Top 100 – Part VIII

This is the 800th post on exlibrismagnis! Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from reporting on current reading and shared some of my favorite moments from books: sections and ideas and lines that I think about often. I just went through all the previous entries in this subseries and did two things. First, I added the label “Top 100” to each of them; now you can find all the others easily in the “Labels” section at the right side of the page. (If you’re reading on a phone, you have to click “View web version” at the bottom of the page to see the “Labels” section, as well as other “gadgets.”) Second, I realized that, sure enough, I do think about all these favorite passages often.

Two or three years ago, I selected the items for today’s post. Curiously, I’ve read a couple of these books within the last twelve months and even wrote on this blog about these very moments, proving, I suppose, that I do really think about these things often.

I’ll begin with a Russian theme.

• Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: Dmitri, railing against God, asks his brother whether he (he, Alyosha, not God) could have created a world in which one little girl would be tortured for the good of the whole. For me and others, it’s the most piercing, devastating presentation of the “problem of evil”: if God is all-powerful and all-benevolent . . . . And yet human beings do torture little girls, so the question creates its dilemma partly by pushing this responsibility off on God.

• Edward Rutherfurd, Russka: One afternoon a visitor from the west visits a humble restaurant in Russia, almost nothing more than a domestic kitchen opened to the public. He asks for bread, and the woman of the house offers him the last stale heel of yesterday’s loaf. After asking if she has any fresh bread, the woman says that she doesn’t start the new loaf until the last loaf has been completely eaten. How often do you make a loaf? Every day, she says. So every day you serve a couple of slices of fresh bread in the evening and then stale bread during most of the day the next day? Yes. Why don’t you, one morning, throw out the old loaf and make a new loaf each morning? That would waste the bread. But only once, and then you could serve fresh bread all day every day from now on! Well, she finally replies, suffering is a part of life. I think of that woman every time I drink the bitter cup of coffee left in the pot overnight instead of just throwing it out, every time I hang on to a cheap, plastic mechanical pencil after the eraser end has broken. Oh, the examples are embarrassingly numerous.

• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: Levin struggles with belief in God until he sees his baby’s face for the first time, and his doubts “blow away like dust.”

• Cervantes, Don Quixote: I mentioned this point just last month without realizing it was in my notes to talk about in no. 800. Cervantes treats two prostitutes as if they were great ladies worthy of respect. At one level, we’re supposed to believe that he’s crazy and can’t see how they’re dressed. But what does dress have to do with the dignity of the human person? I think Quixote is the sanest man in the book.

• Ariosto, Orlando Furioso: Orlando has lost his mind (over a girl not worth losing one’s mind over), so Astolfo goes to look for it. Does that sound like a joke straight out of The Phantom Tollbooth? Maybe. But it turns out that in the world of Orlando Furioso, a lost mind does indeed go somewhere. In fact, everything that is lost goes to the same place, and that place is the moon. Naturally, Astolfo searches for the legendary Prester John (who is strangely easier to find than Orlando’s lost wits), and together they ride a hippogriff to the moon to look through the landscape of discarded treasures. To me that sequence stands right at the pinnacle of fantastic creations along with the Yellow Brick Road, a snowy wood in a wardrobe, a pilotless boat covered in white samite waiting to take Galahad to the Holy Grail, and Sauron’s Eye, and perhaps surpasses them.

• Dickens, The Pickwick Papers: Just a few months ago, I mentioned Toby Weller’s contribution to the trial scene in Pickwick and said, “Trust me: it’s hilarious.” Well, in jotting down the outline of this list a few years ago, I thought then that I could actually convey the humor so that you didn’t have to trust me. Now that we’ve come to it, though, I don’t think I can, but I’ll try. The Wellers have a Cockney habit of switching around V’s and W’s when they speak. “ ’e’s wery aggrawating,” one of them might say of an annoying personage. In the dock (i.e. on the stand), Sam Weller gives out his name as “Veller.” The judge asks him if he spells it with a V or a W. “Mark it down a wee, milord!” shouts his father, Toby, from the gallery. “Mark it down a wee!” Out of context, the line probably doesn’t make you crack a smile. You might not even get the joke, since it depends on my poor retelling. But I have laughed out loud many times at Toby’s eccentric understanding of the alphabet and think of that line every time a spelling issue with a V comes up.

• Dickens, Dombey and Son: Okay, I know I’ve already used up all the credit I have for retelling great jokes without the necessary context of hundreds of pages of setup. But here I go overborrowing: Captain Cuttle has a habit of quoting hodgepodges of Scripture and common aphorisms. When he realizes that the result doesn’t sound right and that he has no way of looking up the correct version easily, he turns to any handy young person in the vicinity and says, with all the airs of a great, wise professor of sacred literature, “Search the Good Book, and when found, make note of.” This is my favorite of all the Dickens books that most people haven’t heard of, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. When you read it, that joke will make you laugh. For right now, though, know that I laugh at it, and imagine how often I think of it with glee when a garbled Bible verse comes to mind and I make a resolution to look it up later.

I don’t have a plan yet for the books to talk about in my 900th post. But at the rate I’m going, I’ll have several years to work it out.

Half of The Brothers Karamazov

It’s hard to know what to write about this most profound of novels. What could I possibly say that could add anything to what Dostoevsky has said? If you don’t read the book, anything I try to tell you wouldn’t matter. If you do read it, you don’t need me to point out to you that Ivan’s question about children’s suffering is devastating or that Alyosha’s summary life of his mentor in the monastery is inspirational. You’d notice without any help from me! So I’ll just say a couple of brief things about my reading experience.

I had difficulty deciding on a translation, but I decided to go with Constance Garnett, partly because her translation is cheap on Kindle, but also because I had read that she keeps Russian turns of phrase more than others. The book is strange enough to read with its Russian customs and Russian outlook; adding Russian conversational cadences only makes it weirder. But part of the reason for reading the book is to appreciate the perspective of the author in his time and place, so I prefer this experience to one in which the dialog has been translated so all the nineteenth-century Russians sound like twenty-first-century Americans. I know one way or another I’m reading Russian characters speaking English. But in my head, I want them to speak English with a Russian accent.

Mortimer Adler divided up The Brothers Karamazov over two years in the original reading plan included with the Britannica Great Works set. So that’s the way I read it the first time. I had never done such a thing before, but I was amazed at how well I picked up the characters when taking up the book again after several months. I started thinking about Star Wars stories appearing in installments, about Dickens books originally coming out in serial form over the course of twenty months, and about Cervantes publishing the conclusion to Don Quixote only after a hiatus of ten-years, and it occurred to me that splitting up the reading of a book over years isn’t as odd as it seems at first. Maybe I’m just jealous of my wife, who can sit down and read a whole book in a day. Anyway, I’ve split Karamazov up again. I just read half of it this month and then put it aside for the next book on this year’s list. I’ll finish it sometime early-ish next year.

Follow-up on Dickens’s Christian Message

Thinking over what I wrote last month about Dickens’s Christian message, I realize that I followed my train of thought down two avenues only: Dickens’s use of allegory and his explicit portrayal of the moral characters as Christians. Today I want to trace two other paths.

Sometimes Dickens just blatantly offers a Christian message in his narration. The example I think of first has to do with Jo, the little crossing sweeper from Bleak House. Jo is a homeless orphan. He has never known a day of education or a day of love (that he remembers). Dickens describes his illiteracy thus:

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?

One day, Jo is called upon to testify at an inquest, but the officers of the court find that he doesn’t know what it means to swear to the truth or what truth is or what the Bible says about truth. They are completely stymied by the question of what to do with such an uncooperative boy! But it never occurs to anyone in the court (representing the Christian state of the United Kingdom, remember) that what they should do is to give Jo a home and teach him to read.

Later Jo comes across a charlatan preacher named Chadband, who, as a minister in the Church, has even less reason than the bailiff at the court to wonder what to do with a boy wholly ignorant of the Bible. But Chadband leaves Jo just as unenlightened as he found him. After their initial conversation, Dickens’s narration addresses this apostrophe (I learned this use of the word from Dickens himself!) directly to the neglected child:

It may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet!

There’s nothing hidden about this message. If you are a Christian individual, organization, institution, or country, take care of children and teach them to read, because our religion depends on revelation found in a Book. Don’t be a Chadband! (By the way, “Chadband” is one of Dickens’s most successfully expressive names. As soon as the narration presents you with “Rev. Chadband,” you know you’re meeting pomposity and hypocrisy. And the beauty of it is, I don’t know exactly how the name conveys the idea so well. But how can any good come out of “Chadband”?)

I alluded to the other kind of Christian message I want to mention in one confusing sentence near the end of the earlier post. But it deserves more space. This message is all-pervasive in Dickens’s books and stories. It is simply this. In Dickens, as in no other author whatsoever, every character – businessmen and lawyers, landowners and urchins, moneylenders and spendthrifts, belles and streetwalkers, butlers and innkeepers, parents and children, teachers and students, eccentric aunts and boring office mates, cart drivers and coal diggers, bashful grooms and jilted brides, clerics and showmen, aristocrats and scullery maids, conservatives and revolutionaries, doctors and nurses, detectives and engineers, criminals and judges, sailors and tailors and jailers, French and English, American and Indian – all are presented as humans and individuals, not merely plot points.

Most authors in a situation where a runaway boy needs money would simply report that he sold his jacket for a few shillings at a resale shop, perhaps mentioning a shopkeeper, maybe even giving him a generic line or two: “I can give you ’alf a crown at most.” Dickens, however, gives the man who buys David Copperfield’s jacket a weird rattle in his throat and makes him so strange and so memorable, I believe Tolkien found inspiration here for Gollum. The clear message is that the children of God in all their infinite variety of forms are worthy of our attention. The hypocrites and self-servers Dickens dignifies by scolding them. (Our contemporary society doesn’t understand that thought, but what good parent doesn’t know that loving the child sometimes means telling her she is very wrong?) Those characters with a heart, on the other hand, find their author’s mercy for all their doubts and missteps and hilarious foibles, and receive his honor and admiration for their best moments.

Were you to ask me for examples of people who treated prostitutes as dignified beings fashioned in the image of God, only three people would immediately come to mind: Jesus and, in their writing, Cervantes and Dickens. If we could each learn to treat every real person we meet on the road of life as Dickens treats the creations of his prolific imagination, we would have nothing to be ashamed of when we meet our own even more prolific Creator.

Great Conversations, part 1

My poor literature students! Some high-school world-lit classes read a couple of novels, a couple of short stories, and a play by Shakespeare, and call it a year. In my class at a local homeschool co-op, we’re dipping our noses into The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of Two Cities, stories by Tolstoy, Hesse, and Doyle, plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen, poetry by Donne, Gray, Wordsworth, and Keats, and much more. So, yeah: “poor” students now, but they’ll be loaded with riches when I’m through with them!

This Tuesday we started Don Quixote, and I told the students truthfully that that very morning during my walk I had read in C. S. Lewis's Miracles that certain theologians had been “quixotic.” (Lewis meant that these particular thinkers pursued a noble end but had gone too far; the details don’t concern my topic today.)  Cross-references like this happen all the time in my reading. Mortimer Adler says that the Great Books take the form of a Great Conversation because they constantly refer to the same Great Ideas and treat them in counterpoint. Concerning the same fact, Lewis says, “Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else.”

This week I've experienced several conversations in print. One example involves the history of the understanding of the universe. In a chapter called “Science in the Age of Copernicus,” Will Durant says the Copernican Revolution posed the greatest challenge to religion in all of history. “When men stopped to ponder the implications of the new system they must have wondered at the assumption that the Creator of this immense and orderly cosmos had sent His Son to die on this middling planet. All the lovely poetry of Christianity seemed to ‘go up in smoke’ (as Goethe was to put it) at the touch of the Polish clergyman.”

But, again in Lewis, I read a response to this idea just a couple of days later. He may have been (at the end of his career) a Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, but his Discarded Image finds its way onto required-reading lists in History of Science classes. So I believe him when he tells me who believed what when about the shape of the heavens. Lewis says that the ancients knew the Earth was tiny. Some even knew that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, that Ptolemy placed it there. So, contrary to Durant’s observation, the science of the modern era didn’t discover the astronomical unimportance of the Earth; Christians in the Middle Ages believed both in God and the tininess of Earth. Says Lewis, “The real question is why the spatial insignificance of Earth, after being asserted by Christian philosophers, sung by Christian poets, and commented on by Christian moralists for some fifteen centuries, without the slightest suspicion that it conflicted with their theology, should suddenly in quite modern times have been set up as a stock argument against Christianity and enjoyed, in that capacity, a brilliant career.”

A friend has asked me to read and discuss with him a book called Chance or Dance by Union University professors Jimmy Davis and Harry Poe. Reading in that book this week, I came across yet a third reference to the argument: a further contribution to the conversation about the theological views of the unfathomable size of space. Here the authors address statements by Carl Sagan and others to the effect that if humanity had some central significance in God’s eye, we’d have to admit that He wasted a lot of space and stellar material. Lewis also addresses this outlook (it sometimes seems difficult to find something he didn’t think about) when he points out that Nature has a predilection for overkill. Think of the extravagance in the number of spermatozoa that venture forth in search of an ovum when it only takes one to do the job. I doubt that that answer would give many nonbelievers a moment’s hesitation, but Lewis offers another a much more significant response to the thought that a minuscule race in a cosmological backwater doesn’t merit God’s attention, and I’m left wondering why Christians don’t generally have this central understanding at the ready: we never claimed to merit the attention we receive from Him. In fact, the better we understand how contemptible our position is, the more we love Him.

Update, Nov. 11: I just read in Augustine a couple of days ago an indication that he understood quite well, way back in the fifth century, the vastness of the heavens in comparison with the tiny earth. The conversation continues.

Book Awards – 2015

As we prepare once more to greet the two-faced Janus, we mortals also tend to look both backward and forward. Among the good things of this past year, I’m most thankful for my daughter’s move to Tennessee, my successful cancer surgery, and our driving trip to St. John’s Newfoundland. (Driving, mind you!) Coming up next year are a trip to Ireland (we decided not to drive there, though) and full retirement in December 2016. But of course having a Ten-Year Reading Plan prompt me to think back over the last twelve months of books and to anticipate the next twelve. As I’ve done for several years now, I offer my retrospective in the form of awards.

Hall of Fame: Charles Dickens
I used to think that if I didn’t place Dickens in his own honorific category, no one else could ever win the Best Reread. But I found this year that I’m perfectly happy announcing a four-way tie in that category.

Best New Read, Religion: Pascal, The Provincial Letters
Although his Pensées is one of my very favorite books, I had to put down Pascal’s Provincial Letters unfinished when its turn came up in the original ten-year plan that came with my Britannica Great Books set. And I find it very difficult to give up on a book; I’ve probably done it only three or four times in my whole life. But this year as I enjoyed the rest of these public letters, I couldn’t figure out how I lost interest the first time. Maybe it helped that my reading schedule has kept the Reformation on one of the closest back burners for several months. As Pascal exposes “Christian” theological theories that bribery is not sinful, that receiving forgiveness doesn’t require contrition, and that loving God is not necessary for salvation, you’d think he was writing satire except that he offered quotation after quotation from actually published books.

Best New Read, History: Foner, The Fiery Trial
Eric Foner understands that our country’s oldest and most persistent problem can’t be effectively treated in the sound bytes of postmodern politics. Through extensive quotations and careful analysis of historical context, the author does an amazing job setting out and balancing the delicate nuances of Lincoln’s feelings, thoughts, judgments, words, and actions concerning race relations and slavery. While the Great Emancipator didn’t have a twenty-first-century liberal view of race in America, it is a relief to find him consistently and emphatically denouncing American slavery as an unmitigated evil over all the decades of his public life. The high point of the book came when Foner distinguished feeling and belief and then made it clear that Lincoln valued the latter over the former, a point that I don’t normally encounter in any writing after, say, 1800.

Best Payoff for the Wait: Malory
In contrast to my experience with The Provincial Letters, when I put down Morte d’Arthur unfinished years ago, I knew I’d get back to it, and I knew I’d love it. I didn’t know it would take thirty years to get back to it, and I didn’t know I would love the last part as much as I do. The book starts out being really good, and then when Galahad and the story of the Grail shows up, it gets great. When the surprises in that story play out, though, it becomes something even greater than great. I didn’t see Malory’s tale of the knights of the Round Table on any Great Books list when I drew up my schedule ten years ago; I just planned it because I like King Arthur. Now I’m wondering how no one else recognizes this deeply moving classic.

Biggest Disappointment: Bede
I thought that by reading Bede, I’d read an inspiring history of the early Church in England. But in books II and III, Bede reveals an axe that I don’t care to see ground: the monk known as the Venerable wants to make it clear that the Celts, because they calculate the date of Easter differently from the English, are rude and barbaric. Hey, Bede, in the words of Paul, “One man esteems one day as better than another, while another man esteems all days alike. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?”

Most Changed Author: Hume
I learned in college about Hume’s far-reaching skepticism. I’ve read about his skepticism. I’ve read Hume himself and thought he was a skeptic, although it seemed clear to me that he was uncomfortable with his skepticism. But after reading Hume this year, I came away convinced that he fully believed that we should trust our senses, believe in God, and pursue science. All he was skeptical of, it seems to me now, is reason as the basis for these assurances.

Most Challenging Nonfiction: Lewis, “Christianity and Culture”
When C. S. Lewis starts wondering what good it does anyone for him to teach culture, the dimmer mind in this lesser professor has to sit up and take notice.

Best Return Visit: (tie) Lord of the Rings, Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, Orthodoxy
Why did I plan four of my very favorite books for the same year? Maybe, when I drew up my ten-year plan a decade ago, I put them all in year 9 thinking of each them (at four different times spread over several weeks, no doubt) that I should read new things and difficult things before I indulge myself – and then couldn’t bear to put any of them off all the way to year 10. If books were food and chocolate were completely nourishing, these four books would be chocolate to me.

Best Offroading: A History of the World in 6 Glasses
I learned something new and fascinating in almost every paragraph. I didn’t know that beer had so much to do with the beginnings of writing. I didn’t know that Enlightenment philosophers considered coffee vital to their discussions and thinking. I didn’t know that Coca-Cola is so closely associated with the U.S. that Pepsi often finds ready foreign markets in countries that don’t like us.

Tomorrow I begin the last year of my ten-year reading plan. It’s the weirdest, most extensive self-educating plan I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve reached the 90% mark right on schedule. Oh, wait. I remember now reading that Thomas Edison vowed as a boy to read every book in his library. Oh! And there’s the classic Twilight Zone episode where the avid reader finds himself the only survivor of the holocaust. I watched that episode recently, and I couldn’t believe how much I resembled Burgess Meredith’s character. Not only does he love Dickens; he lays out stacks of books on the steps of the library and arranges them according to the year he plans to read them. If I want to finish my plan next December, I guess I’d better not break my glasses!

Is Don Quixote Mad?

The thing about a Ten-Year Reading Plan is that the fellow doing the planning and reading looks forward to some books for years. And I waited with eager anticipation to reread Don Quixote for eight-and-a-half years. Then, as I began a year ago to put the calendar together for this twelvemonth of reading, I also started to look forward to blogging about the books on the schedule for 2015. And of all the blogging of the year, I looked forward most to writing this post.

Is Don Quixote mad? I’m not totally sure, but I’m pretty confident he isn’t. Yes, he says he’s a knight errant several hundred years after such characters supposedly existed. Yes, he attacks windmills while claiming that they are giants. Yes, he chooses a frumpy, unibrowed farm girl named Aldonza, rechristens her Dulcinea del Toboso, and then insists that everyone he meets declare her the most beautiful woman alive. But none of these facts makes me think that Don Quixote is insane. (1) He admits that he knows perfectly well who he is, that the books about knights depict them not as they actually were but as heroes ought to be, and that he simply wants to pattern his own life after the most virtuous models he can find, all of this making him idealistic, but not mad. (2) He doesn’t actually see giants when he attacks the windmills but instead claims that a sorcerer has changed the appearance of giants to that of windmills, making him gullible, but not mad. (3) He admits that no woman in a ballad is as lovely as the poet makes her out to be and that Dulcinea simply deserves to be called beautiful, making him extremely gallant and romantic, but not mad. No the detail that most tempts me to think him insane is his explicit deathbed confession that his days of knight-errantry were days of madness. But couldn’t this just be a figure of speech?

Sancho on the other hand truly believes (after a while) everything Don Quixote says. Who’s more mad: the madman or the fool who follows him?

Hmm. Was that brief exposition worth all the wait? Maybe not. But the great Spanish treasure, the book worth more than all the gold in all the conquistadors’ ships, was certainly worth the wait of a few paltry years.

Who Is Cervantes Making Fun Of?

Or for those who don’t know the wonderful witticism that may or may not have originated with Winston Churchill: “Of Whom Is Cervantes Making Fun?” Actually, I think he may be making fun of pedants, maybe even pedants who cite overly fastidious grammatical rules. (And as a pedant who cites only moderately fastidious grammatical rules, I have the right to laugh with Cervantes.) But more on the satire in a moment.

First I have to say a word on the difference between book I and book II. While I’ve been rereading Don Quixote, I’ve noticed that I remember a lot from book I and almost none from the second half. I was puzzled about the stark difference for a while, but I think I now know why it is. Despite Cervantes’s efforts to improve his writing for the conclusion of the novel (he says right in the narration that he’s trying to satisfy the critics who found fault with book I), I just don’t find book II nearly as entertaining. The efforts of Don Quixote’s family and neighbors to keep him from going out again are fun. But soon after he sets forth on his final quest for new adventures, he falls in with a Duke and Duchess who take up at least 25% of the whole work playing tricks on poor Don Quixote. I can laugh at the Knight of the Sad Countenance when he mistakes windmills for enchanted giants, but I can’t laugh with the supposed nobles who tell Don Quixote that a particular bearded man is an enchanted woman just to see what he’ll do. If I can’t laugh with the Duke and Duchess, I’m not laughing at Don Quixote. And if I’m not laughing at Don Quixote, I’m not having as much fun. I must have thought the same thing the last time I read the great Spanish treasure, and that would explain my remembering so much more of the first part.

Still, if Quixote’s delusions aren’t funny in the second part, at least he has interesting things to say. And Sancho is still funny – maybe even funnier than he is in book I. And I’m still more than happy about including every word of this most wonderful classic on my ten-year reading plan. So I’ve been thinking: who is Cervantes making fun of in this book? On the surface level, he’s making fun of Don Quixote (at least when he’s not making sport of him). And of course he succeeds famously: history’s last knight errant is such a hilariously great character that everyone, even people who haven’t read the book, knows about Don Quixote and his mad attempt to tilt at windmills (an episode found in book I, naturally).

But the satire runs deeper. Don Quixote himself says that he wants to style his life after the knights he reads about in books. So apparently Cervantes is poking some fun at Spanish heroic romances written at and just before his time. If Cervantes primarily aimed his barbs at these knightly tales, the wonder is that Don Quixote is still funny for us today, since virtually no one now knows the originals.

I think, though, that Cervantes goes after even larger game. Many times in the book, people marvel that someone who talks so intelligently and even wisely could behave in such a barmy way. This oft-mentioned view of Don Quixote has me thinking that he represents scholars, authors, and (perhaps especially) critics: people who live off of the words they spout out but don’t necessarily live as wisely as they speak. Come to think of it, though, isn’t that all of us? We all talk a good game, and we all fall short of the glory of God. So ultimately perhaps Cervantes is making fun of the whole human race. And maybe that’s why we all love Don Quixote so much and are so ready to forgive him.

Another Foil for Don Quixote

Last time, I wrote about a comparison between Don Quixote and some insipid shepherds that Cervantes included in a subplot. Don Quixote certainly comes out on top in this comparison. But if the Knight of the Sad Countenance hangs on one side of a balance scale, shepherds who die of broken hearts aren’t the only characters we’re invited to place in the other pan. The whole book, of course, compares Don Quixote with the heroes of chivalric romances popular at the time. But right at the beginning of the book, I noticed a connection between one other personage and La Mancha’s most famous resident: Cervantes himself.

The preface to Don Quixote is all about writing a preface. Cervantes (at least the Cervantes that the author named Cervantes presents to the world) says that he despaired of ever writing a suitable introduction that could match the style of the many beautifully penned prefaces he’s read in other books. But then he claims that a friend came to him one day with a solution: steal parts from each of the prefaces he likes, and then just make the rest of it up. Now isn’t the Cervantes of the preface just like Don Quixote in trying to live up to the flowery books he's read? Come to think of it, isn’t his friend just like Sancho with his slightly immoral realism? The parallel is so striking, I wonder if this friend inspired more than just the preface.

Don Quixote’s Foil

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is famous for one book, and that book is one of the greatest in the history of literature. But Cervantes wasn’t always so successful. Earlier in his life, he wrote and published just half of an earlier book, La Galatea, a pastoral book about shepherds and shepherdesses who fall in love and then die of broken hearts. The book didn’t sit well with someone – the public, the publisher, or the author – because Cervantes never completed it. The author himself makes fun of it in a book-burning scene in Don Quixote, although we can’t tell if the joke came from proper literary judgment or from some kind of modesty. I haven’t read it; I have no wish to. So I can’t begin to say if it’s a bad book. But someone thought Cervantes’s pastoral writing bad, or else we would have a completed novel.

So why did Cervantes include pastoral side stories in Don Quixote? The translator of the version I’ve been enjoying recently condemns these passages as boring and advises readers to skip them so they don’t get bogged down and give up on the extremely long novel (423,813 words: somewhere between David Copperfield and War and Peace.) It’s hard for me to skip parts, though, and the digressions at least interesting as historical artifacts. So I’m reading them (quickly). But still I kept wondering: why did Cervantes include them?

I have a couple of theories. First, perhaps he included the pastoral stories because that's what you had to do at the time to sell books. More likely to my mind, though, is the theory that Cervantes knew the flaws of this genre and included the stories as a foil to the much superior story of Don Quixote. The shepherds and shepherdesses die because of unrequited love, a thing no one to my knowledge has ever done. Meanwhile, Don Quixote performs crazy antics in imitation of the dejected Orlando of Orlando Furioso, publicly making a fool of himself and causing himself pain in order to show his beloved Dulcinea what torture “she” is putting him through, a thing thousands of teenagers do every day.

Looking Forward to 2015

Some time in the late ‘90s, I found out about a new sin. This sin didn’t exist before, but now it did. And I was committing it. “Don’t you check your email?” my friend from the Economics Department asked me. It was the first thing he said to me that day. Not “hi.” Not “Hey, what a pleasant surprise. I don’t get to see you every day.” Not even “I tried writing you, but since you’re right here, I’ll just go ahead and say face-to-face what I had to say.” Nope. It’s easier to accuse first and forget to ask forgiveness later.

“I sent you an email, and you didn’t answer it.” “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t have email.” “Yes, you do.” “No, I don’t.” “Yeah, you do. You work for OU, right?” “You know I work for OU. So do you.” “Everybody at OU has email. So you do, too.” “No, I really don’t have email.” “You do, and you just don’t know it.”

It wasn’t that long ago. So it hardly seems possible, but I didn’t know what the internet was. The web was especially confusing. Are they the same thing? Different? Is one the subset of the other? I knew that people surfed the net (that’s what the television commercials said), but I wondered what people did to the web. (Turns out we surf that, too, when we even bother with verbs anymore.)

I could never have predicted then that just fifteen years later, the internet would permeate my reading plan. I order all my books online now. I do half my reading on an electronic device I hold in one hand. Half of those books I download for free right from the web. I search guides and quotations using Google. And I blog about my experience. I couldn’t even have understood it if someone from 2014 could have told my 1998 self what my future reading program would consist of.

Yesterday I posted my calendar for 2015. (You can see it by clicking the tab marked – you guessed it – “2015 calendar” in the row just below the title bar above.) Year 9 of my Ten-Year Reading Plan. Amazing. Every year at this time I get the calendar for the new year drawn up, I look at it, and I bask in the thought of how much I’m going to enjoy it. But I think I’m even more excited this year than I have been since year 1. For one thing, I’m looking forward to pursuing my demanding self-imposed commitment of time over the course of a year that won’t include searching for jobs, interviewing, selling a house, packing, buying a house, moving, and starting a new job.

But the particular details of next year’s schedule have me especially eager to begin. First, of course, there’s the continuation of so many favorites that I pursue bit-by-bit each year: Durant’s Story of Civilization, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, James’s Principles of Psychology, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Then there’s King Arthur. Not only do I get to finish Malory after thirty years of looking at it sitting on my shelf, but I finally get to read Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. My rereading includes Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, Great Expectations, and The Lord of the Rings, all truly Great Books and all near the top of the list of my very favorite novels. Each one paints a rich picture of this complex world with all of its sweet pain, presenting its characters with all the missteps, bumbling, and downright evil of the human heart and yet acting in the light of a magnificent, splendid joy just as real as the set sun whose refracted rays dazzle the sky with their royal colors – and just as out of reach. The Rig Veda forever changed the way I read the Psalms; I wonder how the Bhagavad Gita will affect me. I’m even excited about reading Calvin’s Institutes, if only because this year will see me to the end of a book that has exasperated me so. I have only one slog I’m concerned about, but I’ll get through Heidegger, partly by reading Dickens and Ariosto at the same time.

I eventually read that first email. I had to call IT (or whatever IT was called back then) to hook up my office computer. When the technicians arrived and looked at it, they just laughed. So I bought a new one. Then they had to wire my 1908 building for internet; they got to my office by drilling through the 1908 wall – filled with 1908 asbestos – and draping a yellow cord across the room. I hooked up the computer and read and reread my instructions on how to FTP my email files. I waited for only about five minutes for the long-anticipated message to download. Eventually. after a process of some couple of months, I was sinning no more: I was reading the note from my colleague. Oh, yes, my digital reading experience has definitely improved since then. The email he was so anxious about was an invitation to lunch. He wanted to get together and talk.