.

[Joshua:] Of course! Thanks for the invitation and for the conversation.

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass edited by Joshua Bennett is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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