Recommendations

It’s hard for me to fit in a new book. Once upon a time, I had so many books to read, I made a ten-year schedule. Then another. And then another. Right now I’m honing my fourth ten-year reading plan. When someone recommends a book, when am I supposed to read it? Often I just don’t.

But what if one of the books I read makes a recommendation? Lewis’s Surprised by Joy has added several things to my list. (In fact, I had to remind myself after rereading it the last time that this spiritual and intellectual autobiography was the inspiration for my whole reading project thirty years ago.) Seven years ago I read a history of Victorian literature that showed me there was a whole lot more to the era than Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot; I devote a large portion of my Fourth Decade plan to Ainsworth, Kingsley, Oliphant, Gaskell, and others of the time.

Boswell and Dr. Johnson, of course, incessantly talk about literature, much of which I want to add somewhere in the plan. A couple of times in Boswell’s classic, he recommends Edward Young’s Night Thoughts – recommends it highly. He calls it “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced” and says that its lessons are “solemnly and poetically displayed in such imagery and language, as cannot fail to exalt, animate, and soothe the truly pious.” I noted his effusive praise during my second ten years of planned reading and put the book on my third yen-year plan. And this month, its time finally came round!

I had a lot of trouble understanding the opaque grammar of this lengthy poem at first. After many pages I came to realize that Latin influenced Young constantly. Many sentences and clauses leave the verb “is” implied. Many compound sentences using the same verb in each clause omit it from the first clause (where a more modern elegant form would omit it from the second clause). With these two notes in mind, the poem became much clearer, and reading became smoother.

Young had lost his wife, step-daughter, and step-son-in-law and wrote Night Thoughts in answer to an infidel called “Lorenzo” in defense of faith in the light of tragic death. He offers views of death as nothing to be feared, proofs of immortality, expositions of Christian faith in a future state of both individual self and the world, an answer to the person who wants to be a “worldly” man, and much more. Altogether, Night Thoughts offers a thorough philosophical guide to the Christian who wants to think rightly about ultimate concerns.

I noticed in the poem three passages that certainly must have influenced Lewis: one gives an argument of immortality from desire (all the physical desires of my soul – hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc. – find their object existing in the real world, so I may believe, based on my desire for ultimate happiness, that that object also actually exists), another outlines the benefits of pain, and the last, in a survey of the planets, asks, “And had your Eden an abstemious Eve?”

Fortunately, as regards my future reading plans, Night Thoughts is not like Lewis in one key feature. Where Lewis continually makes reference to books I want to read (or reread), Young recommends only one book: the Bible.