In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and critics the following question: “To what book published in the past ten years do you find yourself going back--or thinking back--most often?” I take the question personally because I turned thirteen that year and was already discovering contemporary literature, especially American fiction. If it’s possible to characterize the general sense of most of the responses, I would call them trendy, topical, pre-approved, fashion-conscious and largely, after sixty years, ephemeral. A similar pattern would be seen today. John Barth is honest and audaciously self-serving, naming his own early novels but graciously citing Pale Fire and Jorge Luis Borges’ stories (two of my own unsolicited votes from that era). Anthony Burgess likewise names Nabokov’s novel.  Too many responses are ridiculous – E.B. White’s essays, for instance, and Joseph Heller’s cartoon-novel, Catch-22. Some are merely boring – two votes for John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Teilhard de Chardin gets two votes. I’m reminded of the late D.G. Myers’ ten-year rule – not reviewing books until at least a decade has passed after publication. Otherwise, we risk errant idiocy.   Not all the responses are silly. Poet William Meredith names Auden’s prose collection The Dyer’s Hand. Walter Allen picks The Less Deceived (1955) by Philip Larkin, a rare choice endorsed by the subsequent six decades. Allen writes:   “[I]t is poetry of a remarkably pure kind, rooted in the actual and the unexceptional, although the unexceptional in this sense is very rare in poetry. I can think of no poet since Hardy in whom there is a more resolute honesty, a stronger determination to be himself, warts and all; and in a number of poems in The Less Deceived--in ‘Church Going’ most clearly perhaps--Larkin seems to me not inferior to Hardy.”

“True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization,” the poet Gary Snyder reflected in his reckoning with the real work of life. “We need them.” We have always needed them because we need each other, because we have always been each other’s teachers. Ever since one human being watched another rub wood and flint into fire, we have taught each other how to use our hands and how to use our minds, how to wield our tools at the world and our theories of living at the predicament of being alive. Social learning — this jungle… read article

With an old friend I was reminiscing about the remarkably stupid things we did when young. Neither of us had much money when we were students – this was in the early seventies – and we didn’t own cars. To travel any significant distance, we thought nothing of hitchhiking. I often rode across the state on the Ohio Turnpike. The distance from Bowling Green to Youngstown was 180 miles. The typical driver was a young male, often a fellow student.  Once a guy picked me up who wore his hair in a crewcut. That was noteworthy in 1972. He was about my age, lanky and wore a white t-shirt tucked into blue jeans. In retrospect, I picture him as Charles Starkweather. Mostly he delivered a monologue about himself. He had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps and bragged about it. Life had been very unfair to him. That was his favorite theme. I was bored but not particularly frightened until he pulled up the right leg of his jeans and removed from his boot a long, thin knife. He pointed out the groove that ran up the length of the blade and told me that was to make it easier for the blood to drain.   I was seated beside him on the front seat. He never pointed the knife at me or overtly threatened me with it, but clearly he was playing out some obscure narrative in his head. He was almost gleeful. After a while when his inner weather eased, he put the knife away and returned to his monologue. He let me off near Cleveland and I resumed hitchhiking.   In Walking Backward (1999), the late Paul Lake has a poem titled “Two Hitchhikers” in which the speaker and a friend pick up the title characters:            “And when they spoke, it was with more than words. I heard a sudden snickering of steel, Then saw the knife blade nipping my friend’s ribs As he clutched the wheel, and sensed near my own chin The warm unsteady hand poised at my throat And just the slightest kiss of silvery blade.”   The driver and his friend are let go safely, after indulging fantasies of mayhem – attempted escape, a fumbling brawl, murder. The hitchhikers just wanted a lift to the liquor store. Lake ends his poem like this:   “That's how a tale should end--in dizzying laughter, Though some won’t be arranged to end that way.”

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“The very catalogue of the authors whom he knew is apt to repel modern readers. We forget that we read countless ephemeral books, magazines, and newspapers, far less worth reading: stuff which bears the same relation to literature as chewing-gum does to food.”  And that was written in 1949, long before the internet and the Age of Perpetual Trivia it ushered in. A friend tells me he is reading for the first time Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition, the ultimate, satisfyingly fat bedside book. I pulled my copy from the shelf and killed an hour reading pages at random. It’s an eminently browsable book, the sort Max Beerbohm called “dippable-into.”   Above, Highet is writing about Montaigne, our forebear and contemporary, whose father gave him a thorough classical education and instructed family members and servants to speak only Latin with the boy. The first book he enjoyed reading was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Highet looks at the essay “Of Books” (1578-80):   “Two general points emerge. The first is that he read for pleasure. He would not be bored. He would not read tedious authors. He would not read difficult authors at all, unless they contained good material. The standard he uses is one of pleasure. However, his pleasure was not merely that of pastime, but that which accompanies a high type of aesthetic and intellectual activity, far above the vulgar escape-reading and narcotic-reading.”   Secondly, Highet notes that Montaigne had little Greek. “That still puts him head and shoulders above the moderns,” Highet writes, “but it explains a certain slackness we [!] often feel in his thinking, a certain lack of clarity in his appreciation of the ideals on antiquity.” Montaigne relied heavily on Plutarch in French translation and Seneca. Highet lists more than fifty classical writers cited by Montaigne, calls it an “enormous mass of learning” and writes:   “He did not want to be a classic in modern dress any more than he wanted to be a polymath. He wanted to be Michel de Montaigne, and he loved the classics because they could help him best in the purpose. So he assimilated them, and used them, and lived them.”   Highest tells us Montaigne used his vast reading in three ways in his Essays: as “sources of general philosophical doctrine,” “treasuries of illustration” and “stores of compact well-reasoned argument” – not unlike the way certain bloggers use the works of ancients and moderns to combine autobiography and the best of literature. Montaigne writes in “Of Books”:     "If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them. If I planted myself in them, I would lose both myself and time; for I have an impulsive mind. What I do not see at the first attack, I see less by persisting. I do nothing without gaiety; continuation and too strong contention dazes, depresses, and wearies my judgment. My sight becomes confused and dispersed. I have to withdraw it and apply it again by starts, just as in order to judge the luster of a scarlet fabric, they tell us to pass our eyes over it several times, catching it in various quickly renewed and repeated glimpses.”   [The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]