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lawyers and literature Exercise 1-2: Enemies of Reading Will Barrett, the lawyer protagonist in Walker Percy's novel, The Second Coming (one of the novels assigned in the course) says: "Enemies . . . often tell the truth. And these days enemies, honest enemies, are few and far between. Nobody says anything unpleasant. Enemies will often tell you unsuspected truths about yourself, just as a photograph or a double mirror will show your snoutish nose." [Will Barrett, The Second Coming 177 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980)]. When we forget the name of an enemy, we fight phantoms, shadow-box with the unnamed. When readers face the enemies of reading, they should be named. We are, here, talking about enemies as Will Barrett does in The Second Coming, when he says: "Ha, there is a secret after all. . . . But to know the secret answer, you must first know the secret question. The question is, who is the enemy? Not to know the name of the enemy is already to have been killed by him." [271]
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Can you
identify the enemies that impede your reading?