Growing up, I remember “milk” almost always meant “whole milk.” Yes, there was chocolate milk, but it never appeared at the Engel breakfast table, no matter how much I begged (“but Mom, Auntie Oxident says chocolate is good for my heart!”). And I’d heard about fat-free milk, but I never knew a kid who had ever tasted it.
But now? A trip to my nearest supermarket dairy case revealed: whole milk, 2% reduced fat, 1% reduced fat, ½% reduced fat (!), skim, organic, lactose free, raw, good ol’ chocolate, strawberry, soy, oat, almond, and “of human kindness.” (OK, I made that last one up, but, anyway, it is never available during an election year).
It was not until I was an undergraduate, eating breakfast at the dorm cafeteria, that I noticed the milk station had two levers—one for whole milk and the other for skim. I told a table-mate that I might try skim tomorrow with breakfast, and he made a face and said “You mean ‘blue milk’? No, thanks.”
Sure enough, when I had a glass the next day, it had a bluish tint to it. That, and the fact that it tasted like watery milk (or, actually, more like milky water), put me off it until I was about fifty. Then I switched to non-fat in the belief that it would allow me to have a second slice of chocolate cake with a glass of skim milk and still stay fetchingly skim-slim. Wrong.
I was introduced to an entirely different kind of “skim” in 1962 (how’s that for a milky smooth segue?). Kennedy was in the White House, and it was revealed that he had taken a new class called “The Evelyn Wood Speed Reading Course,” which supposedly allowed him to fast-read scores of briefing papers in practically no time at all.
Thanks to all the publicity, my school began teaching “Developmental Reading.” We were told to place our finger in the center of the page we were reading and to concentrate our vision where our finger was, thus allowing our mind to grasp whole phrases at once, rather than the much slower method of reading word for word. The technique was dubbed “grinning and skimming your way to better comprehension.”
I don’t remember any grinning on my part, but this experience certainly taught me how to skim—to read quickly and selectively—throughout my high school and college years. Textbooks were easy skimming for me, since the most important information always seemed to appear in the first sentence of each paragraph—the topic sentence.
But it was when I began studying Victorian novels that skimming became verboten. Great fiction writers recreate real life, where there are no important learning experiences conveniently summarized in topic sentences. The reader must immerse himself within the flow of the entire narrative to comprehend the novelist’s brilliant themes and motifs. Woody Allen said it best: “After taking the Evelyn Woods course, I was able to read all of War and Peace in only twenty minutes. I think it’s about Russia?”
Charles Dickens, for example, tried to stuff all of life in his novels. They are loose, baggy monsters, teeming with episodes and characters galore, some funny, some tragic, but all reflecting the infinite variety of life itself. One must read every word, so not to miss the entire experience of his pulsating, exuberant world.
I shall now confess that there was one novelist that drove me into furtive skimming: Henry James. Whereas Dickens occasionally stuffed too much into his works to allow his readers to digest everything fully, James went in the opposite direction. Though James was a brilliant stylist, his plots are often anemic, and so nothing much happens in his novels, but he spends page after page minutely analyzing why his characters are too busy thinking to act. Skimming seemed to me one way to get James moving forward.
To put the difference between Dickens and James in munching terms: Dickens always bites off more than he can chew; James always chews more than he bites off.
To me, reading great literature allows us to experience vicariously the best and worst life has to offer — and the full breadth and depth of what it feels like to be a human being. Why should we settle for life’s skim milk when great authors lavish upon us “la crème de la crème” of profoundly being alive?