Great Literature

FaceBook ^ | February 16, 2020 | Tony Esolen

[Fester Chugabrew]

Not that anybody is wondering, but if you asked me what books have been of the greatest influence on how and what I think, aside from the BIBLE, and the plays of Shakespeare, I'd answer:

Homer, Odyssey
Plato, Phaedrus
Plato, Symposium
Virgil, Aeneid
Augustine, Confessions
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
Anonymous, The Quest of the Holy Grail
Dante, The Divine Comedy
Spenser, The Faerie Queene
Herbert, The Temple
Pascal, Pensees
Milton, Paradise Lost
Fielding, Tom Jones
Boswell, Life of Johnson
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Manzoni, The Betrothed
Dickens, Bleak House
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Marcel, Man Against Mass Society
Guardini, The End of the Modern World
Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Kirk, The Conservative Mind
Muggeridge, autobiography
Lasch, Culture of Narcissism
Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

For what it's worth...

[robowombat]

Unlike ‘1984’ which is the classic dystopian novel whose message is this can happen if the Stalinoids are not stopped. As Orwell was writing this in the lat 40’s when one east European state after another were being steamrolled into ‘Peoples Republics’ . It looked like an irresistible tidal wave. Especially because the western democracies seen fatuously deaf and dumb to the threat of Stalin
s empire and all his little helpers in the west. It is difficult to be able to grasp how strong the communists and their fellow travellers were in the west at that, including particularly the US. Orwell's novel set off a huge campaign of vilification and intimidation. Fortunately he was a brave mand and had moved to one of the Hebrides Is;ands to keep his family from the dangers of a nuclear blitz.

Brave New World was written a different universe in the mid-1920’s. The emergence or the first real nationwide consumer state offered tantalizing hints of endless bliss filled consumerism just around the corner. BNW is in much of it a very funny satire on these attitudes interwoven with some very prescient concepts of what life in a couple hundred years could be like. The warnings are there of the manipulation of humans ‘for the good of the individual and society’ consequences. But it is a witty book and really funny.

[gnickgnack2]

Bkmrk

[chulaivn66]

Au contrare mon ami. The digital tablet and download capability to my storage media in the present have allowed me to carry my entire library with me providing near instant availability to me at anytime, anywhere. Given another hundred years of technological advancement, despite the ravings and actions of the Greta Thunbergs of this world, I must say I am sorry I will not live to witness future discoveries and the applications of them.

Disregard my remarks if I misinterpreted your post.

[Savage Beast]

I am very interested. Thank you.

BTW, I don't access FaceBook. The kicked me out some time ago.

[Savage Beast]

This is an excellent list, but mine would have to include

Les misérables,
Moby Dick,
The Scarlet Letter,
The Orestaia,
Euripides' Medea,
the Iliad,
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
War and Peace,
Lord of the Flies,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Pride and Prejudice,
The Sound and the Fury,
Absalom! Absalom!,
1984,
Animal Farm,
Gulliver's Travels,
Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War,
le rouge et le noir,
The Wings of the Dove,
Washington Square,
The House of Mirth,
Oedipus Rex,
The Call of the Wild,
Through the Looking Glass,
I, Claudius,
The Good Earth,
Ivanhoe,
and some poems, short stories, biographies, and plays

--to name a few off the cuff.

[InterceptPoint]

“No Les Mis?”

I’d put that at the top. Along with Atlas Shrugged and the 11 book The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant.
+++++
You have named my two personal favorites. I have read both Les Miserables and Atlas Shrugged at least twice. Although I have read bits and pieces of the Durant series I can’t claim to have really consumed it.

[Savage Beast]

"I used to hate to read."

Reading has always been a problem for me too.

My father, my wife, my sister, my daughter--all read constantly and love reading fiction. (My father would read anything!) But my mother, my son, and I don't.

My mother inherited a wonderful collection of books from her parents. My father read them all. My mother didn't.

My sister read them all. She once said to me: "I'd much rather read a book that watch a movie." She got a job in a book store so she could read all the books.

My wife reads contemporary fiction constantly.

I have always envied these people.

My wife pointed out that I read all the time--just not fiction very much, not contemporary fiction, mostly nonfiction and mostly on the internet.

At her suggestion, I read some books by Greg Iles and a few other contemporary writers. I liked Iles' Sleep No More.

But it's as difficult for me to read a popular novel--or a classic novel like Ivanhoe--as it is something like The Sound and the Fury or a technical text, such as a medical journal.

I have read wonderful things, and I loved them, but the words and images don't flow for me like they do for my wife, my sister, and my father.

Many times, I've gotten interested in a subject or a single work and studied it, but it was hard work. I did this with King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, African American History, a number of things. I loved it all, but it was not an easy flow. I wish it were.

I've wondered if I have something like dyslexia.

The world seems to be divided between readers and non-readers.

Any suggestions, anybody?

[TBP]

Yes. Dr. Kirk was quit a fan of Eliot, as am I.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Who determines the fine line between noise and music? Art and rubbish? Great literature and pap?

Well, the list above is from a professor of liberal arts, and to my reckoning it’s a good list. I can only hope to be as well-read. Here is the thing: technology is making us lazy. Sound bytes instead of sound books. We are wired for deeper things, but hanker for pottage.

[DoodleBob]

It is a fair question. Who is the "musician" - a classically trained pianist who can't improvise, or a self-taught jazz whiz who can't read music...or the illiterate punker who puts on an awesome live show?

Technology facilitates laziness; it's up to us whether we acquiesce or not. And, truthfully, if a smaller percentage of society reads the classics but that same laziness-inducing technology give us FR and greater awareness of govt evil and a greater proportion of Deplorables, I'd be ok with that tradeoff.

[Fester Chugabrew]

I like your perspective on this.

[SamAdams76]

For those with Kindles, you can download most if not all of these works for free. I recently downloaded the entire works of Jack London for free. Love those tales of the Klondike - they never get old.

[Dante3]

In high school, I found Victor Hugo’s “Ninety-three” fascinating and plan to reread it.

[DoodleBob]

Thank you.

I should note that I, too, find your list daunting. However, if I wasn't a reader of those texts, but if instead I read, say, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; Free to Choose by Milton Friedman; The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? by David Kopel, A Nation of Cowards by Jeffrey Snyder, and listened to some pivotal talk show hosts, would that make me less of a man?

Again...I suspect I'd understand life and the human condition a lot better had I read all of those classics. And please don't mistake my comments as me championing the dumbing down of America. But recall Buckley's choice between Ivy League faculty and peope in the phone book being his overlords...it's ok to not be "well-read."