Like a pilgrim to Lourdes, I return every few years to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain.
It is, after all, the greatest novel ever written by an American. And even 110 years after its publication, it continues to ring of truth, beauty and healing wisdom.So I pull my copy off the shelf now and then to see what strikes me. This year I was surprised by what bounded toward me - and by how early in the book, too. In this year of a crime bill debate, Twain led me to think about today's urban gang violence.
In just the second chapter, Huck, Tom Sawyer and other boys form what they call Tom Sawyer's Gang and take an oath of loyalty to the outfit.
Listen: "So Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had wrote the oath on, and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn't eat and he mustn't sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross on their breasts, which was the sign of the band.
"Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath and asked Tom if he got it out of his own head. He said some of it, but the rest was out of pirate-books and robber-books, and every gang that was high-toned had it."
It is hard to imagine someone in the 1880s getting closer to the violence of gang loyalty that plagues America today. All that's lacking is the notion of drive-by random evil.
And yet notice that Tom Sawyer, author of the "real beautiful oath," says he was influenced by books. Because of the demands they put on readers, books - even poorly written ones - tend to civilize.
One reason - as the book later bears out - that these boys could sign on to such an oath is that they knew, even if they were unable to articulate it very well, that all such violent promises were little more than make-believe, shadowy repetitions of ideas in made-up books. Indeed, Tom Sawyer's Gang couldn't even bust up a Sunday School picnic very well.
But jump ahead 110 years and you find troubled kids who not only don't get ideas from books but who sometimes can't get them from books because they can't even read.
It makes me wonder how different things would be today if members of urban gangs had spent the time they've eaten up watching mindless violence on TV reading books instead.