Dying for a Literary Education

Εἰς δὴ τοῦτον ἄγουσι μὲν ἱεροὶ λόγοι, δι’ ἀποῤῥήτων ἡμᾶς ἐκπαιδεύοντες· ἕως γε μὴν ὑπὸ τῆς ἡλικίας ἐπακούειν τοῦ βάθους τῆς διανοίας αὐτῶν οὐχ οἷόν τε, ἐν ἑτέροις οὐ πάντη διεστηκόσιν, ὥσπερ ἐν σκιαῖς τισι καὶ κατόπτροις, τῷ τῆς ψυχῆς ὄμματι τέως προγυμναζόμεθα, τοὺς ἐν τοῖς τακτικοῖς τὰς μελέτας ποιουμένους μιμούμενοι· οἵ γε, ἐν χειρονομίαις καὶ ὀρχήσεσι τὴν ἐμπειρίαν κτησάμενοι, ἐπὶ τῶν ἀγώνων τοῦ ἐκ τῆς παιδιᾶς ἀπολαύουσι κέρδους. Καὶ ἡμῖν δὴ οὖν ἀγῶνα προκεῖσθαι πάντων ἀγώνων μέγιστον νομίζειν χρεὼν, ὑπὲρ οὗ πάντα ποιητέον ἡμῖν καὶ πονητέον εἰς δύναμιν ἐπὶ τὴν τούτου παρασκευὴν, καὶ ποιηταῖς, καὶ λογοποιοῖς καὶ ῥήτορσι καὶ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις ὁμιλητέον, ὅθεν ἂν μέλλῃ πρὸς τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ἐπιμέλειαν ὠφέλειά τις ἔσεσθαι. Ὥσπερ οὖν οἱ δευσοποιοί, παρασκευάσαντες πρότερον θεραπείαις τισὶν ὅ τι ποτ´ ἂν ᾖ τὸ δεξόμενον τὴν βαφήν, οὕτω τὸ ἄνθος ἐπάγουσιν, ἄν τε ἁλουργόν, ἄν τέ τι ἕτερον ᾖ· τὸν αὐτὸν δὴ καὶ ἡμεῖς τρόπον, εἰ μέλλει ἀνέκπλυτος ἡμῖν ἡ τοῦ καλοῦ παραμένειν δόξα, τοῖς ἔξω δὴ τούτοις προτελεσθέντες, τηνικαῦτα τῶν ἱερῶν καὶ ἀπορρήτων ἐπακουσόμεθα παιδευμάτων· καὶ οἷον ἐν ὕδατι τὸν ἥλιον ὁρᾶν ἐθισθέντες οὕτως αὐτῷ προσβαλοῦμεν τῷ φωτὶ τὰς ὄψεις.

It is Holy Scriptures, by instructing us in sacred mysteries, that lead us into this other life. But as long as our age prevents us from penetrating the depths of their meaning, with the help of those books whose spirit is not entirely opposed to them, we exercise the eye of our soul as if on shadows and on mirrors; in this we imitate those who perform military exercises, and who having made themselves skilful at shadow-boxing and dancing, reap the profits of their training in battle. And so we also must believe that the greatest of all battles is set before us, and that in order to prepare ourselves for it we must do everything and endure everything to the extent of our power in preparation for it. We must associate with poets, historians, orators and all men who might be of some use to us in the cultivation of our souls. And so just as dyers, first prepare the cloth with certain treatments before it receives the dye, and then apply the colour, whether it be purple or some other shade, so we must first also in the same way, if we would preserve with us indelible for all time the splendour of the good, be instructed by these external means; and like those who have become used to seeing the sun’s reflection in the water, so we shall become able to turn our eyes upon the sun itself.

St. Basil of Caesarea, Ad adolescentes, de legendis libris Gentilium, II. My translation.

Chinese Books

Duarte de Sande, Diálogo sobre a missão dos embaixadores japoneses à Cúria Romana, ed. by Américo da Costa Ramalho & Sebastião Tavares de Pinho, 2 vols (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009; 1590) , II, pp. 719-21:

Veniamus nunc ad eam artem quam Sinae summopere profitentur, eamque merito litteraturam possumus appellare. Quamuis enim uulgata fama sit, a Sinis multas ingenuas artes coli, praesertimque utramque philosophiam, quae de rerum natura et moribus agit, et apud eos esse Academias, ubi huiusmodi artes traduntur haec tamen opinio magna ex parte popularis potius, quam uera censenda est.
   Dicam tamen quid huic opinioni occasionem dederit. In primis ergo Sinae litterariam artem praecipue profitentur, eamque diligentissime ediscunt, longum tempus totamque fere aetatem ea in re consumentes. Eam ob causam in omnibus urbibus et oppidis, immo et in exiguis pagis sunt magistri, mercede conducti, qui pueros litteras docent. Cumque illae iuxta nostrum etiam communiorem morem sint infinitae, ab ineunte aetate, tenerisque unguiculis pueri libros in manus sumunt, quos tantum illi deponunt qui parum habiles ad hoc munus iudicantur, et ad mercaturam, uel artes quae manibus exercentur, animum applicant. Reliqui uero tanto studio ad litteras incumbunt, ut mirabiliter in praecipuis libris sint uersati, et in quauis pagina quot sint litterae, et in quo situ rogati, facile respondeant.

Let us now to that art in which the Chinese cultivate the most, and which we may rightly call literature. For although it is popularly known that the Chinese cultivate many ingenuous arts, and especially the two branches of philosophy, which deal with the nature of things and manners, and that there are academies among them, where such arts are taught, yet this opinion is by and large more commonplace than it is true.
   However, I will comment on, what gave rise to this opinion. Firstly, therefore, the Chinese especially profess the art of letters and learn it with the greatest diligence, spending a long time and almost and almost their entire lives in study. For this reason, in all cities and towns, even in small villages, there are hired teachers who teach characters to children. And since their characters are infinite compared to our alphabet, from the earliest age children carry books in their hands, and only those who are considered inept put them down and apply their minds to trade or the manual arts. As for the rest, they devote themselves so ardently to letters that they become marvellously versed in the canonical books, and when asked how many letters there are and where on each page, they easily answer.

My translation.

Weltliteratur

Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 128-29:

Just as our students should know something about the major classics of Western literature, so they should know something about the major classics of non-Western literature, because even the understanding of our own Western civilization is distorted and incomplete unless it is seen in a global and not merely in a regional and parochial context. After all, Western civilization did not spring like Aphrodite from the sea foam. It has been enriched by contributions from many different sources, including the Islamic world and even the remoter regions of Asia and Africa. Without a recognition of that diversity of origin, our education and our self-perception are flawed and falsified. The interdependence of human existence at the present time, the unity of human culture, which is becoming more of a fact every day in spite of the political and other differences that divide us, require such mutual study. I stress the word “mutual.” It is good that our students should study the Mu’allaqāt; it is also good that Arab students should study Beowulf.

One of the Greatest Readers Alive

    ‘I am one of the greatest readers alive,’ said Herrick. ‘I have read all European modern literature, the enormous bulk of it. And I have read as much mediaeval literature as any man living. And I know my Greek and Latin. They were taught to us well when I was a boy.’
   ‘But you need not imply how they are taught now,’ said Bumpus.

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Pastors and Masters (London: Hesperus Press, 2009; 1925), p. 95.

Old is Better Than the New

    There must be several men of spirit and experiences akin to mine who remember that little book-shop opposite Portland Road Station. It had a peculiar character; the books were of a solid kind—chiefly theology and classics—and for the most part those old editions which are called worthless, which have no bibliopolic value, and have been supplanted for practical use by modern issues. The bookseller was very much a gentleman, and this singular fact, together with the extremely low prices at which his volumes were marked, sometimes inclined me to think that he kept the shop for mere love of letters. Things in my eyes inestimable I have purchased there for a few pence, and I don’t think I ever gave more than a shilling for any volume. As I once had the opportunity of perceiving, a young man fresh from class-rooms could only look with wondering contempt on the antiquated stuff which it rejoiced me to gather from that kindly stall, or from the richer shelves within.  My Cicero’s Letters for instance: podgy volumes in parchment, with all the notes of Graevius, Gronovius, and I know not how many other old scholars.  Pooh!  Hopelessly out of date. But I could never feel that.  I have a deep affection for Graevius and Gronovius and the rest, and if I knew as much as they did, I should be well satisfied to rest under the young man’s disdain. The zeal of learning is never out of date; the example—were there no more—burns before one as a sacred fire, for ever unquenchable.  In what modern editor shall I find such love and enthusiasm as glows in the annotations of old scholars?
   Even the best editions of our day have so much of the mere school-book; you feel so often that the man does not regard his author as literature, but simply as text. Pedant for pedant, the old is better than the new.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; 1903), pp. 32-33.

Choosing Books to Read

Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913), p. 362:

The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five-foot library of particular books which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read. But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five-foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years.

Read and Question

inter cuncta leges et percontabere doctos,

through all this you must read and question the wise

Horace, Epistulae, I.18.96. My translation.

Age and Literary Tastes

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and forty-eight.

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960; 1934), p. 86.

Daily Life

sic igitur vivitur; quotidie aliquid legitur aut scribitur...

This is how I live my life: every day I read or write something...

Cicero, Letters, 9.26.4. My translation.

Faking It

There is a mythical story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, who co-starred in Marathon Man. At some stage of the filming the plot required Hoffman to be exhausted from sleeplessness. So Hoffman stayed awake for three nights until he was exhausted – and ready for filming. Olivier is reputed to have asked, ‘Have you ever thought of acting?’

There is a profound misunderstanding in this malicious anecdote about the nature of acting. A false opposition of technique (faking it) and method (living it), of trained Olivier versus literalist Hoffman. Acting is like literature in this respect. We read a book. We cry over the fate of its characters. We know the characters are not real. This is the theme of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: their fate is assigned by Stoppard’s title and Shakespeare’s antecedent play. They are fictions without back stories, they are without free will. Yet they have the illusion of free will – illustrated by the boat that takes them to England and their deaths. On the boat, they are free to walk around, to choose their movements, direct their actions – but they cannot alter the course of the boat or their destiny. Guildenstern reflects that the nails grow after death – an emblem of their situation. When they look for their pasts, they discover they are effectively non-existent. Is Hamlet their friend? Guildenstern tells Rosencrantz: ‘You only have their word for it.’

Craig Raine, Heartbreak (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), pp. 114-115.

A Literary Imbalance

Lydia Davis, Essays Two (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), p. 94:

What had been bothering me, as an incongruity, an imbalance, was that whereas artwork of the eighteenth century and further back, to the beginning of discovered painting, is readily available, at least in reproduction, and enjoyed by the general public, not just scholars or specialists, and likewise the music of the eighteenth century and earlier—though as one goes back through the centuries, the numbers of listeners does drop off—the great works of literature before, say, Jane Austen, are mostly unread, even by writers. Here, too, of course, the further back in time we go, the smaller the readership becomes. There are shelves and shelves full of fresh and surprising language and convivial company that are ignored by writers and completely unknown to most of the same people who may crowd New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and who then, on their way out of town, may hear a little Vivaldi from the loudspeakers of the Port Authority Bus Terminal or Penn Station. The language of earlier writing is certainly a barrier, and yet some adventurers learn Arabic, Hebrew, and Swahili, and many more learn French, German, and Spanish. But those avid language-learners don’t as readily try to cross the barrier to James Boswell’s English, or John Donne’s, or further back to Chaucer’s or Beowulf’s (at which point the English is admittedly a more or less foreign language). But maybe the barrier is something other than the language; maybe it is the sensibility or the worldview that changes too much, as we travel back in time, for us to understand it, or, if we understand it, to feel any sympathy for it. But if the language

How Should You Read?

Lydia Davis, Essays One (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), p. 178:

How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time. You should be reading a lot—reading different kinds of books but also reading in different ways: sometimes fast, and sometimes slowly. Sometimes just absorbing what you are reading, losing yourself; at other times analyzing as you read, developing your awareness of how a writer achieves an effect; sometimes stopping to analyze closely just one sentence or one paragraph.

The Absolute Book

Leszek Kołakowski, ‘Is There a Future for Truth’ in Is God Happy?: Select Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2013), pp. 288-297 (p. 288):

Some of us, at that stage of our early youth when we made our way through a great many books, believed that one day we would hit upon the book par excellence: the absolute book, the book that would bring ultimate enlightenment and reveal the Whole Truth. We fairly soon came to the conclusion that, although there are many excellent books, wise books and interesting books, the absolute book does not exist. But what we had in mind, as we laboured under the illusion of its existence and waited for the Truth to be revealed, was truth in a particular sense.

A World of His Own

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (New York: Macmillan, 1948; 1938), p. 8:

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

One Quality

There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don’t NEED schools and colleges to keep ‘em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every so often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbridled, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favors.

Ezra Pound,  ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960; 1934), p. 45.

Golloping Books

Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London: faber & faber, 2010), p. 366 [13 October 1966]:

   ‘It’s a nice feeling, being good at being fond of books. You watch him [C.S. Lewis] golloping them down, & getting a living out of it, & finding more books to gollop. I wish I could have done it. I don’t think I really liked books, not old books anyways. I could never feel that Chaucer was as real as the Daily Mail, & so I was never an academic.’

Good Books

 A man ought not to be ashamed of reading a good book because it is simple and popular, and he ought not to condone the faults of a bad book because it is simple and popular. He should be able to say (altering the names to suit his own judgement), ‘I read Buchan and Eliot for the same reason, because I think them good; I leave Edgar Wallace and Ezra Pound unread for the same reason, because I think them bad.’ It is by no means for the protection of bad books that I wish the distinction of high- and lowbrow abolished. That distinction itself protects bad books. As it robs excellent A books of deserved praise, it teaches its victims to tolerate bad A books.

C.S. Lewis, “High and Low Brow”, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. by Lesley Walmsley (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 421-33 (p. 432). This essay was first published 1939.

I Prefer Reading

 Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (London: Constable & Company, 1933), p. 155:

People say that Life is the thing, but I prefer Reading.

Reading is Where the Wild things Are

Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture - exploit the new thing then move on.
   There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
   Reading is where the wild things are.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), p. 144.

Every Book By Its Scent

 I know men who say they had as lief read any book in a library copy as in one from their own shelf. To me that is unintelligible. For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things. My Gibbon, for example, my well-bound eight-volume Milman edition, which I have read and read and read again for more than thirty years-never do I open it but the scent of the noble page restores to me all the exultant happiness of that moment when I received it as a prize. Or my Shakespeare, the great Cambridge Shakespeare-it has an odour which carries me yet further back in life; for these volumes belonged to my father, and before I was old enough to read them with understanding, it was often permitted me, as a treat, to take down one of them from the bookcase, and reverently to turn the leaves. The volumes smell exactly as they did in that old time, and what a strange tenderness comes upon me when I hold one of them in hand. For that reason I do not often read Shakespeare in this edition.

George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; 1903), p. 29.