Book by Book (2 page)

For
Book by Book
, I've set down some of what I've learned about
life from my reading. In its character the result is a florilegium: a “bouquet” of insightful or provocative quotations from favorite authors, surrounded by some of my own observations, several lists, the occasional anecdote, and a series of mini-essays on aspects of life, love, work, education, art, the self, death. There's even, occasionally, a bit of out-and-out advice.

Though my emphasis clearly remains on books as life-teachers, readers searching for any definitive answers or gurulike pronouncements won't find them here. Soon enough one learns that there are no straightforward solutions to most of life's perplexities. Great fiction, in particular, eschews the reductionist and obviously didactic, instead reveling in complication, pointing out options, at most revealing the consequences of one course of action over another. Contradiction, not consistency, second thoughts, rather than dogmatic certitude, lie at the heart of humane understanding, and all those who try to simplify experience usually only succeed in narrowing it. To my mind, life should be complex, packed with questioning, full of misdirection and wasted effort—a certain number of mistakes is, after all, the price for “living large.” Arthur Schnabel remains the nonpareil interpreter of Beethoven's piano sonatas, yet he made occasional fumbles in his fingering. But to play such music as it should be played required the pianist to push himself to his limits. Schnabel's motto was that of all great souls: “Safety last.”

As I assembled these pages, my intention was to produce a book that could stand, however sheepishly, on the same shelf as Cyril Connolly's
The Unquiet Grave
, Robertson Davies's
A Voice from the Attic
, and W. H. Auden's
A Certain World.
Above all, I hope the resuit
is, to echo the poet Horace's old formula,
duke et utile—
enjoyable and useful—a book to read slowly, to browse in, and return to.

For just this reason you might want to keep a pencil nearby to mark favorite quotations or to scribble in the margins and on the endpapers. These are the sort of pages that demand to be “personalized,” amplified, and enriched with your own reflections, made uniquely yours. Perhaps
Book by Book
may even encourage you to start creating a reader's guide of your own.

N.B.—Some of the authors cited use the generic “man” or the pronoun “he” to refer to the totality of humankind. The female half of the population will, I trust, make allowances for this largely outmoded convention.

Quotations are usually identified simply by author; uncredited material is my own.

BOOK BY BOOK

Much of
Book by Book
has been gleaned from a small notebook into which I have copied striking quotations and passages from my reading. Such volumes are typically called commonplace books, though their contents tend to be anything but commonplace. What follows are a number of general axioms about life, a few well known and some contradictory, but all of them worth carrying around in your head for their insight, solace, and counsel.

Character is fate.—Heracleitus

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.—Joseph Conrad

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be
without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. —Thomas Hobbes

Remember that every life is a special problem, which is not yours but another's; and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.—Henry James

What others criticize you for, cultivate: It is you.—Jean Cocteau

Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.—Hugo von Hofmannsthal

The point is to . . . live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.—Thomas Nagel (summarizing the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche)

To enjoy yourself and make others enjoy themselves, without harming yourself or any other, that, to my mind, is the whole of ethics.—Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.—Sydney Smith

Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and—if at all possible—speak a few sensible words.—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People must never be humiliated—that is the chief thing. —Anton Chekhov

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.—Thomas Carlyle

There is only one line to be adopted in opposition to all tricks: that is the steady straight line of duty, tempered by forbearance, levity, and good nature.—Duke of Wellington

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice.—Mortimer J. Adler

It is a good lesson for a man to step outside the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all he achieves, all he aims at. —Nathaniel Hawthorne

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In life, I have learned, there is always worse to come.
—Julian Maclaren-Ross

Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well. —Kenneth Clark

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.    
—ALEXANDER POPE

For many grown-ups, long past the age of scissors and coloring books, September provokes a familiar frisson. Something in our cortex sparks to the memory of Big Chief tablets, three-ring binders, stiff leather shoes, scratchy clothes. Come September the past is mentally recaptured, and we are again second or seventh or twelfth graders. A new teacher, a strange desk, different classmates await. This year we will learn cursive or algebra, study Greek mythology or physics, read
Bread and Jam for
Frances
, take the SATs. We will also keep journals and suffer through gym class, deliver oral book reports, and debate whether the United States should withdraw from the United Nations. Many of us will naturally try out for the class play or just miss being elected to the student council or fall hopelessly in love again or get into a fight on the blacktop, not far from the swing sets and the old teeter-totter, where we skinned our knees.

Some fall mornings such unspoken, almost unthought memories just barely break the dulled surface of our adult minds; perhaps only when we glimpse little kids waiting for yellow buses, or hear the distant, muffled brass of a high school marching band practicing on a brisk Saturday afternoon. And the joy of learning? Yes, for a week or two in those early Septembers, we might feel eager, even downright industrious; but then the steady grind of homework would inevitably turn us back into our normal sullen selves, again fearful of the pop quiz, terrified that we would be called on next to go up to the blackboard, frantic in our attempts, always vain, to remember the formula for calculating the area of a parallellogram or the spelling of “supercilious.”

The aim of education is “to develop in the body and in the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.”—Plato
The first object of education is to teach the young mind to foster the seeds of piety, the next to love and learn the liberal arts, the third to prepare itself for the duties of life, the fourth, from its earliest years, to cultivate civil manners.—Desiderius Erasmus

Charles Fourier “believed that the aim of education was not to impart a body of knowledge or to wash children free of sin, but rather to make it possible for them to discover and express their true natures.”—Francis Beeding

We call the higher education that part of human training which is devoted specifically and peculiarly into bringing the man into the fullest and roundest development of his powers as a human being.—W. E. B. DuBois

To “rouse and stimulate the love of mental adventure ... To give this joy, in a greater or less measure, to all who are capable of it, is the supreme end for which education of the mind is to be valued.”—Bertrand Russell

The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.. . . Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our mind, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired, which we are forced to make use of.—Simone Weil

The preconditions for learning should include “habits of attention to what others are saying, the ability to keep quiet and wait one's turn in discussion, courtesy in response.”—Alan Ryan

The primary function of education is to make one maladjusted to ordinary society.—Northrop Frye

A school should be the most beautiful place in every town and village—so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be that they should be debarred from going to school the following day.—Oscar Wilde

“Once in a class of graduate students,” recalled the distinguished Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, “I met a young man who did not know who Noah was.”

What should a person know of the world's literature? It has always seemed obvious to me that the great patterning works ought to lie at the heart of any structured reading program. By “patterning works” I mean those that later authors regularly build on, allude to, work against. There aren't that many of these key books, and they aren't all obvious classics. Here's a roughly chronological short list of those that the diligent might read through in a year or two. For such famous works you can hardly go wrong with any good modern editions, though for the Bible the Authorized, or
King James, Version is the one that has most influenced the diction and imagery of English prose.

The Bible (Old and New Testament)

Bulfinch s Mythology
(or any other accounts of the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths)

Homer,
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey

Plutarch,
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

Dante,
Inferno

The Arabian Nights

Thomas Malory,
Le Morte D Arthur
(tales of King Arthur and his knights)

Shakespeare's major plays, especially
Hamlet, Henry IV, Part One, King Lear, A Midsummer Nighfs Dream
, and
The Tempest

Cervantes,
Don Quixote

Daniel Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe

Jonathan Swift,
Gullivers Travels

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen

Any substantial collection of the world's major folktales

Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Know these well, and nearly all of world literature will be an open book to you.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.—Flannery O'Connor