I did it again this morning -- not buying a newspaper.
This renunciation is akin to Tom DeLay forsaking golf junkets. Here I am a recovering newspaper columnist, a print-and-paper junkie, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School ostensibly concocting cosmic thoughts about the future of journalism, and still on certain days of the week I just never get around to purchasing a daily paper.
True, my itinerant schedule during my temporary sojourn in Cambridge does prevent me from getting home delivery of the Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. So each morning I have to weigh the cosmic question: Are reading the papers at breakfast worth a 10-minute round-trip walk to the convenience store? As odysseys go, this is a far cry from "I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel." But it is a telling reflection of my fast-changing reading habits, or perhaps my middle-aged sloth, that too often I decide, "Nah. Who Cares? I'll skim the headlines on-line and catch up with the papers tomorrow."
This morning, in fact, I read the entire Book of Revelation instead of the New York Times. While this may be a common pre-breakfast practice in red-state America, it is not normally a ritual associated with Harvard.
But during my fellowship, I have been auditing classes, including a Divinity School course called "Introduction to the New Testament." As someone whose prior theological musings in any testament have been pretty much limited to Susan Sarandon's ruminations on the Church of Baseball, I would say, to put it delicately, that Revelation was a revelation. (Growing up in the New York suburbs, 666 was associated with a top-floor office-building bar on Fifth Avenue, not the number of the beast).
Both the New Testament course and a 20th Century British poetry seminar, which I'm also auditing (and Auden-ing), have employed the same academic buzzword: "hermeneutical," which loosely defined means the interpretation of texts. Not having studied a poem closely in more than 30 years and not having read the New Testament at all (aside from one stray night in a motel during a campaign stop in Iowa when I left my book on the plane and had to resort to the Gideon Bible), these hermeneutical adventures may have cut into my yen for newspaper reading. For it is temporarily bracing to scan the outside world from a vast distance, musing when I read a Times headline on-line about the new Iraqi government that Ahmad Chalabi may have had more political resurrections than Richard Nixon or wondering how John Bolton might be portrayed in the "Left Behind" series, since these Revelation Revisited potboilers portray the UN Secretary-General as the Anti-Christ.
Yet hard as I try, I cannot escape that staple of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition: guilt. So, yes, I'll go out for the papers tomorrow morning.