200 Books

The Divine Comedy Page: 361

Before I get started on today’s regularly scheduled update, let me take a moment to correct a misperception. I think Shelf Awareness misunderstood a bit out of the article Erin Ryan did for the Idaho Statesman. I’m not working on this project as any kind of protest against Americans not reading. She just compared me to the average American as described in that report. I’m actually doing this so that my brain doesn’t turn to mush while I take care of two very small kids…

Today I have lots of help with my boys because my little brother and sister are hanging out with me. Zach is 11 and mostly just interested in playing on the computer but he still takes out the trash for me and things like that. Rachel is 13 and super-helpful with the boys. She plays with Alex and walks Luc around when he’s fussy. So I’ve gotten plenty of reading done.

I finished The Inferno and nearly finished The Purgatorio today and reading so much reminded me of a thought I had while reading Milton’s Paradise Lost while I was in college; when reading epic poetry, the more the better. If you read it in small pieces you don’t get the ‘epic’ effect and the more you read the more accustomed you become to the style and the easier it is to understand. I suggest reading Dante, Milton, etc…with a small notebook in hand to note the classical references you don’t get, and after finishing a good chunk (10 cantos or a book), go look them all up (an encyclopedia is good Wikipedia almost as good and much faster) and then, if you have the time go back and re-read that section. You’ll be amazed at how much better you understand it and how much more you’ll remember over time.

Reading Dante reminds me of thoughts that I’ve had over time about really great classic literature. C.S. Lewis once said about The Wind in the Willows that it wasn’t a book you judged; it judges you. And that is how I feel about the greats like Dante, Augustine, and Homer. We modern Americans are eager to judge but not so eager to be judged. We dismiss everything from Shakespeare to Virgil as “not all it’s cracked up to be” or we claim that things like truffles or escargot don’t taste as good as others claim. The one thing we never seem to consider is that the fault may lie with us. Our palate may not be refined enough to appreciate the delicacy of a ’47 Cheval Blanc and our minds may not be disciplined enough to handle the complexity of Dante’s poetry. I know I reacted against Augustine’s extreme self-abnegation in The Confessions thinking that he was “beating himself up over nothing” but when I faced reality I realized that that reaction came because my own conscience was just that much duller than his. I think this comes from living in such a democratic age. Because we are all equal before the law, we imagine that we are equal in all respects and if someone raises himself above the crowd by appreciating something finer, wiser and better than we can understand we have an impulse to pull him back down to our level. Certainly there are those that pretend an appreciation when they themselves do not really understand but that doesn’t mean that all who claim it do not have it. It is high time we started to acknowledge our betters and a good place to begin is with the classics. Your character will have grown the day you can put down a book and say “I could not get into it…it must be beyond me”. And you will have grown even more the day you can say “I will now try to train myself to appreciate that which I could not before”.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Books as Objects, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.