one more note about that island
If you’re going to be a successful teacher at a liberal-arts college — something I have tried to be for twenty-five years now — you have to be flexible and adaptable. You can't work just within your specialization, as you might be able to do at a research university. Sooner or later, you are bound to have to fill in for someone on leave, or team-teach a course whose reading list is not within your control — or maybe you'll just decide to try something new.
For some people this can be frustrating; for me it’s one of the best things about my job. Every year I teach books that are new to me; and I don't enjoy them all. But if I’m going to teach them well, I have to practice appreciation of them — even if I openly admit (which I do) that this book or that one isn't my cup of tea.
I think that this discipline has made me a more wide-ranging reader, but it has also revealed to me that there are limits to my catholicity of taste. D. H. Lawrence, for example, has always set my teeth on edge and probably always will; but I can recognize why he’s important, and I can show my students that importance. I wouldn't want to boot him off the island, though I would like him to stay on the other side of it most of the time.
And there’s another point I want to add to this conversation: we can change over time. Until just a few years ago I greatly preferred the Odyssey to the Iliad, but that preference has been reversed. Don't know why, but it has. I find it almost impossible to read Faulkner now, except for a handful of things, chief among them “The Old People” — one of the best short stories ever written. Yet reading Absalom, Absalom! as an undergraduate was one of the transcendent reading experiences of my life.
I am almost certain that if I read Absalom, Absalom! for the first time now, I wouldn't like it very much. I would think it absurdly overwrought. I might not even be able to finish it. But I don't think that’s necessarily because I’m a smarter or better or more sophisticated reader than I was thirty years ago. Maybe I knew some things then that I don't know any more. Maybe I was open to experiences then that — for whatever reason — I’m no longer open to.
And maybe when I’m seventy I’ll learn to love Faulkner all over again. Who knows? So here’s a reason for being very careful before you throw any books off the island: later on, even much later on, you may find that you need them after all.
Alan,
These are my experiences as well, almost exactly (though I haven’t read any Faulkner in a long, long time, and don’t plan to start again any time soon.)
I suspect that as we age the deeply tragic nature of Illiad appeals more, and our lust for travel and adventure (or at least the belief that they are transforming, or maybe just our belief that we will ever do these things any more) tends to dissipate.
— Jim Manzi · Jul 17, 01:06 PM · #
Beautifully said, Alan. One point that I was trying to make in my post, and I’m sure failed, was that the amount of reading any one person can do is limited, but the canon isn’t. There’s enough space for all of it. That doesn’t mean we should let books in willy nilly, only that there’s limited utility in throwing anything out. XJ Kennedy once said about different kinds of poems “God made both fleas and whales and pronounced both good.”
— Freddie · Jul 17, 01:25 PM · #
That’s exactly right, Freddie. I also think of Auden’s comment that there is something “frivolous” about reading only masterpieces. We’re not always up to the challenge of reading masterpieces. To every thing there is a season.
— Alan Jacobs · Jul 17, 01:33 PM · #
Jim, I do think my move towards the Iliad is a function of living long enough to see just how deeply tragedy is woven into the whole human experience.
— Alan Jacobs · Jul 17, 01:34 PM · #
There was something bothering me about this whole blogosphere island conversation, and this helps me put a finger on it. I was appalled by the Absalom, Absalom choice, now I’m a little afraid of going back and re-reading it. Anyway, thanks for the post — reminded me that, while I transferred from Wheaton, your class was a big reason I majored in English.
— jsgarn · Jul 17, 02:10 PM · #
More TAS book talk please.
— Craig · Jul 17, 02:33 PM · #
A more interesting question is, which ten books would you save if you had to regrow the Western Worldview from primitive stock?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jul 17, 04:10 PM · #
Alan: this may not make much sense given that I started this whole bru-ha-ha, but I find myself agreeing with you as well. Not to mention this was a really lovely post.
— Noah Millman · Jul 17, 04:20 PM · #
I’m rereading the Aeneid now. I disliked it in high school (Aeneas is a stuffed shirt), but I now see that there is a deep sadness at the core of the work that escaped me when I was an adolescent. It’s taken 40 years, but I finally see that Vergil is a great poet.
— JimB · Jul 17, 05:40 PM · #
Guys! I’ve identified the crux of the problem!
The canon’s bigger than we can read in a lifetime. Clearly we need a different metaphor. Putting all the authors on a desert island simply no longer fits.
— Geoff · Jul 17, 06:16 PM · #
Perhaps KVS is onto something. Perhaps we’re talking gardens, not desert islands. Perhaps an island that isn’t deserty, but with a fairly temperate climate good for growing authors.
— Geoff · Jul 17, 06:59 PM · #
But if by “a successful teacher at a liberal-arts college” you mean “a teacher who succeeds in not getting fired from a place that requires a loyalty oath which is designed to ferret out heretics,” does that mean you have an easier time filling in for your like-minded peers than you would at, say, a real liberal arts college?
— Josef · Jul 17, 07:27 PM · #
Oh noes! Josef don’t like schools that be religulous!
— D to the Rock · Jul 17, 08:21 PM · #
Alan: I also think of Auden’s comment that there is something “frivolous” about reading only masterpieces. We’re not always up to the challenge of reading masterpieces. To every thing there is a season.
Robertson Davies once said it this way: “An exclusive diet of masterpieces will give you spiritual dyspepsia.”
— william randolph · Jul 18, 12:42 AM · #
Oh noes! Josef don’t like schools that be religulous!
You see, D, the true freedom is not being free to be religious.
— Freddie · Jul 18, 12:42 AM · #
“the true freedom is not being free to be religious.”
Well, maybe I was being a little snarky, but Wheaton does fire people for becoming Catholic, so it might be possible to believe that it is a place lacking in some of the recognized attributes of a liberal-arts college (e.g., at least some tolerance for variation in world view among its community)while not being anti-religious in suggesting that it is easier to find like-minded people there if you think it is ok to behave that way.
— Josef · Jul 18, 01:22 AM · #
As a fairly recent graduate, I was going to comment on the whole “How intellectually diverse is Wheaton” issue, but then I remembered the old saying: Do Not Feed the Trolls.
— Ethan C. · Jul 18, 04:57 AM · #
Well, there’s never a lack of discussion at TAS. I can’t ever remember the exact quote but didn’t C.S. Lewis say that pagans were closest to Christianity? How’s that for another twist in the conversation! Great post, Alan.
— Joules · Jul 19, 01:53 AM · #
Great post. I don’t know what it is about Faulkner, but I had exactly the same experience. I loved Faulkner when I was in high school and as an undergraduate. I read both Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury twice, and I consider AA Faulkner’s best work. A couple of years ago, I realized I had not read any Faulkner in 10 years, so I picked up TSatF and tried to the chapter with Quentin at Harvard, and I just couldn’t get through it. I don’t know if it’s a matter of having one’s taste change, or not being able to love a novel in the same way when you are no longer a young adult. I have also had the experience of feeling that I read other books at exactly the right point in my life, which may be a sort of selection bias, or just the paths that life took me.
My other theory about not being able to read Faulkner the same way any more has to do with the “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” hypothesis that the internet has shortened readers’ attention spans. I just may not have the patience for those two page sentences anymore.
— wph · Jul 20, 10:30 PM · #
And if you’re going to keep quoting Auden on this subject, we might as well include this:
“For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”
(From In a A Certain World: A Commonplace Book)
— Michael Straight · Jul 23, 04:18 AM · #