There is absolutely a curriculum I carry around in my head. There is a method. There are lists I love. A society needs to be “on the same page” to some extent. “Selecting” the “best literature” and giving everyone a chance to read the “best” should be a top priority. Focus is our friend, distraction, our enemy. But focus on what? What do we need to know? Professor smart. Street smart. Tech smart. Creativity smart. People smart. Disciplined smart. So many ways to be smart. “How To Read” by Ezra Pound (an article published in 1929 when he was 44—at 60, he would be in a mental hospital) features a reading list. But it’s a crackpot list. Modernist art and literature is, to a great extent, crackpot.
This is the first thing—which few get, and which they need to get. It’s not very well understood, for instance, how Americans rejected Modern Art/Literature when it came over from Europe—it was gradually, not until the 1930s (very recently) that it began to be accepted. Few people know what mental lakes and rivers they are swimming in. We don’t have a coherent, bird’s eye, view of history and our place in it. Propaganda isn’t just a thing “over there;” it is layered into every thing we view and read. This isn’t paranoid; it’s a simple, historical fact. It’s not nefarious. It’s ordinary. Like “best sellers” replacing real literature. Error can be benign and even comforting, like a bag of cookies for dinner. So that’s the first thing to “get” in making a reading list.
Second, general reading does need to be guided; there needs to be coherence and purpose, a Living-Story of sorts, so we don’t forget: otherwise isolated facts blow away in the wind.
Third, reading must be enlightening and pleasurable (!) and done critically, not just a boast that “we got through” so many novels, pinning a medal on ourselves that we finished Ulysses or Moby Dick! Or, 100 novels this summer! I know people who have read thousands of novels and I have never heard them make one interesting literary or philosophical observation. It seems we either have the non-fiction reader (discovering .001% of reality one small bite at a time), the fiction reader who devours novels like bags of cookies, or the person who doesn’t read at all—and why should they? The “readers” don’t seem very wise.
Here’s my list:
1. Plato, the Dialogues. You don’t know these, you are just a robot. How to reason, how to think, how to argue, how society is ordered, how rhetoric works, the whole v. the parts, friendship v. love, what is love? what is wisdom? how are the elements and parts of the universe ordered in an elemental way? what is scientific thinking? what is practical thinking? what entails inspiration? wherefore emotion? what parts do we play in the social world? what is valuable? what is the good? Out of Socrates comes Christ, Dante, Shakespeare, Poe, poetry and the poetic soul. Without Plato, you are a member of the “peanut crunching crowd” and that’s it. Is “your guru” wise, or a fraud? How do you know? You need Plato.
2. Da Vinci. The notebooks. Amusing (and somewhat true) how he argues painting (which he associates with geometry and astronomy) is much closer to reality than the “hearsay” of poetry.
3. Shakespeare. The Plays and the Sonnets.
4. Alexander Pope The poems. “…what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”
5. German Lieder. German is very close to English. In terms of poetry, avoid French—which has no verse. Verse needs this: Sy-lab-i-fi-CA-tion. If pronouncing this word properly, with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable, doesn’t give you pleasure, poetry is perhaps not for you. (The French say “Sy-lab-i-fi-ca-tion.” Therefore their language has no verse). With German lieder, you not only get German Romantic verse—of the most passionate kind ever written, you can hear how a genius like Schubert adds music to it. Melancholy love poetry is the best poetry, and having read your Plato, you’ll understand the profound relationship between love—and thought itself.
6. The Romantic Poets. Byron is fun. Coleridge is delightful. Wordsworth is endearing. (Mary Shelley inspired Poe to write Sci-Fi.) Keats and Shelley are poetry itself.
7. Poe. The Collected Works, including his non-fiction. Beauty and humor as perfect and less perfect shapes of rhetoric, etc
8. Knut Hamsun. The early novels.
9. Edna Millay. Her exceptional sonnets advance the Romantic notion that the sonnet/the stanza, not the line, is the true unit of poetry.
10. Any modern conspiracy book. Just to loosen up your thoughts. Mainstream, conventional thinking is useful as a soporific, but ultimately you will need to face the fact that the agitated, excitable thinking of others whom you care about may cause you to feel an emptiness inside, like you are missing something.
That’s all you need, really. This reading list is the Light, by which you will be able to “see” everything else.
The great bulk of modern literature will generally be about people being mean to each other.
Go! read your lengthy, contemporary novels of men being mean to women, the rich being mean to the poor. Modern literature—and much older examples of modern literature (time does go backwards) will feed you endlessly with tales of injustice and betrayal, and it will move you, and make your heart beat faster, and make you cry.
But the misanthropy which causes human suffering is for this reason:
So many refuse, or were never exposed to—my reading list.