"you have enough time to see how choices play out over years. You have space to even see the consequences of the consequences." Yes! Was just thinking about this and Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Half way through she's looking pretty good! It takes a lifetime for our choices to catch up to us, for good or for ill.
I like your thoughts on the question. Values are difficult to define for experiences that are largely subjective. I read Middlemarch last year and enjoyed the experience. In addition to the pleasure of the reading act itself was the subtle and hard to articulate effect it had on my thoughts and feelings during other parts of my day. I seemed to have a greater capacity for unstructured thought, a bigger internal canvas for musings and general attention.
I rather like Herr Pistelli's take on the question, which I quote at length. (Would also be interested how you and Tyler would parse this, or how it squares with more "rational" justifications for the reading of great literature.)
"I replied: I take your point, but I didn’t and don’t mean anybody has to read literature for this religion’s sake, that it’s a literary religion, or that literature itself is a religion or should be worshiped. I mean, following Shelley’s “Defence” and whatever Pound was going on about and my crude impressions of Graves and Frye and Hughes and Bloom and Paglia and Pagels and Doody, that a select body of imaginative literature (minimally the Greek tragedians plus Plato, then Dante, then Shakespeare, then the Romantics and the modernists) is the extant textual record of an actual and by no means exclusively textual religious practice and faith, or overlapping set of practices and faiths, later marginalized by monotheist orthodoxy’s development in the west. We could roughly identify it (at the risk of trying to name the true Tao) first with the Greek mystery cults and then with various gnosticisms, in particular their wider “magical” metaphysics and more diversely populated cosmic order, all this reflected in the panoply of literary archetypes, in literature’s identification of human imagination with God, and in the anti-moralistic and anti-reductionist literary practice of irony. (This is a dim and intuitive apprehension on my part, not anything I’d want to write up more systematically. Also there’s a lot we don’t know—obviously a lot I don’t know but also a lot we don’t know about ancient religion.) So my answer to your cogent objection, again, is that imaginative literature of all textual traditions, and much more than the mainstream religious or philosophical ones, encodes this older religion, which, with the onset of postmodernism (i.e., social changes bearing upon kinship and intercultural relations, new media’s destruction of linear textuality, the popular dissemination of haute nouveau skepticisms from Nietzsche to Freud to quantum physics, even at its most literal the discovery of the gnostic gospels and various occult and eastern revivals) started to become a genuine religion again (in the sense of a social practice) sans literary mediation, even though literary mediation was all the access to it anybody really had in the intervening millennia. (I refer you back to that panicked letter McLuhan wrote to Voeglin about literary traditions as the remnants of mystery cults, “a person feels like an awful sucker to have spent 20 years of study on an art which turns out to be somebody else’s ritual,” which reminds me I still need to read Jane Harrison.) I’m not saying, “Read Ulysses and get religion!” I’m not proselytizing. I am saying to read Ulysses if you want to understand consciously your once and future religion, the religion you probably practice even without knowing it, a religion that has quietly crept even into the official churches by now. (You place a candle on the altar every time you say, “Who am I to judge?”) But it’s a religion whether you read Ulysses or not. The people practicing it most ardently as we speak are borderline illiterates making a vision board or watching anime—or are, you know, Grimes or Sigh Swoon or whomever, no disrespect, I like them both—while erudite academics writing up the latest sociological analysis of Ulysses are in fact theologians of quite another sect. Whether this is a true religion or even a good one is still another question. I could criticize it! I have my Catholic schoolboy side, too. When the aforementioned Voeglin, for example, reads it as partner to or origin of modern totalitarianism in its master-manifester drive to “immanentize the eschaton,” we should heed his warning. But, if monotheist orthodoxies won out over gnosticism and paganism initially for a reason, monotheist orthodoxies and their materialist sequelae haven’t been able to sustain themselves for a reason, too, so this at once archaic and futurist religion is probably what we have to work with."
This post from an economist is like reading a paper about how to optimize a a multi-variable objective function with many constraints. The use of the word "choices" rather than "decisions", used by the writer gives it away. Decisions are not choices. The former exist in the realm of real life and passions, which is what Anna experienced and Dorothea less so but with a yearning for what a marriage is meant to be. Whatever the picture she had in her head and however impulsive or unconsidered her decision to pursue such a union, it could not be explained by bounded rationality. In fact, it should not be explained at all. The aim of great literature is not to show you counterfactuals. If only Vronsky had realized this before....or Dorothea had thought about that before... things would have turned out differently.
I cannot help but wonder if Joy Buchanan is related to the disreputable James Buchanan, the Virginian economist and the underserving Nobel laureate, who had something to do with the founding of the Mercatus Center, where Henry Oliver now works.
When a great work is assessed it may be useful to try to see the actual life of that creator. Was any effort made to live normally, or was the life one to corrupt others?
Tolstoy has some interesting ideas. But how much was really contributed by his wife?
I'd love to see a longer list of recommended books in this category— The Living by Annie Dillard? Anything by the classic great Russians I guess... but Eugene Vodolazkin for a modern one?
"you have enough time to see how choices play out over years. You have space to even see the consequences of the consequences." Yes! Was just thinking about this and Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Half way through she's looking pretty good! It takes a lifetime for our choices to catch up to us, for good or for ill.
I like your thoughts on the question. Values are difficult to define for experiences that are largely subjective. I read Middlemarch last year and enjoyed the experience. In addition to the pleasure of the reading act itself was the subtle and hard to articulate effect it had on my thoughts and feelings during other parts of my day. I seemed to have a greater capacity for unstructured thought, a bigger internal canvas for musings and general attention.
always found longer books--middlemarch, don quixote, a la recherche--somehow more moving. it's in the payoff
I rather like Herr Pistelli's take on the question, which I quote at length. (Would also be interested how you and Tyler would parse this, or how it squares with more "rational" justifications for the reading of great literature.)
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/p/weekly-readings-204-122925-010426
"I replied: I take your point, but I didn’t and don’t mean anybody has to read literature for this religion’s sake, that it’s a literary religion, or that literature itself is a religion or should be worshiped. I mean, following Shelley’s “Defence” and whatever Pound was going on about and my crude impressions of Graves and Frye and Hughes and Bloom and Paglia and Pagels and Doody, that a select body of imaginative literature (minimally the Greek tragedians plus Plato, then Dante, then Shakespeare, then the Romantics and the modernists) is the extant textual record of an actual and by no means exclusively textual religious practice and faith, or overlapping set of practices and faiths, later marginalized by monotheist orthodoxy’s development in the west. We could roughly identify it (at the risk of trying to name the true Tao) first with the Greek mystery cults and then with various gnosticisms, in particular their wider “magical” metaphysics and more diversely populated cosmic order, all this reflected in the panoply of literary archetypes, in literature’s identification of human imagination with God, and in the anti-moralistic and anti-reductionist literary practice of irony. (This is a dim and intuitive apprehension on my part, not anything I’d want to write up more systematically. Also there’s a lot we don’t know—obviously a lot I don’t know but also a lot we don’t know about ancient religion.) So my answer to your cogent objection, again, is that imaginative literature of all textual traditions, and much more than the mainstream religious or philosophical ones, encodes this older religion, which, with the onset of postmodernism (i.e., social changes bearing upon kinship and intercultural relations, new media’s destruction of linear textuality, the popular dissemination of haute nouveau skepticisms from Nietzsche to Freud to quantum physics, even at its most literal the discovery of the gnostic gospels and various occult and eastern revivals) started to become a genuine religion again (in the sense of a social practice) sans literary mediation, even though literary mediation was all the access to it anybody really had in the intervening millennia. (I refer you back to that panicked letter McLuhan wrote to Voeglin about literary traditions as the remnants of mystery cults, “a person feels like an awful sucker to have spent 20 years of study on an art which turns out to be somebody else’s ritual,” which reminds me I still need to read Jane Harrison.) I’m not saying, “Read Ulysses and get religion!” I’m not proselytizing. I am saying to read Ulysses if you want to understand consciously your once and future religion, the religion you probably practice even without knowing it, a religion that has quietly crept even into the official churches by now. (You place a candle on the altar every time you say, “Who am I to judge?”) But it’s a religion whether you read Ulysses or not. The people practicing it most ardently as we speak are borderline illiterates making a vision board or watching anime—or are, you know, Grimes or Sigh Swoon or whomever, no disrespect, I like them both—while erudite academics writing up the latest sociological analysis of Ulysses are in fact theologians of quite another sect. Whether this is a true religion or even a good one is still another question. I could criticize it! I have my Catholic schoolboy side, too. When the aforementioned Voeglin, for example, reads it as partner to or origin of modern totalitarianism in its master-manifester drive to “immanentize the eschaton,” we should heed his warning. But, if monotheist orthodoxies won out over gnosticism and paganism initially for a reason, monotheist orthodoxies and their materialist sequelae haven’t been able to sustain themselves for a reason, too, so this at once archaic and futurist religion is probably what we have to work with."
This post from an economist is like reading a paper about how to optimize a a multi-variable objective function with many constraints. The use of the word "choices" rather than "decisions", used by the writer gives it away. Decisions are not choices. The former exist in the realm of real life and passions, which is what Anna experienced and Dorothea less so but with a yearning for what a marriage is meant to be. Whatever the picture she had in her head and however impulsive or unconsidered her decision to pursue such a union, it could not be explained by bounded rationality. In fact, it should not be explained at all. The aim of great literature is not to show you counterfactuals. If only Vronsky had realized this before....or Dorothea had thought about that before... things would have turned out differently.
I cannot help but wonder if Joy Buchanan is related to the disreputable James Buchanan, the Virginian economist and the underserving Nobel laureate, who had something to do with the founding of the Mercatus Center, where Henry Oliver now works.
When a great work is assessed it may be useful to try to see the actual life of that creator. Was any effort made to live normally, or was the life one to corrupt others?
Tolstoy has some interesting ideas. But how much was really contributed by his wife?
"You Must Go" On my way!! ❤️
I'd love to see a longer list of recommended books in this category— The Living by Annie Dillard? Anything by the classic great Russians I guess... but Eugene Vodolazkin for a modern one?