A brief story to begin, of a bookstore variety. I had been wanting to read The Aeneid, by Virgil, and found myself in a used bookstore in Laramie, Wyoming (during a cross-country roadtrip, fodder for another newsletter). Small as the store was, it had three copies of The Aeneid on offer—three different publishers and translations. Old paperback copies, shelved in the poetry section. I compared the three translations and chose the one I liked best, Patric Dickinson’s, published by New American Library as A Mentor Book in 1961. A steal at $3 (original 1961 cost, $1.25). Sheer perfection, a 60-year-old copy of a 2,000-year-old story.
The book itself is worn, the cover marred by slightly frayed and abraded areas where it has rubbed against other books throughout the decades. Given the wear, it took me a few minutes to realize that the spine isn’t creased. At all. Smooth as could be. And I realized. This is a virgin volume, unread. After 60 years of its meandering amidst parts unknown, I am the first to read it.
2,000 years. 2,000 years after Virgil wrote The Aeneid, here I am in my house, reading it. This isn’t accidental, or some strange twist of fate. Or just the luck of the draw that this particular story survived throughout the millennia. This story exists here, now, in my happy little hand, unfolding before my very eyes and within my imagination, because it is timeless. Though it depicts specific events happening to specific characters, it is so very much more. It delves down, way down deep into the human soul and psyche, elucidating something fundamental about humanity. About human experience and inclination. About the eternal truth and silence underlying all humanity, every last one of us.
This is why classics are classics. Any story that has stood the test of time, appealed to generation after generation of readers, has survived because it resonates with the fundamental core of the person, beyond thought, beyond reason. This, here, is truth, the being recognizes.
Given our current times, I must add this addendum. Classics are not only timeless but universal, to all people, because people are people, regardless of when and where they were born, regardless of particular life experiences. Western classics, like classics from any other world region, belong to every last person.
Startle the soul. What classics do. Let’s travel back decades for a personal example, to my eighth grade year. (I was very fortunate to attend middle and high schools that taught traditional academic subjects, including the classics.) That year, I read many books, some assigned though most not, but two in particular shocked my being. Pierced my soul. A coup de foudre whose immediacy lingers to this day.
A Midsummer’s Night Dream, by William Shakespeare. That language. That stunning, flowing, agile poetry. I had no idea, not once in the thirteen years leading to that moment, that the English language could be used like THAT. I can’t begin to describe. The realization that words, mere words, each ordinary in itself, can be combined to create pure magic. A thrilling realization, even though the reading wasn’t easy. I sat there for hours, Folger Library edition in hand, deciphering each page using the notes printed to the left, as if translating a foreign language. Reading and rereading until every line made perfect sense. After finishing A Midsummer’s Night Dream, I read most of Shakespeare’s other plays in quick succession, and discovered therein universal human truths that resonated with my thirteen-year-old being. They also made me much smarter about people.
Black Boy, by Richard Wright. Such a vastly different use of language. Raw, brutal, stripped down bare. I had no idea that the English language could be used like THAT. (Wright and Shakespeare together, demonstrating that language is an infinitely versatile and surprising tool.) The story stunned me. I had read extensively of history, knew from an academic distance that certain terrible things had happened (had happened throughout history and continue to do so), but Black Boy, that was an entirely different experience. Wright cries out with wounded immediacy, shocking a young reader like a slap to the face, saying that this, this here is what happened, these terrible, brutal, soul destroying things. This here is the reality of history. Never forget that every last bit of history was endured by people.
To this day the memory of reading those two books creates a touch of that same stunned euphoria.
Classics are classics for a reason. They are timeless stories. I’ve run across people who consider themselves so intellectually superior, who claim that traditional stories are trite, outdated, and, as a literary form, unsophisticated. After moving to my current city, a neighbor invited me to join her book club. Though I am not a social, club kind of person, I thought, books! Excellent. First meeting, the women were discussing how any book possessing a narrative drive, aka plot, is nothing but hackneyed rubbish appealing to the lowest common denominator. I mentioned that essentially every story that has stood the test of time, has continually and universally resonated with people, whether over decades, centuries, or millennia, does indeed have a narrative drive. I (gently) asked them to name one that doesn’t. Though they couldn’t, I gathered that I, my apparently Philistine self, was no longer welcome at their gatherings.
People want stories. People, all peoples, have always created stories, since the beginning of human existence. The oldest known stories are myths, particularly creation myths. In them we see people not only trying to make sense of their existence, but also attempting to put a name, form, and explanation to that great silent internal core of being that is timeless and immortal. (The ancients sensed this core, whether consciously or not, while most people today create too much mental static to perceive it.)
Stories, traditionally, serve a purpose beyond mere entertainment. They teach lessons, convey history, place readers within their cultural and ancestral context. They specify societal mores and expectations, offer cautionary warnings, provide examples of every shade of human behavior. They elucidate the very nature of humanity.
After all of this, perhaps it doesn’t need to be said, but stories aren’t external, superficial things, disconnected creations wrought in the physical world. Stories, real stories, emanate from the most fundamental essence of people. Through stories we learn everything vital.
Which brings us back to the classics, whether 2,000 years old or 20. They provide such an astounding wealth of… everything. Thought, experience, wisdom, everything learned by people throughout history. It always perplexes me when people assume that everyone who lived in the past was ignorant and superstitious, as if the human species has somehow now evolved beyond them, and we have nothing to learn from them. Hah! Not true. (One need only observe the current appalling dearth of intellectual honesty at either extreme of the political/cultural/societal spectrum, the frenzied and enraged tribalism, to know that people can very quickly devolve, right there in front of us.) People are people, and always have been. Why not explore their hard-earned wisdom?
So I leave you with a request. Please read a classic. Today, tomorrow, soon. I would hazard to guess that there is a classic you’ve always wanted to read, one in particular that recurs to you on occasion, causing you to think, hmmm, I really should read that someday. Please read it. And, to take this one step further, if the thought of that classic has stayed with you over time, then I would suggest that a more fundamental force is prompting you to read it. Consider that, if you will.
While I’m at it, I’ll make another request. If a classic has ever stunned you, affected your life, altered your world perception, please let me know what it is. I would love to hear. Simply comment on this newsletter, or reply back by email.
I leave you with a passage from The Aeneid, translated by Dickinson. Pyrrhus and his fellow Greeks are sacking Troy. (Only after typing it out did I realize that it could be considered a metaphor for what is currently happening to our society.)
In the front of the entrance in the very gateway
Pranced Pyrrhus, all a glitter of steel and bronze.
He was like a snake that has come out after a winter
Lived underground and bloated from a diet
Of poisonous greenery and now prinks in the light
And sloughs his skin and rears his head to the sun
Glistening in new vigor and youth renewed,
Flexing the fluid coils of his back and frisking
His three-forked tongue. And with him was Periphas,
A huge man, and Automedon charioteer
And armor-bearer to Achilles, and all
The youth of Scyros pressing up to the building
And lobbing firebrands onto the roof. Pyrrhus
Among the leaders with his two-edged ax
Was battering down the door, and cleaving through
The bronze pins of the hinges: and soon he hacked
A hole through the tough oaken planking turning
The door into a window—the whole inside
Of the house was nakedly exposed and the Great Hall.
The ancestral home of the House of the Kings of Troy
Lay open wide and standing within the entrance
Its last guard of armed warriors.