Didn't de Tocqueville say most homes in rural America had a copy of the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare, that they read and could speak of them?
He did. Factory owners of the day would give their employees time off to go and hear travelling lecturers like Emerson and P. T. Barnum (for all his hucksterism he was surprisingly well-read).
I grew up rich in the sense of being comfortable, going to wonderful schools with enthusiastic teachers, and having parents who kept me supplied with books. I read Greek myths voraciously (and German fairy tales--dark, let me tell you). Antigone changed me forever. She lives in my head and commands me never to sacrifice principles for comfort. And yes, she has lost me friendships, lol.
You've easily surpassed the pedigreed essayists on Substack.
The upper classes are philistines, far removed from the Renaissance humanists who devoted great sums of effort and capital towards patronage of the arts. They read because they feel some social obligation to be cultured.
The poor who read search for a reason to not kill themselves. What kind of cruel fate gives a big brain to a poor person?
I reflect often on the Parable of the Talents. Those who are given something others are not, something more, will be judged all the more strictly for how they use it. A poor person with a big brain is meant to use it- to what end is his or her life's great adventure.
How I feel; big brained it seems, yet poor. Hopefully that'll change soon. But definitely agree, it depresses me though to think of our thoughtless and stupid leaders whilst every poor person I meet is full of passion, full of dreams and knowledge. Some from Africa who can quote Homer, or Aristotle and the Bible and so many other books, yet are trapped... in Africa. It's enough to make angels' weep.
As a "big-brained poor person" who has never been inclined to use that brain to make money or achieve any other material goal, I have never understood how anyone could believe that the Jesus who kicked the money-lenders out of the temple was actually on the side of the two proto-capitalists who "served their master" by making profits for him.
Even as a young lad curious about the Christianity that my parents constantly warned me against, I saw the third servant as the "good guy" with the only accurate assessment of "the master".
But then I've always been a socialist of one sort or another who has often thought that the saving grace of Christianity lay not in the actions of the various churches and their outright support of the status quo, but in the revolutionary thoughts of that lad from Bethlehem who saw each and every man, woman and child as worthy, simply by virtue of living.
I must admit this one strikes home; I'm poor (always have been), and I love reading Japanese & French classics, along with Greek/Roman ones and of course am reading through Geste de Roland in my native tongue and loving every syllable, and every sentence. My peers think it's funny and of course I'm back to teaching ESL (to my horror) and have plans next year to switch to custodianship so I have more time to study.
Reading classics, reading fairy-tales, and old stories and Cicero and also history is so much more fun and enlightening than anything else. I take what I read though, the whole body of it and try more and more to transmigrate it into my own books and literature. Ironically the school-principal I work for found out I write, and was enthusiastic and has suggested I hurry to finish the year's lessons' plans and marking so that I can in her words; 'do more important things, such as getting those books out especially those pesky English ones so you can focus on your more important French ones so we can host them in our library'. I'm deeply grateful to her for her geniality and enthusiasm.
Most of the library is also interestingly full of old fantasy, old lit and she remains a Tolkien enthusiast so I quite like her.
My last boss resented my writing and disliked it, as did the one before him, and now I've a boss who loves having a writer aboard. So that I'm very much blessed. Now off to finish one more page, and to then read a little and then do some school-planning. Haha.
But for us poverty stricken folks, the notion that we should avoid the classics fills me with horror as I don't know how I could endure poverty without Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Roland.
A rich man isn’t someone who has a lot. It’s someone who doesn’t need a lot. I can nearly always buy a single book I want online without having to think about the cost, which was not true of my youth. I’ve come a long way.
That sounds wondrous. I do mean it, I however need to think a great deal about costs and prices these days, but my hope is to be on better footing next year and to slowly get on better footing. Once that’s done I plan to collect ever more classics.
So many things come to mind from this excellent essay.
First, as you note: The lives of the poor are too hard *now* to appreciate classical literature and art? Well-meaning neoliberal friends, what do you think the lives of poor people living in Dickensian London were like when Dickens was the bestselling popular author? Spoiler: they're pretty much how Dickens described them, and yet they were still hungry for literature (as well as food.) Every single place in the world is much, much materially better off now than then, if poorer off in terms of art.
Secondly, the crass neoliberal assumption that if something isn't good for earning money, it's not good for anything at all. Was it Oscar Wilde who said that a cynic is one who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing? I don't remember, but if I hadn't learned about Oscar Wilde (and so many other authors) I would not be able to have this thought at all. My life is so much richer because I read classic literature--and that's richer in an absolute sense, not in a shallow how-much-money-do-I-have sense.
Finally, a personal reflection on "Wit." I never saw the Emma Thompson movie. I only ever saw this play in a community theatre. The actress playing the protagonist was a professor of mine at the local college. In real life, my professor was also a never-married, childless middle-aged woman. She was also one of the most influential teachers I have ever had, who helped show me the beauty of classic literature, and its essential place in the human experience. She was also an excellent actress.
Watching my professor become someone who dies knowing but not understanding the classics is an experience that I think will haunt me forever.
Thanks...I just wanted to share that. I haven't reflected on "Wit" in some years now.
I'm so glad so found my work worthy and thank you as well for your account of watching "Wit." It must have been quite the experience for your professor.
I don’t know how the movie ends. But when my professor played this role, when her character died there was a bright spotlight. She looked into it, gasped, smiled, and walked into the light. I believe she indicated that, at the end, the cynic did “see the light” and understood. I don’t know if this is how the play was written.
This was at least 25 years ago. I don’t know if she, my real professor, is still alive.
That’s how the film ended too. I like to think the same thing, that the reading of Runaway Bunny represented her embrace of a true, innocent love of the beautiful, in the sense Christ spoke of when He said, “unless they become like little children they cannot come to me.” I hope your professor found the same peace.
I have a relative by marriage, one of those types who knows better than everyone else how to live a life. We homeschool, and he often questions the sorts of things we teach or expounds on what schools "should" teach, which seems to boil down to this sort of utilitarian set of knowledge, though instead of insisting that only the poor need this, he assumes that is sufficient for everyone.
"Why should they teach Shakespeare in school? It doesn't matter!"
"You plan to teach your kids calculus? Why?"
My response was, because they will be able to. Right now we are doing Algebra, and while I don't anticipate they will spend much of their lives factoring quadratic equations, the exercise of thinking through difficult concepts will never be wasted. We have studied Shakespeare, we study the Bible, we've studied classics that I wish I had read as a child.
He and his family absolutely adore all things Disney, however.
The boys in my class ask why they have to study history since they'll never use it. I point out that a squirrel will never use a laptop, but that's not because a laptop is useless . . .
Hum, I'd lean toward you should learn it and you should use it. 'cause if you don't read about it and learn about it and learn from it you'll soon be living 1939 all over again, this time in living radioactive color.
Hum hum, second thought, maybe your squirrel's a better choice.
My son is in precalculus now. We were just talking about how he has known everything that they have taught so far. I responded that calculus will take things that you know and then rearrange them in a completely new and different way.
I knew when studying calculus that I would never use it post-college. But that's ok. The abilty to wrap my head around it has served me well. Humanities in a somewhat or totally foreign language work in the same way.
Great essay! I noticed a few thngs while getting an advanced degree in poetry late in life. The professors were mostly avid and passionate, but many of my fellow students seemed to suffer from a kind of professionalism in their reading habits. They could easily could get through anything, but their engagement seemed to suffer. The text became a kind of matter for manipulation. It is a different way of reading from, say, a working class reader, who mostly reads for pleasure. Understanding pleasure (or love) in its highest forms, I think, is the great reward of reading. Pleasure expands one's view of the world. I had a great teacher/actor in 9th grade who opened Shakespeare for me, and my long-held opinion is that Shakespeare is the key. Not only is it like learning a second language, but the mix of ethereal and demotic, high and low pleasures makes his appeal more universal. The physicality of drama, and of poetry, also make him the man to turn to. I remember a quote from Frederick Douglas, which I've never been able to relocate, who talks about reading Shakespeare, and the unity of his mind with the bard's which confirmed Douglas's sense of himself as part of a larger world.
A footnote/story you might find interesting. One of my great grandfathers was a an acquaintance of Samuel Gompers and a member of his Cigar Makers International Union. If you read about labor union history you would never guess that one of the major victories for Brooklyn cigar makers was to have a reader in the workshop. Peter Goerner rolled and packed cigars for decades while listening to the works of Goethe, Heine, Schiller and other classic German authors read aloud. By the time he retired he had many of them by heart. What if union reps, employees and employers thought of the Common Good not only in terms of hours, work rules and wages?
Get a workers’ college going for after-shift enrichment. Recent graduates could work off student loans teaching there for free at night, something like that.
in 2003 I was making $6.75 an hour as a parking lot cashier in a hospital. during the down time I read Melville, Twain, Dante, Steinbeck, C.S. Lewis etc. at times it was incredibly stimulating and rewarding, so much so that sometimes I looked forward to going to work.
in the end it all translated into me becoming a much better writer/composer as well cultivating a better understanding of the world around me.
This reminds me of what runaway bestsellers the original Penguin Classics became after World War II, I think I've come upon some snooty quotes from old Etonians shocked that bricklayers might want to read Homer.
That and the various “Great Books” compilations. Snobs thought them gauche but for millions of striving Americans they represented a gateway to a richer life.
I must admit I still turn up my nose at the E.V. Rieu prose translation of The Odyssey however much I like the idea of it! When I was a bookish lad with endless time on my hands I could be rather high and mighty about avoiding abridged books -- the idea of not making it through every last page of Gibbon, even the Byzantine stuff nobody cares about, was unthinkable. Now as a busy adult with a shorter attention span I'm awfully glad that sort of thing exists.
I enjoy the Samuel Butler prose translation myself. As for abridged versions, they have their uses. I started off on Readers' Digest stuff I found laying around when I was young; I had a good outline of the plots of a number of works which I think really helped me get into them as I got older.
They used to teach it that way. There is a great homeschool resource, Heritage History, with hundreds of school-age books from 100 years ago. Many are of the "Shakespeare for Young Reader" variety. There are some wonderful, wonderful writers included. There is a warmth and love. They knew that they were letting the young readers in on a secret; and it was absolutely their pleasure to do so.
I just can't abide any of the prose translations, as glad as I am that they exist. I had a ton of illustrated classics for kids laying around growing up, they really made Ben-Hur and the Three Musketeers and the Phantom of the Opera live and relevant cultural figures for me as a kid, at least as much as Ren & Stimpy. I hope those are still in print!
Thomas Hardy wrote a bit on this subject, specifically in Jude the Obscure. Jude so desperately wanted to become an Oxford man and he studied and learned latin and the classics only to be told to stick to stone masonry. The story eventually goes off the rails (Hardy was a bit heavy-handed with his plots) but hits on a lot of the points about the upper classes largely being snobbish frauds and the desires of even the lowliest working stiff to engage the life of the mind.
I wholeheartedly agree that we've lost something vital when we look at all education as vocational or career-driven. But then that's the neoliberal way: education costs a fortune and thus nothing but money, money as far as the eye can see and none to drink.
And thanks for the film recommends. Dead Poets was insufferable. Might take a swing at Wit though it sounds a bit dreary. Is that really Tom Berenger as the substitute teacher with a shoulder-holster?
For some reason I feel the cold dead hands of Olive Chancellor grabbing at me from the grave.
Tom Berenger plays a mercenary who goes undercover at a troubled high school as a substitute to investigate the attempted murder of a friend. He kills a lot of people, but he’s also a surprisingly effective educator, so it kind of balances out. Wit is extremely well-made (Emma Thompson never goes wrong) but it is a very, very sad film.
Great essay! When I studied Classics at Emory, the department was a motley crew compared to the rest of the university, and I mean that in a good way. There were only about 8 of us in my class. One guy was a former trucker. Then there was a mechanic and a former plumber. They were much more articulate and well read than any of the “elite” kids in my other classes.
I don’t suppose that Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” counts as a “Classic” per se but from what I’ve understood it was second only to the Bible in most homes in England for about two centuries. So perhaps not a classic but a gateway drug ….
I used 'classic' in two senses. When I capitalized it, I was referring to Classics proper, the study of Greek and Latin literature from the ancient world. There is also the shorthand 'classic' for more recent works that have generally stood the test of time and informed critique such that they are commonly considered canonical works for a broad education.
I must admit that Bunyan’s _The Holy War_ affected much more than _Pilgrim’s Progress_. The depiction of the battle against sin has stayed with me for decades.
Yes I figured. I wonder if you share my sense that Pilgrim’s Progress is certainly a small c classic of the Christian Anglosphere — given that it follows, loosely, the form of spiritual autobiography that dates back to what I would consider a real deal Classic — Augustine’s Confessions and serves as the model for a minor modern classic of the same sort — Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress?
"Classical literature will make you strange. Your head will never be fully in the world around you anymore, you will never fully belong to the same universe as your peers. Your very idea of normal will shade into something your friends and family do not recognize. You will want different things than them. " This is true of much old literature-- not just the "Classical Literature" you became attracted to and read. There were a whole lot of serious and quite observant people in the past. Hopefully, the same is equally true of the present.
I suspect that there are such people, more than we believe. However, it’s not fashionable to be serious and observant and so it isn’t amplified. Instead everyone hides behind a facade to appear “normal”; but “normal” isn’t the norm because everyone is pretending…
The West has a crisis of honesty which begins with the individual.
This is probably not a new thought to any reader but I don’t think I have articulated it so succinctly to myself until now.
It is true about science as well. I was only able to tolerate the stultifying normality of my university when I landed in with the beautiful and strange physicists.
Yes, it's my experience too that a lot of scientists and their respective sciences and scientific professional practices are normality-divergent making, too. Not all, but quite a few.
I come from a blue collar background where my parents would say “you read too much, you think too much, etc.”. Read Dante’s Divine Comedy at least three times and it’s enriched my life in incredible ways. Oh and whenever I’d tell my dad I wanted to be a poet( thinking it was the most noble thing to be), he’d reply “poet? They’re all dead!” That’s only fueled my poetic 🔥 all the more. The Classics are classic for a reason and I loved the way you outlined how it affects the readers.
Your dad wasn’t entirely wrong. The best poetry was produced by the dead for the living. But of course, since we’ll all be dead one day, we each of us can do our part.
Didn't de Tocqueville say most homes in rural America had a copy of the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare, that they read and could speak of them?
He did. Factory owners of the day would give their employees time off to go and hear travelling lecturers like Emerson and P. T. Barnum (for all his hucksterism he was surprisingly well-read).
Not to mention Dickens, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe...
I grew up rich in the sense of being comfortable, going to wonderful schools with enthusiastic teachers, and having parents who kept me supplied with books. I read Greek myths voraciously (and German fairy tales--dark, let me tell you). Antigone changed me forever. She lives in my head and commands me never to sacrifice principles for comfort. And yes, she has lost me friendships, lol.
Euripides is such a brilliant playwright. It's amazing the emotion Medea can evoke after 2,500 years.
Jules Dassin's movie, ΚΡΑΥΓΗ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΩΝ , A Dream of Passion an excellent retelling of a retelling of Medea.
BTW, as credits roll across the screen writing credits are given to Dassin and Euripides.
You've easily surpassed the pedigreed essayists on Substack.
The upper classes are philistines, far removed from the Renaissance humanists who devoted great sums of effort and capital towards patronage of the arts. They read because they feel some social obligation to be cultured.
The poor who read search for a reason to not kill themselves. What kind of cruel fate gives a big brain to a poor person?
I reflect often on the Parable of the Talents. Those who are given something others are not, something more, will be judged all the more strictly for how they use it. A poor person with a big brain is meant to use it- to what end is his or her life's great adventure.
How I feel; big brained it seems, yet poor. Hopefully that'll change soon. But definitely agree, it depresses me though to think of our thoughtless and stupid leaders whilst every poor person I meet is full of passion, full of dreams and knowledge. Some from Africa who can quote Homer, or Aristotle and the Bible and so many other books, yet are trapped... in Africa. It's enough to make angels' weep.
Ah, yes. The Parable of the Talents.
As a "big-brained poor person" who has never been inclined to use that brain to make money or achieve any other material goal, I have never understood how anyone could believe that the Jesus who kicked the money-lenders out of the temple was actually on the side of the two proto-capitalists who "served their master" by making profits for him.
Even as a young lad curious about the Christianity that my parents constantly warned me against, I saw the third servant as the "good guy" with the only accurate assessment of "the master".
But then I've always been a socialist of one sort or another who has often thought that the saving grace of Christianity lay not in the actions of the various churches and their outright support of the status quo, but in the revolutionary thoughts of that lad from Bethlehem who saw each and every man, woman and child as worthy, simply by virtue of living.
I must admit this one strikes home; I'm poor (always have been), and I love reading Japanese & French classics, along with Greek/Roman ones and of course am reading through Geste de Roland in my native tongue and loving every syllable, and every sentence. My peers think it's funny and of course I'm back to teaching ESL (to my horror) and have plans next year to switch to custodianship so I have more time to study.
Reading classics, reading fairy-tales, and old stories and Cicero and also history is so much more fun and enlightening than anything else. I take what I read though, the whole body of it and try more and more to transmigrate it into my own books and literature. Ironically the school-principal I work for found out I write, and was enthusiastic and has suggested I hurry to finish the year's lessons' plans and marking so that I can in her words; 'do more important things, such as getting those books out especially those pesky English ones so you can focus on your more important French ones so we can host them in our library'. I'm deeply grateful to her for her geniality and enthusiasm.
Most of the library is also interestingly full of old fantasy, old lit and she remains a Tolkien enthusiast so I quite like her.
My last boss resented my writing and disliked it, as did the one before him, and now I've a boss who loves having a writer aboard. So that I'm very much blessed. Now off to finish one more page, and to then read a little and then do some school-planning. Haha.
But for us poverty stricken folks, the notion that we should avoid the classics fills me with horror as I don't know how I could endure poverty without Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Roland.
A rich man isn’t someone who has a lot. It’s someone who doesn’t need a lot. I can nearly always buy a single book I want online without having to think about the cost, which was not true of my youth. I’ve come a long way.
That sounds wondrous. I do mean it, I however need to think a great deal about costs and prices these days, but my hope is to be on better footing next year and to slowly get on better footing. Once that’s done I plan to collect ever more classics.
And I suspect you have as well.
So many things come to mind from this excellent essay.
First, as you note: The lives of the poor are too hard *now* to appreciate classical literature and art? Well-meaning neoliberal friends, what do you think the lives of poor people living in Dickensian London were like when Dickens was the bestselling popular author? Spoiler: they're pretty much how Dickens described them, and yet they were still hungry for literature (as well as food.) Every single place in the world is much, much materially better off now than then, if poorer off in terms of art.
Secondly, the crass neoliberal assumption that if something isn't good for earning money, it's not good for anything at all. Was it Oscar Wilde who said that a cynic is one who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing? I don't remember, but if I hadn't learned about Oscar Wilde (and so many other authors) I would not be able to have this thought at all. My life is so much richer because I read classic literature--and that's richer in an absolute sense, not in a shallow how-much-money-do-I-have sense.
Finally, a personal reflection on "Wit." I never saw the Emma Thompson movie. I only ever saw this play in a community theatre. The actress playing the protagonist was a professor of mine at the local college. In real life, my professor was also a never-married, childless middle-aged woman. She was also one of the most influential teachers I have ever had, who helped show me the beauty of classic literature, and its essential place in the human experience. She was also an excellent actress.
Watching my professor become someone who dies knowing but not understanding the classics is an experience that I think will haunt me forever.
Thanks...I just wanted to share that. I haven't reflected on "Wit" in some years now.
I'm so glad so found my work worthy and thank you as well for your account of watching "Wit." It must have been quite the experience for your professor.
I don’t know how the movie ends. But when my professor played this role, when her character died there was a bright spotlight. She looked into it, gasped, smiled, and walked into the light. I believe she indicated that, at the end, the cynic did “see the light” and understood. I don’t know if this is how the play was written.
This was at least 25 years ago. I don’t know if she, my real professor, is still alive.
That’s how the film ended too. I like to think the same thing, that the reading of Runaway Bunny represented her embrace of a true, innocent love of the beautiful, in the sense Christ spoke of when He said, “unless they become like little children they cannot come to me.” I hope your professor found the same peace.
I have a relative by marriage, one of those types who knows better than everyone else how to live a life. We homeschool, and he often questions the sorts of things we teach or expounds on what schools "should" teach, which seems to boil down to this sort of utilitarian set of knowledge, though instead of insisting that only the poor need this, he assumes that is sufficient for everyone.
"Why should they teach Shakespeare in school? It doesn't matter!"
"You plan to teach your kids calculus? Why?"
My response was, because they will be able to. Right now we are doing Algebra, and while I don't anticipate they will spend much of their lives factoring quadratic equations, the exercise of thinking through difficult concepts will never be wasted. We have studied Shakespeare, we study the Bible, we've studied classics that I wish I had read as a child.
He and his family absolutely adore all things Disney, however.
The boys in my class ask why they have to study history since they'll never use it. I point out that a squirrel will never use a laptop, but that's not because a laptop is useless . . .
Hum, I'd lean toward you should learn it and you should use it. 'cause if you don't read about it and learn about it and learn from it you'll soon be living 1939 all over again, this time in living radioactive color.
Hum hum, second thought, maybe your squirrel's a better choice.
My son is in precalculus now. We were just talking about how he has known everything that they have taught so far. I responded that calculus will take things that you know and then rearrange them in a completely new and different way.
I knew when studying calculus that I would never use it post-college. But that's ok. The abilty to wrap my head around it has served me well. Humanities in a somewhat or totally foreign language work in the same way.
Great essay! I noticed a few thngs while getting an advanced degree in poetry late in life. The professors were mostly avid and passionate, but many of my fellow students seemed to suffer from a kind of professionalism in their reading habits. They could easily could get through anything, but their engagement seemed to suffer. The text became a kind of matter for manipulation. It is a different way of reading from, say, a working class reader, who mostly reads for pleasure. Understanding pleasure (or love) in its highest forms, I think, is the great reward of reading. Pleasure expands one's view of the world. I had a great teacher/actor in 9th grade who opened Shakespeare for me, and my long-held opinion is that Shakespeare is the key. Not only is it like learning a second language, but the mix of ethereal and demotic, high and low pleasures makes his appeal more universal. The physicality of drama, and of poetry, also make him the man to turn to. I remember a quote from Frederick Douglas, which I've never been able to relocate, who talks about reading Shakespeare, and the unity of his mind with the bard's which confirmed Douglas's sense of himself as part of a larger world.
A footnote/story you might find interesting. One of my great grandfathers was a an acquaintance of Samuel Gompers and a member of his Cigar Makers International Union. If you read about labor union history you would never guess that one of the major victories for Brooklyn cigar makers was to have a reader in the workshop. Peter Goerner rolled and packed cigars for decades while listening to the works of Goethe, Heine, Schiller and other classic German authors read aloud. By the time he retired he had many of them by heart. What if union reps, employees and employers thought of the Common Good not only in terms of hours, work rules and wages?
Get a workers’ college going for after-shift enrichment. Recent graduates could work off student loans teaching there for free at night, something like that.
in 2003 I was making $6.75 an hour as a parking lot cashier in a hospital. during the down time I read Melville, Twain, Dante, Steinbeck, C.S. Lewis etc. at times it was incredibly stimulating and rewarding, so much so that sometimes I looked forward to going to work.
in the end it all translated into me becoming a much better writer/composer as well cultivating a better understanding of the world around me.
I also read a lot of Lewis during those years. I'm very happy to hear it worked out for you.
This reminds me of what runaway bestsellers the original Penguin Classics became after World War II, I think I've come upon some snooty quotes from old Etonians shocked that bricklayers might want to read Homer.
That and the various “Great Books” compilations. Snobs thought them gauche but for millions of striving Americans they represented a gateway to a richer life.
I must admit I still turn up my nose at the E.V. Rieu prose translation of The Odyssey however much I like the idea of it! When I was a bookish lad with endless time on my hands I could be rather high and mighty about avoiding abridged books -- the idea of not making it through every last page of Gibbon, even the Byzantine stuff nobody cares about, was unthinkable. Now as a busy adult with a shorter attention span I'm awfully glad that sort of thing exists.
I enjoy the Samuel Butler prose translation myself. As for abridged versions, they have their uses. I started off on Readers' Digest stuff I found laying around when I was young; I had a good outline of the plots of a number of works which I think really helped me get into them as I got older.
They used to teach it that way. There is a great homeschool resource, Heritage History, with hundreds of school-age books from 100 years ago. Many are of the "Shakespeare for Young Reader" variety. There are some wonderful, wonderful writers included. There is a warmth and love. They knew that they were letting the young readers in on a secret; and it was absolutely their pleasure to do so.
Thanks for the resource!
I just can't abide any of the prose translations, as glad as I am that they exist. I had a ton of illustrated classics for kids laying around growing up, they really made Ben-Hur and the Three Musketeers and the Phantom of the Opera live and relevant cultural figures for me as a kid, at least as much as Ren & Stimpy. I hope those are still in print!
I think starting with a kids’ version is a good way to prepare to read the real thing.
Thomas Hardy wrote a bit on this subject, specifically in Jude the Obscure. Jude so desperately wanted to become an Oxford man and he studied and learned latin and the classics only to be told to stick to stone masonry. The story eventually goes off the rails (Hardy was a bit heavy-handed with his plots) but hits on a lot of the points about the upper classes largely being snobbish frauds and the desires of even the lowliest working stiff to engage the life of the mind.
I wholeheartedly agree that we've lost something vital when we look at all education as vocational or career-driven. But then that's the neoliberal way: education costs a fortune and thus nothing but money, money as far as the eye can see and none to drink.
And thanks for the film recommends. Dead Poets was insufferable. Might take a swing at Wit though it sounds a bit dreary. Is that really Tom Berenger as the substitute teacher with a shoulder-holster?
For some reason I feel the cold dead hands of Olive Chancellor grabbing at me from the grave.
Tom Berenger plays a mercenary who goes undercover at a troubled high school as a substitute to investigate the attempted murder of a friend. He kills a lot of people, but he’s also a surprisingly effective educator, so it kind of balances out. Wit is extremely well-made (Emma Thompson never goes wrong) but it is a very, very sad film.
Great essay! When I studied Classics at Emory, the department was a motley crew compared to the rest of the university, and I mean that in a good way. There were only about 8 of us in my class. One guy was a former trucker. Then there was a mechanic and a former plumber. They were much more articulate and well read than any of the “elite” kids in my other classes.
Thank you. I’ve been to Emory many times and I’ve always loved the campus. In another life it might have been me there.
I don’t suppose that Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” counts as a “Classic” per se but from what I’ve understood it was second only to the Bible in most homes in England for about two centuries. So perhaps not a classic but a gateway drug ….
I used 'classic' in two senses. When I capitalized it, I was referring to Classics proper, the study of Greek and Latin literature from the ancient world. There is also the shorthand 'classic' for more recent works that have generally stood the test of time and informed critique such that they are commonly considered canonical works for a broad education.
Thanks for the shoutout!
In all seriousness, though, I quite agree that Pilgrim's Progress should be counted as a classic of some sort.
I must admit that Bunyan’s _The Holy War_ affected much more than _Pilgrim’s Progress_. The depiction of the battle against sin has stayed with me for decades.
Yes I figured. I wonder if you share my sense that Pilgrim’s Progress is certainly a small c classic of the Christian Anglosphere — given that it follows, loosely, the form of spiritual autobiography that dates back to what I would consider a real deal Classic — Augustine’s Confessions and serves as the model for a minor modern classic of the same sort — Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress?
"Classical literature will make you strange. Your head will never be fully in the world around you anymore, you will never fully belong to the same universe as your peers. Your very idea of normal will shade into something your friends and family do not recognize. You will want different things than them. " This is true of much old literature-- not just the "Classical Literature" you became attracted to and read. There were a whole lot of serious and quite observant people in the past. Hopefully, the same is equally true of the present.
I suspect that there are such people, more than we believe. However, it’s not fashionable to be serious and observant and so it isn’t amplified. Instead everyone hides behind a facade to appear “normal”; but “normal” isn’t the norm because everyone is pretending…
The West has a crisis of honesty which begins with the individual.
This is probably not a new thought to any reader but I don’t think I have articulated it so succinctly to myself until now.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
It is true about science as well. I was only able to tolerate the stultifying normality of my university when I landed in with the beautiful and strange physicists.
Yes, it's my experience too that a lot of scientists and their respective sciences and scientific professional practices are normality-divergent making, too. Not all, but quite a few.
A case of unfair, low expectations.
I come from a blue collar background where my parents would say “you read too much, you think too much, etc.”. Read Dante’s Divine Comedy at least three times and it’s enriched my life in incredible ways. Oh and whenever I’d tell my dad I wanted to be a poet( thinking it was the most noble thing to be), he’d reply “poet? They’re all dead!” That’s only fueled my poetic 🔥 all the more. The Classics are classic for a reason and I loved the way you outlined how it affects the readers.
Your dad wasn’t entirely wrong. The best poetry was produced by the dead for the living. But of course, since we’ll all be dead one day, we each of us can do our part.