Self-knowledge is fine but some things are best left unexamined. “Why do you read so many books?” a reader asks. His assumption, never directly articulated, is that reading is compensation for the absence of something far more important. I suppose people have been facing such suspicions at least since Freud’s arrival on the scene. Busybodies flatter themselves by uncovering previously unsuspected motives in others. Think of it as amateur psychology practiced as a self-congratulating hobby. One of my favorites among Clive James’ books is Late Readings, published in 2015, four years before his death from cancer. “Late” is redolent of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” James writes about the books he knows will be among the last he ever reads, including those by Joseph Conrad, Dr. Johnson, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning – all superb choices. A line in his introduction comes to mind: “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” That almost sounds like a pep talk. If something has worked for more than six decades, reliably supplying pleasure and learning, why stop now? James continues: “Piled up, the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge any further, but it brought us this far.”

A Guest Lecture with Margo Loor, co-founder of the Estonian participatory democracy platform Citizen OS.

I owe a significant chunk of my education to the existence of paperback books. By “education” I don’t mean what I pretended to do while in the company of professors, though many of them assigned books published in soft covers. I mean self-assigned literature, beginning as a kid with all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ various pulpy series (Tarzan, Pellucidar, Amtor, John Carter), followed by a brief but intense enthusiasm for science fiction. I recall an oddly fetishistic fondness for books published by Ace Books. I collected the paperback reprints of Mad magazine, and I remember working weekends at Kwik Kar Wash at age twelve and packing a paperback with my lunch. I worked beside an old man, Elijah Waters, who told me he never read books in paperback because they were “low-class.”  Paperbacks had precursors in the nineteenth century but they burgeoned in the 1930s in England with Allen Lane and his Penguin Books. By the nineteen-sixties, they were still inexpensive. The base-price for mass-market editions was thirty-five to fifty cents. Larger or more prestigious books – the Oscar Williams poetry anthologies, for instance, published by Washington Square Press -- might go for $1.25 or even higher, which seemed extravagant. I remember reluctantly shelling out extra money in Avallone’s Pharmacy for a paperback edition of Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (1966). Today, paperbacks are shelved indiscriminately among my hard covers: In Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades (1960), Phyllis McGinley includes “Dirge for an Era,” a poem from the fifties, in a section called “Laments and Praises.” It begins:   “O! do you remember Paper Books When paper books were thinner? It was all so gay In that far-off day When you fetched them home At a quarter a tome . . .”   McGinley writes of a time before I was around, when paperback were cheaper still and most were popular books, mysteries and romances. They contained “never a taint of Culture.” In contrast:   Cluttering bookstore counters,     In stationer’s windows preening, The Paperbacks Now offer us facts On Tillich and Sartre And abstract artre    And Life’s Essential Meaning . . .”   McGinley has an eye for shifts in the culture and the pretensions of the middle class.   “You pack your trunk and you’re at the station But what do you find for a journey’s ration? Books by Aeschylus, books by Chaucer, Books about atom or flying saucer, Books of poetry, deep books, choice books, Pre-Renaissance and neo-Joyce books, In covers chaste and a prose unlurid. Books that explore my id and your id, Never hammock or summer-porch books But Compass, Evergreen, Anchor, Torch Books, Books by a thousand stylish names And everywhere, everywhere, Henry James.”   The rhymes “Chaucer”/“flying saucer” and “unlurid”/”your id” are good. So are, in the next stanza, “thrilling”/“Trilling” and “to read”/”seldom Gide.”

Augustine Sedgewick on the history of paternity and patriarchy The post Family Values appeared first on The American Scholar.