Occasionally one encounters two writers, each unknown to the other, expressing sentiments similar but varied enough to define their differences. There’s no question of influence or plagiarism. The first is C.H. Sisson, the English poet/critic/translator, explaining his tastes in reading at the start of his eighth decade. The interview appears in PN Review 39, as part of a 1984 Festschrift celebrating Sisson’s seventieth birthday:  “I like books of observation, memoirs, letters, anything that tells how people actually lived. Truth is certainly better than fiction, if you can get a bit of it.”   The other is William Maxwell, the American novelist, in his note introducing The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews (1989), who says he didn’t review fiction for The New Yorker, where he served as fiction editor for forty years. That would have been a "busman's holiday":   “[D]iaries, memoirs, published correspondence, biography and autobiography . . . do not spring from prestidigitation or require a long apprenticeship. They tell what happened—what people said and did and wore and ate and hoped for and were afraid of, and in detail after often unimaginable detail they refresh our idea of existence and hold oblivion at arm’s length.”   In his introduction to the 1997 edition of The Outermost Dream, Maxwell writes: “[S]tyle is not in itself enough. One wants blowing through it at all times the breath, the pure astonishment of life.” He often used the expression “breath of life” to describe the quality he most often looked for in books. Perhaps the common motivator here is age. I recognize this in myself – a hunger for the raw matter of life one finds in diaries, letters and other literary forms that are not forms. It’s their casualness, spontaneity, inadvertence and off-the-cuff observation that sometimes makes more formal, polished work so intriguing. I remember one of my philosophy professors saying if he could choose between a previously unknown dialogue of Plato’s and a transcript of conversation on an Athens street in the fourth century B.C., he would choose the latter.   I’ve been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters, part of my long-delayed discovery of that writer. Here he is on July 24, 1879, writing to Edmund Gosse:   “But who wrote the review of my book? whoever he was, he cannot write; he is humane, but a duffer; I could weep when I think of him; for surely to be virtuous and incompetent is a hard lot. I should prefer to be a bold pirate, the gay sailor-boy of immorality, and a publisher at once.”

“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).]