Why Read the Classics? (1986)
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Fast forward 35 years. I have come to enjoy reading Shakespeare on my own.
(Why is it great literature? Incredible prose, insane plot lines, and way way underrated comedy. Some of the best comedy I have ever encountered is in Shakespeare’s so-called tragedies, a situation that very much matches my own tragedy-marred life. Reread “Hamlet”, “Richard III”, and “MacBeth” for a barrage of hilariously inappropriate one-liners.)
Anyway, a decade and half ago wife wants to take the kids, ages 7 & 9, to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. I tell them they don’t have to see any of it. I tell them I didn’t enjoy anything but the comedies as a kid but that the staging and costumes were always good. No pressure at all; they are welcome to hang out in the hotel room with iPads or to watch TV, a luxury they lack at home.
They go see everything, including histories and tragedies. And they totally get it. Apparently my children don’t know they’re not supposed to understand the antiquated English, because halfway through their first play (“Merchant of Venice”) I am sometimes having to ask them what’s going on, and my 7 year-old patiently and correctly gives me the 411. They attend pre-play lectures and, when asked by the lecturer, read better than most actors. We go many more times in the ensuing years and it’s now among my most cherished memories.
To this day they quote Shakespeare accurately and mumble “Exeunt” under their breath when they want to get out of a boring situation.
Pedantipoint: it's mostly verse.
https://shakespearefactsblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/02/shakes...
(Be prepared to explain a lot of off-colour puns and double entendres. Shakespeare may have written much for the the equivalent of the private boxes, but he was most definitely not above a bit of Carry On/Benny Hill for the groundlings.)
I hesitate to link this (because it's been parked for a while), but you and the OP might enjoy the text-audio integration at this site.
A lot of it depends on context. A guy trying to be intimidating, but realizing they’re out of their league.
> Marry, sir, she's the kitchen wench and all grease; and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light. I warrant, her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter: if she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.
If Shakespeare's plays were written today, there would be outrage. Political correctness was definitely not a concept in 1594.
"It's Cinna! Tear him apart!"
"I am not Cinna the conspirator. I am Cinna the poet!"
"Tear him! Tear him for his bad verses!"
(I mostly appreciate that line (from Macbeth) because it's just extremely relatable.)
Now I read history for recreation and can’t get enough, largely because now that I’m older and understand enough of how society works that I can understand the chain of events better. Reading history is almost like applied psychology.
My wife is the niece of a history professor too. It's interesting that the more I learn the less I want to talk to him about it - perhaps because I'm always learning there's a hell of a lot I don't know. Intimidating.
The Merchant of Venice is blatantly anti-Semetic. The Comedy of Errors has a whole scene that's just fat shaming for no good reason. There's plenty of other examples of things that would be problematic if written in a modern context. Obviously it wasn't problematic several hundred years ago, and we shouldn't judge Shakespeare by modern standards.
I really don't think fat jokes are considered off-limits for present-day comedies.
> Schools and universities ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite.
Of course, a great number of Shakespeare's works were riffs on old plots that had been done many times before, and up to a few thousand years earlier.
His genius was not the plots but in what he 'said more than the plot in question'. One could easily make a distinction between analysis of a work and reinterpretation of a work, but I still think it is foolhardy to claim that analysis and critical thinking can not create its own value, and even more foolhardy to imply that that value is in competition with the value of the original work.
Anyway, I think the better modern reinterpretations of Shakespeare tend to focus on the themes that Shakespeare added to the classic plots, than they worry about the plot specifics.
One point worth mentioning is that Shakespeare was not particularly high literature for his time: these were plays written for the 17th century theatre-goers to enjoy. And they had plenty of risqué one-liners: http://mentalfloss.com/article/54442/10-shakespeares-best-di... has a list. That said, Shakespeare at his best easily outdid his peers — his tragedies particularly, although they aren’t particularly historically accurate.
I suspect some of Asimov’s and particularly Stephen King’s works will be “classics” in 500 years time.
One point worth mentioning is that Shakespeare was not particularly high literature for his time
I don't think this bit is accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Men_(playing_company)
The point about not being “high literature” was that the plays had a very broad audience. Shakespeare’s company were asked to perform in front of royals as well, but the plays were were seen by up to 3000 people a day with the cheapest tickets being a penny (about the price of a loaf of bread - cheap even for its time). They were effectively mass entertainment for 16th century Londoners.
The thing is, I've seen enough films at this point in my life that even when I see new material, I get the sense that I've seen it before. Shakespeare's stories might be very predictable, but instead of giving much thought to the plot, you focus more on getting into the heads of the characters in the moment. They are vehicles for the universal human feelings: jealousy, love, lust, loneliness, elation, depression, mourning etc.
And then the way Shakespeare describes this is so rich. This is one way in that reading the plays is more rewarding than watching them, because in our day you need more time to parse the sentences, to look up archaic words (or those whose meaning has changed) and Classical references. But I find that putting in that work enriches my own English, and is an entertaining puzzle on its own .
Personally I found it hilarious, but it was a poor experience for the SO, who isn't as au fait with the bard as I am.
I couldn't believe how much more I was impacted by some of these books just 10 years after reading them in high school. Many of the plights of the protagonists just didn't stir me at all when I was in school, either because I didn't understand the historical context well enough, or because I didn't yet have enough empathy to feel their pain and loss (it's always pain and loss in the classics...)
Anyway, I highly recommend reading some of these books again as an adult. Even some of the ones I remember hating in school I ended up being engrossed by.
How would you define a "classic" and what books would you put in that definition?
[1] exemplar -- https://www.businessinsider.com/100-books-everyone-should-re...
[2] Quora discussion -- https://www.quora.com/Why-is-The-Count-of-Monte-Cristo-consi...
[3] "Dumas published the book in 1846. It is no exaggeration to say “Monte Cristo” still ranks as one of the most exciting stories imaginable, one every bit as good as anything Steven Spielberg or J.K. Rowling could ever conjure up." -- https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2011/0206/Class...
One thing I found quite difficult however is dealing with the different writing styles. Sometimes it could be a real slog to get through books that have a dated or less contemporary style.
One thing I love about the classics is that they have an entirely different set of euphemisms and implicit assumptions. They don't know what you're supposed to pretend isn't true in the modern world. You end up with, for instance, the ancient Greeks being very explicit that their early rulers were the most effective pirates and cattle rustlers. You learn a lot more about how we got where we are and why some obviously bad structures are so hard to change. Many decision makers from the dawn of writing to the present day relied on these texts as playbooks.
Although, maybe the point of a "classic" is that it should have broad appeal, but there is a difference between intellectually understanding something and being able to relate to it. I found Grapes of Wrath to be relatable, but tedious in high school, and noticed a correlation a between the amount of hate better off kids in class espoused for it vs the fact that I while I found it immensely depressing, I didn't mind it nearly as much as many of the other assignments.
When I read a book, it's because I have chosen to read it, I know something about it, I know where it belongs in history, and I believe it either has some relevance to me or I think it will just be entertaining to read.
When a teenager reads a book, it is often assigned, meaning that they do not know about the context of the book, it's often not at all relevant to their life, and is assigned by instructors they might already be inclined to distrust and disrespect. Sometimes the situation is made worse by certain forced critical readings of the book, or a ban on criticizing the book.
I'm not sure calling people who are constantly assigned arbitrary tasks they have little say in and whose bathroom breaks are controlled "emotionally immature" is useful or accurate, and is close to the root of the problem itself.
I think you get caught up in the feeling that "this needs to be done" that you don't really get to get into the book.
What's worse is that I can only unhelpfully lament the current state of literature in education -- I have no idea how we may improve the system...
Half the use of the classes was getting a syllabus someone had gone to great lengths to organize around an expert knowledge of some area or string of thought.
I usually found a good deal of value, even when the author or work was not to my specific taste.
My classical literature class had a cycle exclusively on Antigone. I was and am not as enamored by that play as was my instructor and the critic George Steiner who we were asked to read. But to loathe the requirement and not focus on deriving the best possible value from that assignment would've been a waste of money.
That depends on many factors, including the particular book, the "coolness" of the teacher, the age of the pupil, etc. Poetry finally clicked for me in my final year of high school when we were assigned one single poet I had never read before (and definitely wouldn’t have never read if he hadn’t been assigned in school). I was so fascinated by this mandatory reading that I bought the poet’s collected works, then began reading verse by his contemporaries, and so on and so forth.
This suggest that the difference had more to do with life experiences and generally amount of knowledge then with having it assigned.
I agree that Robin Hood and adventure should be assigned soon. The biggest risk with Robin Hood and similar books is that you get it assigned too late, when you cant appreciate story as genuinly as young people.
So at least, you kind of can read a bit about each book and then see which one you'd like best. Still, the selection had to fit in the school curriculum so it wasn't exactly free choice. And a few of them were mandatory for everyone.
I'd say the experience still wasn't great, but perhaps was better than being forced to read book X.
Intrinsic motivation to read does make the experience a whole lot more satisfying, and as others have noted before me, reading some of those books again now makes me appreciate them more. Just recently started reading some of Tolstoy's work and I can imagine that a decade ago (in high school) I wouldn't have been able to find motivation to read anything he wrote.
Now, years after leaving high school, I actually find myself reading poetry for enjoyment. It's possible to read it and not sit there and analyse every word of every line. Sometimes it's nice to just read a poem and leave it at that, in the same way you'd listen to a song without delving into the lyrics.
(A lot of my experiences in school can be summed up by a question that was never answered: "why are we talking about this?".)
--
[0] - "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process."
At least it's not The Great Gatsby (blegh) 8 chapters of annoyance and one lonely chapter of actual non-world building.
at the rate of one fucking chapter a week
I always remember Flowers for Algernon, a book which we read as part of English class. I devoured it in about 2-3 days and it was definitely the first book to ever make me cry. Like, that book is fucking incredible. I told the teacher next day - who (wisely) said I shouldn't share this with fellow students lest I get mocked.
4 weeks later we're being asked questions about the motivations of characters. Or what do we think the author meant by this paragraph. All in chapter 4.
I couldn't remember, I didn't care. The book had a profound interest on me and nobody else was actually reading it. Just micro-analysing all possible joy out of it. Ugh.
Worse they seem to be chosen without regard to length or readability. I had to read Grapes of Wrath over 3 weeks in HS (with everything else going on, and I know most students shared a cliff notes and prayed for a reasonable grade), but there are plenty of worse examples and the The Count of Monte Cristo in its 1000+ page unabridged addition was assigned my niece last year. I tend to be able to read pulp novels at 100 pages an hour, but older novels, Shakespeare plays etc, can easy bring it down to 30 pages an hour or less. Which for a 600 page book is a 20+ hour long drag if the novel isn't enjoyable.
Surely the instructors can find shorter novels which are easier for the kids to read and relate to. I remember reading Cannery Row a few years ago and wondering why instead of Grapes of Wrath it wasn't assigned, or for that matter I read "This Side of Paradise" and am to this day 100% convinced that any teacher that assigns The Great Gatsby to a teenage student over it should seriously be examined (actually IIRC when I read it, it seemed the sexual content in this side of paradise probably makes it hard to assign, but that is another discussion, along with the fact that Gatsby was initially a failure with mixed reviews, the reasons should be understood but apparently aren't. I hated the Gatsby assignment, but suspect that I would have found it more enjoyable in my 20's when I read Paradise, which is likely one of those books that is less meaningful to people in their 50's).
The bottom line, is that there are plenty of "classic" novels that are relatable to a wide audience (male & female, differing economic backgrounds, etc) and are short enough that a normal teenager can struggle through them even if they aren't enjoyable. The fact that it accepted to assign some of these book because everyone else is doing it is just a sign of bad instruction.
About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it.
On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end.
Reading the classics is still the best way to travel for me. I feel I've lived many years in some kind of half-mythical Russia of the last two centuries. I saw the whole Mediterranean world through Herodotus' eyes. My years as a child were heroic thanks to Dumas and Tolkien.
Later on, classics destroyed my condescending attitude to past ages. Reading "Orlando Furioso", I was astonished to read feminist opinions by a man writing around 1500. IIRC, Arioste wrote that a woman sleeping with a man before marriage was no big deal, that they should try a few guys before choosing the best one. Another Italian classic of the same period, "La Gerusalemme liberata", had the same impact on my vision of the late Middle Age, and was an even better read. For another example, as much as I adored Shakespeare as a young adult, when I discovered the Greek theater of Euripides and Sophocles, I saw that having emotional and deep characters was nothing new.
Italo Calvino did not mention a special kind of classics that many people know in an altered way: the religious literature, and especially the Bible (not the King James). Some of these texts are boring to a non-religious reader, but other are fantastic, like Job and Qohelet. To dive in an even older world, "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and a bit of Sumerian literature gave me a strong connection to people that disappeared milleniums ago.
That's interesting to me, I hated Balzac when I had to read it in school but I loved the Odyssey as a kid. Most of the classics I read and enjoyed as a kid (Voltaire's Contes Philosophiques, To kill a mocking bird, all the books from Maupassant, etc...) I read them for fun by myself without the school asking me to read them, on the other had I hated the books that I was forced to read (Rousseau's confessions, Balzac, Les Allumettes suédoises by Robert Sabatier)
It does show that being forced to read something does color your perception of it. I sometimes wonder what the best way to introduce literature without shoving it down student's throat but still getting them to read good classics.
I think that writing just like everything else has improved with the 20th and 21st century's obsession with design. As such, not all but the best modern writing is much more expressive, concise and communicative. There is boat loads of super high quality writing rolling off the presses each year. Having taken Carl Sagan's axiom to heart that we have a very limited number of books we can read in our lifetimes and should therefore hold them dearly, I read few books older than 200 years. It's awfully reductive I know but generally the value/lb is just lower.
They establish our common tropes amd metaphors. You'll get a lot more out of most modern works having that background. Hell, you'll get more out of the Simpsons
I still have a reading list of cannonical works. It's just shorter and I pursue it less aggressively. One thing I'd say too is that college lit classes and our popular notion of "classical" works both over index on books. You can get a lot more bang for the buck imo out of essays.
Cultural literacy can be raised in lots of ways besides studying the musty canon. And why limit yourself to the slice of modern entertainment where the canon is prerequisite?
Deciding for yourself what art you value -- after questioning the canon, ignoring academics, critics and other authorities -- is the highest form of appreciation.
Each individual owns their experience. The author is not the authority.
Somewhat related, I read Madame Bovary a while ago and the back of the book said something about it being one of the first modern novels (or something to that effect) and so I read it in that light, and it occurred to me several times throughout that if it were written today, it would be completely ignored. There were like 50-100 pages in the middle that I thought would have definitely been cut out by a modern editor. Maybe it just wasn't my thing.
It was exceptional in the time it was written and it's special for that reason, but if you want to read a romance involving a really moody lady, there's probably tens of newer better choices that are also considered "classics".
If we assume that reading great books and practicing writing is critical to becoming a great writer, we've never been in worse time for writing development. The average person grows up reading--if they read at all--Harry Potter, Twilight, etc., being inundated with inane advertising, steeped in piss-poor social media posts, etc. The most writing the average person does is work email. Contrast that to, e.g., Herman Melville, who grew up reading pretty much solely the King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and who probably corresponded with friends and family every day.
I even think the vast majority of 21st century writers would disagree with you.
There are vastly more people who have pursued educations and careers in literature and writing than any past point in history, including reading the classics you expect. We've gone from populations that weren't even literate, to university degrees being normal.
Plenty of people are putting out great writing. The problem has become finding it in a sea of publications.
Let's go back to the (overly) strong statement our parent post made:
>I think that writing just like everything else has improved with the 20th and 21st century's obsession with design. As such, not all but the best modern writing is much more expressive, concise and communicative.
Concision is more a modern trend than anything else and not an absolute good so we'll ignore it.
Name me a 21st century writer more expressive and communicative than Shakespeare. Or assuming he's too "long-tail," someone more expressive than Faulkner. And I agree this is completely subjective, so I'd think the best course of action is seeing if there is any academic consensus on the subject.
Just some quick googling, but here's an article [0] about a Stanford study showing that modern students are writing more than ever (mostly through text messages/social media). But one wonders whether text messages are (a) "prose" in the literary sense, (b) materially different enough on a mental level from just talking to someone to offer any additional benefit, (c) transferable in skills to writing a novel. The authors say that the students are good at "assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across," but their test subjects are a bunch of Stanford students who are great at jumping through hoops and conforming to expectations--as shown by the fact that they got into Stanford. Not to mention that they're not comparing the papers to a sample of pre-texting papers...
Anyway, not like that article is definitive or anything.
Many modern books when I read them, I'm immersed into the world that is created, sometimes not wanting them to end. Never felt like that with Shakespeare. Another book I think that highlights this difference is Voltaire's candide, such a fast paced fantastic story, but it doesn't draw you in. But a fast paced dan brown book tends to draw me in way more than Voltaire did. But Candide is a far far cleverer book I think with a lot of things to think about. Shakespeare seems similar, great storylines with fantastic prose but just doesn't draw you in the way modern book (or scripts) do, well at least not for me.
So expressiveness? the ability to convey meanings and feeling? Most any modern novelist can do this better than Shakespeare can (for me).
The 21st century is just beginning. It will shake out over time. I suspect a part of it is a minor fetishization with language that differs from what we're used to. Like a British accent can sound delightful to me even if it's not any more literate than me. The same could hold with past writing styles. So what is "blandly" written now, might not sound bland to people 50 years from now. Just a thought.
Hundreds or thousands of years may have passed, and yet the lessons are as valuable today as when they were written.
With philosophy in particular, I would argue the classics are worth reading to understand how their ideas have shaped history, and how their ideas continue to shape the present and future - because at their heart what they describe is human thought and behaviour, and those are surprisingly unchanged over the interceding years.
It's so strange how the same idea can affect people so differently.
Sagan's axiom actually made me read old books only. Bible, greek mythology, shakespeare, etc. I even learned latin to read Newton's Principia, vulgate and other latin texts. I don't think I have the patience to learn ancient greek.
Pretty much every modern literature is derivative of the bible, greek mythology, etc. So why not read the real deal?
The same reason we use modern computers even though they're ultimately derivative of primitive tally sticks. “Derivative of” does not mean “worse than”.
Some people might prefer the changes, but when I read classics I want to read something as close as possible to what the author originally wrote. Despite the name, "Standard Ebooks" are actually non-standard.
Whether or not you prefer slightly modernized spelling is a matter of taste, and something I've discussed at length in previous HN comments. (So I won't repeat myself here.) At SE we take the same stance as editors going back generations, who have all been quietly modernizing spelling right under everyone's noses as a matter of course since Shakespeare's days.
"Outside linguistics, the term grammar is often used in a rather different sense. In some respects, it may be used more broadly, including rules of spelling and punctuation, which linguists would not typically consider to form part of grammar, but rather as a part of orthography, the set of conventions used for writing a language."
In common usage, punctuation is often considered part of grammar. This matches well with the computer science meaning of grammar (rules for parsing), because punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence.
We do change from single-quoted British style to double-quoted American style, but I think most everyone would agree that that is merely a presentational change that does not change the actual grammar of a sentence. (And that in and of itself was a very common thing for editors to do going back hundreds of years too!)
Fantastic project, anyway.
But yes, we do do this (sympathetically to my mind), and yes, it’s all marked as editorial in the commit history. It’s not trivial to untangle, but it’s not impossible by any means. We also list the sources used to build the books which include the transcriptions and scans if you want to find the unaltered versions.
(for what it’s worth, by far the most common adjustments are to-day to today, to-morrow to tomorrow, and good-night to good night)
[1] - https://librivox.org/
In your experience what’s the most convenient e-ink device for free ebooks? Ie Kindle is optimized for amazon so probably not the most convenient for this.
Latex with the microtype package is the only solution that does text justification on the level of a human professional. Can’t SE convert to that and provide PDF for common screen sizes?
It would be so easy if only Project Gutenberg had a standardized master source format. So conversion tools can be built around that. But all efforts in that direction were killed of by trolls in the community.
[0]: http://pandoc.org/
SE looks interesting. I don't have an epub reader handy but I will definitely be back to understand the motivation (knowing it's a lot of work to do this sort of thing).
(1) And if you understood that reference right away, you got the point!
As much as I love Star Trek (particularly TNG), I'd say it's far, far less popular among folks in their early 20s these days than the classics. Probably why they're called classics :)
But the truth is, that makes Harry Potter and Game of Thrones much more of a "classic" than Shakespeare.
Shared cultural context is something I believe we're losing anyway, or at least it's not scaling well with population size and civilization - these days they're just so many books being published, along with movies and TV series, that it's increasingly difficult to find things you've both read/watched with random people. Schools in a given country are forcing the same set of literature on people partly in order to ensure a shared cultural context, but as we all know (and as is discussed elsewhere in this comment thread), this only makes people know the titles but not read the books themselves.
Still, there's probably some fascinating anthropology to be had in the idea of fandom as a new form of nationality.
They say dual citizenship is possible but I'd steer well clear of the dmz between Trek and Wars.
I agree. If you think of it, meeting people who identify more with a fictional culture from a TV show more than with any existing one, that's... something new, I think. Can't think of any analogue in past periods in history.
> They say dual citizenship is possible but I'd steer well clear of the dmz between Trek and Wars.
Been there, can confirm. Not pretty :).
Religion, Christianity in particular, seems a close analog.
Then in college, there was an ongoing bet that who could finish the entire unabridged version of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It tool me three months to read the whole of it. It changed me as a person and made me aware of the fact that the problems faced by humans haven't really changed over the centuries, but only their manifestation has changed as per the present times.
And what about The Count of Monte Cristo and other books by Alexander Dumas.
The list goes on ...
Maybe there's a business in updating classics into modern versions. It has been done with Shakespeare and we see it all the time with movies. Why not others?
Except, how many times are those others merely updating Shakespeare into their contemporary times? Maybe everything is just continuously updating Shakespeare at this point.
I jest, I jest.
Or do I?
The article is more poetic than informational. I am so used to technical readings that I translate the sentences into something more concrete, maybe more journalistic.
I guess that this sentence means that "classic books" define our cultural background, differences between the east and the west, between countries and cultures independently of what you can see now on the news.
Translating it into more plain concepts allows for a better understanding. With this new wording, I can reflect on how current events, video games, streamed videos are shaping our society and will be identified in the future as "classic".
> Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.
I interpret this as you have already "read" the classic as it is part of other works that you have read or seen. That our culture has been influenced by "classic" works to the extend that you can feel like you have read them before.
> The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through
This confirms my previous interpretation. But, I have then to open the question. Do "classics" shape society or are only a result of it? If a "classics" was never written our society will be different our we will just miss a recorded piece of cultural history?
> If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.
I do not agree. I am reading "classics" books out of curiosity or even duty towards being responsible to improve my own education, and last but not least for pleasure. Different people will have different motivation.
Can anyone try to explain this other one? It sounds good, but if feels kind of bullshit. :)
> We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we are approaching the idea of the “total book,” as Mallarmé conceived of it.
This post is an interesting read for a change.
“If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller” is just amazing.
Read Sun Tzu’s Art of War before you need to.
If you ask someone what is the best book to read and they reply you now have someone’s preference for a great book rather than a mediocre one. That in essence is how a classic is determined, but at larger scale. Lots of people asked and a lot of people answered. Consensus formed and spread.
I’m fairly sure I can ask a film buff what classic movies I should watch and if I asked a lot of film buffs, some movies would begin to bubble up as being seen as commonly known classics. Others could be seen as just popular. I don’t think that would be a surprising outcome. I don’t think it needs to be much more complicated than that.
I disagree that classics can be understood by osmosis. I'm not discounting the books you read or saying they wouldn't compare to the classics if they were better known. But there is an experience in reading something timeless that can only be experienced by reading it. And there are more experiences to reading them with age that makes them unique. They become richer instead of becoming banal.
>you’ll understand them by osmosis
Nothing about the substance of the books can be understood without reading them. It's all in the details and the language, not the plots and the abstract description of their main points.
Even if we constrained them in their "value-conferring ideas", the power of such ideas in those books comes from experiencing the emotions and subtleties involved in their storytelling.
Without that, a raw "takeaway" idea will have neither the required buildup, nor the emotional impact required to affect one hearing it.
Plus, a key part of literature is not about value-conferring ideas, but about experiencing others' lives and ways of thinking and looking at the world. This is totally lost in plot summaries.
Depends on your goal. Reading a classic by "osmosis" may be enough to make one a dilettante, but doesn't bring about the enlightenment you would experience from reading the original book. Just like reading popular science books doesn't make one a scientist.
“”” They want their pound of flesh. That’s from Shakespeare or something. Macbeth I think.
Me: headdesk. Merchant of Venice. “””
Unfortunately, I've found that even with things I have fully read, I sometimes mix them up and confuse what came from where. There's just not enough distinction sometimes and it smears into a blob.
I'm aware that meanings change, and culture has its own uses for expressions. But the source is there for you to examine, there's no real excuse to use it wrong. We're not (yet) at the point where we have an oral culture tradition, but we're getting damn close.
Sometimes you can get some surrounding information about a work, but you generally cannot replace reading/viewing/playing the work, if only due to a basic law of information density.
It seems like a bunch of people are replying thinking that you meant one would pick up trivia about the classics like which Shakespearian work some quote came from, rather than some distillation of important concepts or whatever.
I tend to consider myself "over read" - I have read everything published by my favorite authors, their followers and their students. When I find a voice I like, I'll finish that entire school of thought. But I'm also very extreme in my reading. I started reading very early, isolated in Christian rural Iowa as a youth, I had a severe stutter, and read the library rather than engage in the other kids I could not manage to converse without sounding stupid. So, I sorta ignored "childhood" until the end of elementary, after which I was the oddest over intellectualized little shithead one could encounter.
Why read the classics? They locate you in time and space to understand the state of society. That pretty valuable.
I've been trying really hard to up my reading numbers to what I remember them being 5 or 10 years ago. As a part of that, I've been trying to keep an even spread of fiction and non-fiction.
The other day I decided I should also revisit books I remember loving as a kid that I haven't read in decades. Specifically, The Count of Monte Cristo and Mysterious Island. I started the latter the other day.
One of the things that strikes me again and again while I read this book is how much it embodies great improvisation; the characters are all "yes men" in the best possible sense of the phrase. When one character encounters a problem or has an idea, the rest are quick to say "yes, and!" to go on to cooperate to find a solution.
This is especially amazing considering that the book is set at the tail end of the Civil War.
I can't imagine a book like this being written today. The characters are so humanist in believing that they and each other can accomplish anything they set out to do; they cooperate without struggle; there are no hidden pasts or ulterior motives threatening them. It's really quite refreshing and invigorating. I wish I could read aspirational(?) fiction like this all the time and feel like my mood would be much better for it.
Heinrich Böll's "Group Portrait with Lady"[1] is a book about that period. You expect particular kind of stuff in such a book: Gestapo officers torturing dissenters. Jew hunts. Nurnberg rallies. Etc.
Then you read the book and Hitler or concentration camps and not mentioned even once. It's full of people trying to live their lives. Teenagers are in love one with another. People go to work. Try to build a business. Pay their taxes. Play piano. They have problems with their children and extramarital affairs. They have varied political opinions. They die of natural causes.
It would be pretty hard to get that kind of (very terrifying, in a way) understanding of the period through history books.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Group-Portrait-Lady-Essential-Heinric...
I enjoy selected classics quite a bit, and I've studied them in depth. One of my favorite pieces is Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, and I can talk about it in the context of evolution of sonata form.
I also know my Duke Ellington and my Joni Mitchell, my Stevie Wonder and my Beatles -- all of which are similarly regarded as unassailable classics within certain circles of devotees.
An appreciation for the classics is completely compatible with the conviction that they are not "timeless universals", but that every last one of them is a product of a specific time and place. And the clash between canons is in fact a disgusting political and cultural power struggle.
This has nothing to do with books, or music, or art. It has to do with people who want to use beautiful art to create a wedge or power dynamic or culture dynamic rather than simply enjoy or learn from the art. And it is a dangerous behavior, because as soon as one brands others (mentally) as uncultured or of a lower class, it helps them justify unjust behaviors.
I happen to think that teaching the classics in most high schools is probably a mistake. An average teacher isn't going to do a very good job and you just end up with a bunch of kids that like reading a little bit less than they used to.
tl;dr read the works of thinkers who were wrong in the past, in order to expand your search space to find out what you're wrong about in the present.