Often, I think of the late Adam Zagajewski urging young poets – and by extension, the rest of us -- to “read everything.” The suggestion is not dictatorial. The Pole even admits he is a “chaotic reader,” as most of us are. I’ve never been systematic about much of anything and inevitably there are embarrassing holes in my education. Call it the Autodidact Syndrome. When it comes to books, we never know in advance what will come in handy, which volume will help solve a problem we didn’t know we were asking. Here is Zagajewski the literary cheerleader:  “Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry, sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t yet understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.”   Zagajewski’s enthusiasm is almost embarrassing but the juggernaut of aliteracy and the threat it poses to Western Civilization may already be irreversible. My friend Cynthia Haven published an interview with Zagajewski not long after his death in 2021 in which she reminds him of his “read everything” essay. He replies:      “What can I say? I’m in favor of reading and taking into consideration past writers. But you know, I don’t know ancient Greek, my Latin almost doesn’t exist; I’m not one of those lofty professors who know everything and terrorize others with their perfect erudition. What’s important is to think, to read, to meditate, to react, to be imaginative. Sometimes a reduced reading list, if given strong attention, can be better than a classical education when pursued somewhat mechanically. Of course I want the past writers to persist but first of all I want thinking and being moved by intelligent texts to persist.”   Good advice. Don’t be intimidated by the vastness of the reading list. Choose a volume someone once mentioned he enjoyed or that had a strong emotional or intellectual impact on him. Say, the Life of Johnson, Richard Wilbur’s poems, Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, a novel by P.G. Wodehouse or Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Read it and see where it carries you.

Fortune cookies no longer contain fortunes. Tucked inside the sugary shells are slips of paper printed with platitudes. I carry one such slip in my wallet, salvaged from a forgotten meal at least a decade ago: “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” Neither fortune nor platitude, the advice packs more writerly wisdom than The Elements of Style. The shift from fortune to platitude, however, is disappointing and hints at a certain weak-minded, authoritarian streak among fortune-cookie writers and perhaps in the larger culture as well. Some of us, encountering a cliché, ignore it and flee the room.   Another reaction to platitudes is possible: amusement. It’s always funny when someone emits a cliché in the solemn tones used by Lincoln at Gettysburg. As in, “It is what it is,” a contemporary bit of nonsense. Tom Disch agrees in his poem “Dueling Platitudes”:   “Because it is an imperative voiced in the accents of ancestors             otherwise unremembered,   “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may carries a proverbial force             that makes us pay attention.   “Only the dead may address us as ‘ye.’ But where are these rosebuds? Are they cheap as the hay   “We’re to make while the sun shines?             What penalties and fines  can we expect to pay   “If we’re caught in the act of gathering someone else’s rosebuds?  Ancestral voices disagree   “On these issues, and we must choose our authorities carefully; one false step and there is   “A piper to pay, and who knows how much a piper requires when the fat’s in the fire?   “Eat, drink, and be merry: okay, but will you still love me  when I'm old and gray?   “Which brings us to the Middle Way,             another idea old as those hills   “Where rosebuds are rare as a day in June and pipers play another tune   “Love’s old sweet song, maybe,             or other golden oldies from the age of the Golden Mean.   “Songs are seldom what they seem; the sirens who charm us may suddenly scream   “Rape!, and words can harm us as brutally as sticks and stones. It depends on our tone.   “A queen who tells us to eat cake may be making a big mistake,   But the same advice from our corner baker is par for the course, not grounds for divorce.   “All adages are relative; each will have its season. So dare to eat your peach, My friend, but keep it within reason.”   I count at least at least fifteen clichés/platitudes in Disch’s sixteen stanzas, including those coined by Robert Herrick, James Russell Lowell and T.S. Eliot, which, of course, are low-hanging fruit.   [Disch’s poem was published in the Autumn 1986 issue of Grand Street and collected in About the Size of It (Anvil Press, 2007).]

We shouldn’t be surprised that bookish tastes change across time. They mature, just as some of us do. The books we choose to read and reread follow a path parallel to our experience and maturity. This isn’t to imply “progress.” It’s not as though all of us shed bad taste and move irrevocably toward good taste. Our needs change as we get older. What once amused and nourished us no longer does. Conversely, a few books remain prized across a lifetime.  A reader tells me he’s offended that I no longer read Hart Crane. He suggests I might be doing this because Crane was gay. That’s a cheap and ridiculous accusation. Why do I continue reading Cavafy, Proust and Auden? Crane is not a “bad” poet. He is no longer a poet for me. Plenty of others read him for admirable and silly reasons. He is their writer and no longer mine. No one can dictate what gives us pleasure and sustenance.   I think of the writers who didn’t much interest me when I was thirty, though I thought of myself as a pretty sophisticated reader – among them, Louis MacNeice, Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Elizabeth Bowen, Max Beerbohm, Henry Green. All are now in regular rotation. Who did I read passionately when young but can no longer abide? Kafka, James T. Farrell, Hemingway, Pound, Dreiser. Just listing these writers feels like an oblique form of autobiography, a mingling of nostalgia and regret. William Hazlitt writes in “On Reading Old Books”:   “A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without this weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years.”

Unlike his friends Coleridge, Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Hunt, who often made fools of themselves as a result, Charles Lamb had little interest in the momentous events of his day. About “Boney” – Napoleon Bonaparte – he wished only to know the dictator’s height, unlike Hazlitt, who published a four-volume biography of the diminutive Corsican. In a letter to his friend Thomas Manning on March 1, 1800, Lamb writes: “Public affairs – except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private – I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in.” This admirable sentiment would profit many of our contemporaries. It’s easily mistaken for self-centeredness, but nature’s busybodies, those preoccupied with politics and power, are the truly selfish.  For Lamb, to be civic-minded was to care for one’s family, friends and strangers – to be a generous host. Though he was a lifelong bachelor, his instinct for family was fierce and he dedicated his life to caring for his matricidal sister, “Mad” Mary Lamb. He practiced charity and compassion as non-proselytizing virtues. In one of the Elia essays, “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,” he writes:   “Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the ‘seven small children,’ in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not.”   His compassion is instinctive, not ideological. Nor was it rooted in a sense of religious obligation, which in Lamb’s case was rudimentary. In a March 9, 1822, letter to his childhood friend Coleridge, Lamb displays a sophisticated appreciation of moral complexity when he writes:   “One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child – when my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not mendicant, but thereabouts – a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me – the sum it was to her – the pleasure she had a right to expect that I – not the old impostor – should take in eating her cake – the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, I wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like – and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.”   Lamb recognizes that his younger self was “virtue-signaling,” performing a kindly act because it would make him look good. He was being what Joseph Epstein has called a “virtucrat.” He was among the wisest of foolish men.