It’s pissing rain this morning, so though I have in the last ten days given up caffeine, the coffee shop calls to me as a waypoint that might eliminate further soaking. One block from the coffee shop lurks what once was the second-best used bookstore I had ever known, The Book House. I say “once was” because the current incarnation of TBK, under new owners, is an order of magnitude less cool. Gone are the towering overflow piles rising from the floor stacked several deep, tapering off toward the top like the tips of pyramids. Gone the shelves, laid sideways and crammed four deep. Gone the liberal pricing, where everything really _was_ half off, so when you found that seventy year-old volume listed at 35 cents, by god you took it home for seventeen. TBK in its present incarnation doesn’t overwhelm, and is perhaps more approachable for the uninitiated, but the people who _really_ love books love it less.
Even so, people still drop their cartons of free booktrash outside one of the awnings after hours, so when I’m walking to the U I usually stop and peruse. Even today, in full inundation, I had a moment to spare to see what had been left, and O Joy, I found a copy of Clifton Fadiman’s “The Lifetime Reading Plan”, a book I had read in the past but so long ago that the memory seems to belong to another man.
Now I’m sitting in the cafe, and it’s stopped raining, but Fadiman has something to say to you regarding The Plan, which is a chronological reading list of hundreds of ‘canonical’ books.
The aim is simple. The Plan is designed to help us avoid mental bankruptcy. It is designed to fill our minds, slowly, gradually, under no compulsion, with what the greatest writers of our Western tradition have thought, felt, and imagined. Even after we have shared these thoughts, feelings, and images, we will still have much to learn: all men die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something, not much but something, of our position in space and time. We will know how we have emerged from three thousand years of history. We will know how we got the ideas by which unconsciously we live. Says Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
When I first read these words, fourteen? years ago, they seemed a godsend. I was looking for something to anchor me to a world that must (I thought) go deeper down than the idiocy around me implied. But of course I’ve already given myself away – I believe, now, that the idiocy around me is no more idiotic than it ever has been, and the profundities of today little less profound than the best the past had to offer. I wouldn’t argue too hard if you wanted to wiggle a little either way, but by and large I’m done with the enshrinement of the past as any particular repository of anything unlike what’s on offer today, at least if you’re paying attention.
Any book lover could compile a lifetime reading list. Probably it wouldn’t be drawn from a sample as wide-ranging as Fadiman’s own, but it would be filled with sublimities of a kind, relevant to the story arc of that particular person. “Watership Down” meant a great deal to the person I was when I read it. What would it mean now? Would it merit inclusion in a “Lifetime Reading List” that I might prescribe for others? I dunno. And not knowing is the best part, the freedom to not know, and to not particularly care, and to not feel, as I once felt, that maybe Fadiman’s list could provide some critical piece that my own experience had lacked, and that if I only read every one of them, in order, that maybe everything would click into place. And if not Fadiman’s than somebody’s, or some history class, or some shitty apartment in some third-world country, or some new lover.
Man, that’s an exhausting way to think.
If you’re really into rock and roll, and your kid is of an age to really be into music, you don’t need to make him reprise the entire history of music for him to know it and love it and receive its revelation. The whole world is every few years made new, and you can’t tell, in the middle of the process, which piece is going where, and how it all ties together, and what it means. And now there’s new music, and now there’s new wisdom and new knowledge flowing past as quietly as a river, and you can’t ever hope to swim far enough upstream to swallow the source once and for all, you can only dangle down your tin cup time.and.again.and.drink. .