How to Live

An op-ed piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled "Ten Things They Didn't Tell You at Freshman Orientation" was written by a Yale physics professor and has me worried. He wrote that to be considered "educated" you must learn French, and if you want to be "cultured" you must "know Shakespeare and the Bible." I took four years of French in high school and survived reading all of Shakespeare for a college course so that's a load off. But I've never read one page, one paragraph or even one sentence of the Bible.

The French comes in handy whenever I'm in Europe, which has averaged out to about ten days every every three years, and for doing crossword puzzles. The Shakespeare has mercifully been forgotten, except for the stuff everyone knows like, "To be or not to be" or, "What light through yonder window shines," etc. As for the Bible, nobody ever made me read it, a fact that my husband finds incredible. But honestly, I can't imagine how knowing those stories could help me deal with any of my problems. I've heard vague rumblings about a man who was swallowed by a whale, and of course Adam and Eve and the talking serpent and a guy named Daniel who spent some time in a lion's den, but nothing about taming sky-high blood pressure or overcoming anxiety.

Anyway, it's too late for me now: My nightstand is piled high with books I want to read, and none of them are the Bible. (Also, none of them are in French.) Besides, I've met a lot of of Bible-thumpers over the years, and the last word that comes to mind about most of them is "cultured." My own list of advice for college freshman is short and sweet:
1. Don't smoke.
2. Don't do drugs.
3. Don't believe everything your teachers tell you.
4. Read "White Noise" by Don DeLillo and "Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton. Then read them again.