Day Fifty-Two
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”.
February 21st, 2008 at 8:04 pm
*Luc only has one shoe on*
I agree. How conceded of us to think that if we do not enjoy a book it is the books fault.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Oh darn… I do love a good protest.
Ah well, reading for one’s mental health is just as worthy a cause… And I’m pleased to report that from where I’m sitting, your brain doth function with the same graceful agility and elasticity as it did when I first met you some ten-odd years ago. (You’re laughing at the “odd” part, aren’t you!)
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:00 am
I think you’re right about the misperception; I was really glad that I went back and read the newspaper article, because that made it clearer.
Then again, reading your tab on why you started this quest was pretty clear, also.
It’s something not talked about much: How great literature is not just entertaining. Great literature collides with the reader’s life, posing powerful questions that require thoughtful answers. This process requires the reader to look inside herself for the true response.
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:18 am
Speaking of the article in the Statesman … we some how thought you made it to the front page. Yeah, I don’t know either. But my mom showed it to me … we were all excited. Mom read it. I finished reading what I was reading. Picked up the front page and your article had suddenly disappeared! GASP! Let’s all say it together … ahhh, good times …:grin:
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:34 am
A (long) quote from Screwtape:
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.
The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”
Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.
Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be — and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be — honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.
All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”
Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates what it expects. (“Since, whatever I do, the neighbors are going to think me a witch, or a Communist agent, I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and become one in reality.”) As a result we now have an intelligentsia which, though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.
But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.
February 22nd, 2008 at 9:37 am
I hate to clutter up your blog comments more…. but here is a funny story by Kurt Vonnegut. You can ignore the introductory comment on the page:
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
That’s a great story and the quote is good too, I hadn’t thought about that one in awhile. I was pretty sure this post would bring you out of the woodwork Brent so clutter away!
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Mandi, even though you are not making any kind of protest, I’m sure people will be inspired by your iniciative. I do know that folks here, in Brazil (at least the ones who reas my blog), are.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Inspiring is fine with me! My best to Brazil and your blog-readers.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Hello, I’ve been enjoying your blog. I’d like to quote part of this entry on my book blog – with your permission, of course. I liked what you had to say about coming to books with a sense of superiority (“judging them”) and really missing the boat sometimes. I agree with you wholeheartedly!
February 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Go right ahead and quote me. Thanks!