I would add that in the next 50 years, we in the West will come to have a far deeper appreciation of the ideas, literature and heart of the East as well. The Bhagavad Gita, The Tale of Genji, The Art of War, Essays in Idleness, and so, so many other writings of the glorious heritage of the East also have much to teach us.
I'm still new here, and this explanation was one more step in assuring me I've made the right decision.
But about those Silicon Valley folks...
I had the chance to work with many of them. I worked for a state senator who represented a good chunk of "The Valley" and during that period, had a bit of a Mind Quake myself. It was when I learned that most of the major tech companies at the time had their own orchestras made up of their workers.
One of the lobbyists explained to me while at a performance the deep and important relation between math and music -- something I'd never thought about before. And it turns out to be quite true. The logic of programming, computing, and now (in a more complicated form) AI comes from the same foundation as the musical tones, and it's pretty well known that music has a natural appeal to folks in that industry.
I bring that up because it related to something I learned when I was a high school teacher: that different people think in different ways. I taught sophomore English, and did my best to help kids not just understand Dickens, Shakespeare, etc., but to actually "get" what was going on in these wonderful works.
And inevitably, there were students who I liked, and who liked me very much, whose minds weren't naturally verbal. They worked their hardest (well, some of them did) to appreciate the marvels of language and human behavior in those works, but could never get comfortable with reading. They were superior in sports and shop and music (mostly rock at that age), but words were hard for them. My job was to help them with that, but after several years of believing anyone could appreciate great literature the way I did (and being told by other teachers that I was naive), it did seem there was some reality I'd need to deal with.
That lobbyists helped me understand that this was true of those Silicon Valley geniuses. Their minds comprehended language and communication, but as necessities, not as a source of pleasure.
I have loved reading since I was a child, and have never stopped loving it. That's why I feel so comfortable here. But reading as pleasure is a fairly recent phenomenon for the middle classes on the planet. Most of civilization for most of its history was illiterate; they got their pleasure/relief from labor, and their information through what religion taught them and maybe their parents (when they were able) and probably through following orders. They could understand religious stories in paintings, but only a very few were reading Shakespeare; they went to the theater for that. Hamlet and As You Like It and Othello are excellent stories on stage, but I'm not sure what the groundlings were taking away was like what the aristocrats were. And, of course, no one at the time was able to even see the words until after Shakespeare's death.
The printing press and slowly increasingly literacy changed everything. It is a miracle today that we have as vast a literate population as we do, but not all of them have the kinds of minds that appreciate poetry and beautiful writing we are fortunate to have in our hands. Like you, I still want as many people as possible to develop that appreciation of words, words, words, words, words. We conduct most of our business and working life and politics in language. That's one of the reasons it's hard for so many people to assess and understand the sheer volume of words they are drowning in and fumbling with. The better they understand language and rhetoric, the better they'll be able to fight their way to make some sense of it all. We're going through an election now, and let me tell you, confusion hath made his masterpiece.
I don't want to underestimate those folks -- the contractors and craftsmen, the athletes and outdoorsmen, the chemists and plumbers and even some of the musicians and programmers -- to whom communication is necessary, but who find words and sentences and verbal thinking hard, nuanced information/misinformation/disinformation impossible,and ideas a chore. They have pleasures too, and they may not be literary ones. I still do my best to talk with my friends (mostly college educated) and family about what I'm reading and loving, but for the most part they view me as a good hearted crank who has a weird hobby.
They're not wrong. Neither are you. I just wanted to add that perspective to the conversation.
I feel like it's a known thing that stories are 'models', like LLMs, Neural networks, and models used in Econ and Finance. but its not as well-appreciated today. what great literature does is that they model the human condition, something the mathy-stuff hasnt quite captured yet.
that said, I'm also going to add more literature to my reading pile. Not just western canon but works like 1001 arabian nights, and works from China like Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Why limit ourselves to just one half of the globe?
Agree! and am currently reading various Japanese lit, but my expertise, such as it is, is in the Western half of the canon.
I think that is a good analogy about lit and models but I don't think it is widely appreciated, even though it is more or less what e.g. George Eliot wrote about. Didn't Tyler Cowen once do a paper on this exact topic?
i love this idea, and its amazing to think you can read 'Master and man', say, and update yourself with aspects of one of Tolstoy's models. Every story i read is like opening a crack in my sense of reality, towards which all my previous models turn, stopping to argue with one another and peering into it with trepidation.
I would love your new book to focus on lesser-known works by great authors as well! I'm re-reading Stowe's "Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp" (1856) for the second time and it is in a way so much more interesting than "Uncle Tom's Cabin" -- everyone knows UTC and our culture is saturated with it. In "Dred" one sees Stowe striving for something else, to go further than she did, to respond to criticism by creating a more manly (by some measures) hero than Tom, by pushing the United States to do more and different things. Plus there's a whole soap opera feeling right in the middle of it all, which may also have been market driven more than anything else. The point is you now have a readership who wants you to tell new stories, so do so!
I read books. I never thought that was a radical admission until this era! My favorite genre is literary fiction, contemporary or from the past. While my own writing is about research methods I hope my appreciation of literature helps me write in a more interesting way. Of course qualitative research does honor participants' stories so it does fit.
I'm sure it does. I love that lots of quality input can inevitably lead to high quality output, and often quite unconsciously. It's wonderful to think of the brain working behind the scenes, making sense of what we put into it. A single piece of creativity, after say a few years study can be surprisingly valuable can't it.
This was a lovely piece of writing. As someone who has yomped her way through much of the Western canon and would happily pick a fight with Dickens (get me a time machine!) over his actions and attitudes and Bleak House (loathed it), I get a little frustrated when people say they don't read "old" books. Do you not see that their influence echoes through not just literature, but so many facets of life?
I read in the same way as I breathe, instinctively and essentially. I am aware that life is busy and reading has become a luxury - time to just sit and lose yourself in a book, but it's such a joyous, wonderful thing. I've read many classics but not those social psychology books you mentioned, they hold zero interest for me.
I follow a Goodreads group called ‘Catching up on classics’. Nearly every day new members pop on saying how eager they are to find direction in navigating the classics. Your upcoming book will be invaluable to so many! I myself happen to have taught literature for years- i see its value when the students connect with the greats. Genre will of course be a huge consideration, the mighty short story being perhaps the most accessible to begin a literary journey.
YES! It's also so important to remember these classics, blinded as we are by the bright lights and shock of the new. There's a reason (well - any number of reasons) why people keep reading these books, and we do them a dishonour to ignore them and their experience. Great literature makes the past a present, reminding us what it was like to live, and what it *is* like to live.
An awful lot of shoulds in this piece, and could that be part of the problem? Isn't the sheer enjoyment of reading great writers the point? And if it were framed as enjoyment would more people do it?
I am careful to make enjoyment a major part of the proposition---i.e. "They are some of the peak experiences available to you, akin to visiting global heritage sites, eating exceptional food, or listening to intensely great music. There are many peak experiences available to us in the world and the best literary works of the imagination are among them." The problem is that the pleasure of great literature isn't the same as the pleasure of some other things and it is har to show people what it is like before they do it.
Interesting crossover from your Harry Potter post, where some people came to the books via film. Perhaps even the more excruciating adaptations of classics are a gateway to the original books, while the best adaptations add to the originals.
I don’t think they add anything, at least I have never seen one that does. I’m pretty relaxed about them being good or bad. In a strict sense none of them are good so why be concerned? I see books getting sales boost from adaptations and it’s clearly been good for Austen, but how many read The Way We Live Now after the adaptation I don’t know. Personally I see a lot of people who sometimes see it as a substitute sometimes a compliment to the book.
My best friend has been lecturing me for years to start reading fiction. I had told him it was a waste of time because I wasn’t “learning anything” I finally submitted and have finished two just started my third fiction classic. I have very thoroughly enjoyed them.
I read Crime and Punishment and Great Expectations. I just started Grapes of Wrath. I’ve learned one thing for myself, it’s to just sit there and be entertained by something. The books also evoked a lot of emotions and thoughts on human behavior.
same here, I was obsessed with econ and evolution and things like that, then I read "the Idiot", and was fascinated by all these characters different responses a given situation. I just read Metamorphosis and I'm not sure what non-fiction i could go to to arrive at that kind of feeling!
Here is a quote from Jane Austen, which Ruth Rendell put into the mouth of one of her favorite characters, Inspector Wexford: "Only novels! Only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineations of its varieties, the liveliest effusion of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language!"
Sorry, can't remember which of Austen's work, or Rendell's, this was in.
I'm the contrarian voice here--I respectfully disagree. I think people stopped reading old classics because our language has evolved and the older stuff is becoming more and more impenetrable. And there's other reasons. Western "cannon" skews heavily to old male white people and touches on subjects that are less and less relevant. And a lot of it is boring. For me, reading Sapiens was way more fun than reading Anna Karenina.
This may be a little orthogonal, but I feel like it's related to your idea that seriousness has somewhat declined.
For years I feel like I have noticed this trend of people in positions that folks normally thought of as places for serious-minded people (reporters on public radio, bloggers at The Atlantic) going out of their way to brag about how they, for example, watch trashy TV.
It seems like it's everywhere. Like it's this conspiracy by a segment of the thinkfluencing class to create social pressure to be less refined and erudite.
And... I feel like it's working. In fact, I feel like it has worked.
It's almost rolled around to the other side, where battles break out over cultural production that's the mind's equivalent of cotton candy. And when fights break out over something, well... almost definitionally, that means at least two people are taking that thing... seriously.
Beautiful, Henry, truly beautiful.
I would add that in the next 50 years, we in the West will come to have a far deeper appreciation of the ideas, literature and heart of the East as well. The Bhagavad Gita, The Tale of Genji, The Art of War, Essays in Idleness, and so, so many other writings of the glorious heritage of the East also have much to teach us.
So agree! One of my very slow side projects is to read through more of those books than I have.
you may want to look at this long read https://scholars-stage.org/a-non-western-canon-what-would-a-list-of-humanitys-100-greatest-writers-look-like/
Love his writing yes!
Oooh! Thank you. I’ve been looking for something like this and thinking about writing one of my own. Lists I mean …
I'm still new here, and this explanation was one more step in assuring me I've made the right decision.
But about those Silicon Valley folks...
I had the chance to work with many of them. I worked for a state senator who represented a good chunk of "The Valley" and during that period, had a bit of a Mind Quake myself. It was when I learned that most of the major tech companies at the time had their own orchestras made up of their workers.
One of the lobbyists explained to me while at a performance the deep and important relation between math and music -- something I'd never thought about before. And it turns out to be quite true. The logic of programming, computing, and now (in a more complicated form) AI comes from the same foundation as the musical tones, and it's pretty well known that music has a natural appeal to folks in that industry.
I bring that up because it related to something I learned when I was a high school teacher: that different people think in different ways. I taught sophomore English, and did my best to help kids not just understand Dickens, Shakespeare, etc., but to actually "get" what was going on in these wonderful works.
And inevitably, there were students who I liked, and who liked me very much, whose minds weren't naturally verbal. They worked their hardest (well, some of them did) to appreciate the marvels of language and human behavior in those works, but could never get comfortable with reading. They were superior in sports and shop and music (mostly rock at that age), but words were hard for them. My job was to help them with that, but after several years of believing anyone could appreciate great literature the way I did (and being told by other teachers that I was naive), it did seem there was some reality I'd need to deal with.
That lobbyists helped me understand that this was true of those Silicon Valley geniuses. Their minds comprehended language and communication, but as necessities, not as a source of pleasure.
I have loved reading since I was a child, and have never stopped loving it. That's why I feel so comfortable here. But reading as pleasure is a fairly recent phenomenon for the middle classes on the planet. Most of civilization for most of its history was illiterate; they got their pleasure/relief from labor, and their information through what religion taught them and maybe their parents (when they were able) and probably through following orders. They could understand religious stories in paintings, but only a very few were reading Shakespeare; they went to the theater for that. Hamlet and As You Like It and Othello are excellent stories on stage, but I'm not sure what the groundlings were taking away was like what the aristocrats were. And, of course, no one at the time was able to even see the words until after Shakespeare's death.
The printing press and slowly increasingly literacy changed everything. It is a miracle today that we have as vast a literate population as we do, but not all of them have the kinds of minds that appreciate poetry and beautiful writing we are fortunate to have in our hands. Like you, I still want as many people as possible to develop that appreciation of words, words, words, words, words. We conduct most of our business and working life and politics in language. That's one of the reasons it's hard for so many people to assess and understand the sheer volume of words they are drowning in and fumbling with. The better they understand language and rhetoric, the better they'll be able to fight their way to make some sense of it all. We're going through an election now, and let me tell you, confusion hath made his masterpiece.
I don't want to underestimate those folks -- the contractors and craftsmen, the athletes and outdoorsmen, the chemists and plumbers and even some of the musicians and programmers -- to whom communication is necessary, but who find words and sentences and verbal thinking hard, nuanced information/misinformation/disinformation impossible,and ideas a chore. They have pleasures too, and they may not be literary ones. I still do my best to talk with my friends (mostly college educated) and family about what I'm reading and loving, but for the most part they view me as a good hearted crank who has a weird hobby.
They're not wrong. Neither are you. I just wanted to add that perspective to the conversation.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of this... although Shakespeare was a best seller in his life time
I feel like it's a known thing that stories are 'models', like LLMs, Neural networks, and models used in Econ and Finance. but its not as well-appreciated today. what great literature does is that they model the human condition, something the mathy-stuff hasnt quite captured yet.
that said, I'm also going to add more literature to my reading pile. Not just western canon but works like 1001 arabian nights, and works from China like Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Why limit ourselves to just one half of the globe?
Agree! and am currently reading various Japanese lit, but my expertise, such as it is, is in the Western half of the canon.
I think that is a good analogy about lit and models but I don't think it is widely appreciated, even though it is more or less what e.g. George Eliot wrote about. Didn't Tyler Cowen once do a paper on this exact topic?
i love this idea, and its amazing to think you can read 'Master and man', say, and update yourself with aspects of one of Tolstoy's models. Every story i read is like opening a crack in my sense of reality, towards which all my previous models turn, stopping to argue with one another and peering into it with trepidation.
Love this!
I would love your new book to focus on lesser-known works by great authors as well! I'm re-reading Stowe's "Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp" (1856) for the second time and it is in a way so much more interesting than "Uncle Tom's Cabin" -- everyone knows UTC and our culture is saturated with it. In "Dred" one sees Stowe striving for something else, to go further than she did, to respond to criticism by creating a more manly (by some measures) hero than Tom, by pushing the United States to do more and different things. Plus there's a whole soap opera feeling right in the middle of it all, which may also have been market driven more than anything else. The point is you now have a readership who wants you to tell new stories, so do so!
I am hoping to do some of that yes!
I read books. I never thought that was a radical admission until this era! My favorite genre is literary fiction, contemporary or from the past. While my own writing is about research methods I hope my appreciation of literature helps me write in a more interesting way. Of course qualitative research does honor participants' stories so it does fit.
I'm sure it does. I love that lots of quality input can inevitably lead to high quality output, and often quite unconsciously. It's wonderful to think of the brain working behind the scenes, making sense of what we put into it. A single piece of creativity, after say a few years study can be surprisingly valuable can't it.
This was a lovely piece of writing. As someone who has yomped her way through much of the Western canon and would happily pick a fight with Dickens (get me a time machine!) over his actions and attitudes and Bleak House (loathed it), I get a little frustrated when people say they don't read "old" books. Do you not see that their influence echoes through not just literature, but so many facets of life?
I read in the same way as I breathe, instinctively and essentially. I am aware that life is busy and reading has become a luxury - time to just sit and lose yourself in a book, but it's such a joyous, wonderful thing. I've read many classics but not those social psychology books you mentioned, they hold zero interest for me.
Thank you! Somewhere in the C19th section I wrote about how BH might be less sexist than in looks, among other things.
I’m excited to read this book! Thanks for giving us a sneak peek.
Thank you for your excitement!
I follow a Goodreads group called ‘Catching up on classics’. Nearly every day new members pop on saying how eager they are to find direction in navigating the classics. Your upcoming book will be invaluable to so many! I myself happen to have taught literature for years- i see its value when the students connect with the greats. Genre will of course be a huge consideration, the mighty short story being perhaps the most accessible to begin a literary journey.
I’m so pleased to know about this goodreads group!
YES! It's also so important to remember these classics, blinded as we are by the bright lights and shock of the new. There's a reason (well - any number of reasons) why people keep reading these books, and we do them a dishonour to ignore them and their experience. Great literature makes the past a present, reminding us what it was like to live, and what it *is* like to live.
So agree that it makes a past a present!
An awful lot of shoulds in this piece, and could that be part of the problem? Isn't the sheer enjoyment of reading great writers the point? And if it were framed as enjoyment would more people do it?
I am careful to make enjoyment a major part of the proposition---i.e. "They are some of the peak experiences available to you, akin to visiting global heritage sites, eating exceptional food, or listening to intensely great music. There are many peak experiences available to us in the world and the best literary works of the imagination are among them." The problem is that the pleasure of great literature isn't the same as the pleasure of some other things and it is har to show people what it is like before they do it.
Interesting crossover from your Harry Potter post, where some people came to the books via film. Perhaps even the more excruciating adaptations of classics are a gateway to the original books, while the best adaptations add to the originals.
I don’t think they add anything, at least I have never seen one that does. I’m pretty relaxed about them being good or bad. In a strict sense none of them are good so why be concerned? I see books getting sales boost from adaptations and it’s clearly been good for Austen, but how many read The Way We Live Now after the adaptation I don’t know. Personally I see a lot of people who sometimes see it as a substitute sometimes a compliment to the book.
My best friend has been lecturing me for years to start reading fiction. I had told him it was a waste of time because I wasn’t “learning anything” I finally submitted and have finished two just started my third fiction classic. I have very thoroughly enjoyed them.
I read Crime and Punishment and Great Expectations. I just started Grapes of Wrath. I’ve learned one thing for myself, it’s to just sit there and be entertained by something. The books also evoked a lot of emotions and thoughts on human behavior.
Very cool!
I love to hear this! Which ones have you read? Are you finding that you are "learning" from them? albeit obvs in a different way to non-fic?
same here, I was obsessed with econ and evolution and things like that, then I read "the Idiot", and was fascinated by all these characters different responses a given situation. I just read Metamorphosis and I'm not sure what non-fiction i could go to to arrive at that kind of feeling!
💯
Your contribution on why we need to read great literature is much needed. hope you also would cover Campbell and the value of folktales and myths,
Maybe but I’m not such a fan… thank you for your enthusiasm!
Here is a quote from Jane Austen, which Ruth Rendell put into the mouth of one of her favorite characters, Inspector Wexford: "Only novels! Only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineations of its varieties, the liveliest effusion of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language!"
Sorry, can't remember which of Austen's work, or Rendell's, this was in.
northanger abbey iirc
Thanks. That's next on my Austen reading list.
I'm the contrarian voice here--I respectfully disagree. I think people stopped reading old classics because our language has evolved and the older stuff is becoming more and more impenetrable. And there's other reasons. Western "cannon" skews heavily to old male white people and touches on subjects that are less and less relevant. And a lot of it is boring. For me, reading Sapiens was way more fun than reading Anna Karenina.
It seems fate that I stumbled onto your post today because I just posted my thoughts on "literature" moments ago on my own stack. https://www.noorwriteson.com/p/yes-its-a-masterpiece-but-will-anyone?r=1l38tm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This may be a little orthogonal, but I feel like it's related to your idea that seriousness has somewhat declined.
For years I feel like I have noticed this trend of people in positions that folks normally thought of as places for serious-minded people (reporters on public radio, bloggers at The Atlantic) going out of their way to brag about how they, for example, watch trashy TV.
It seems like it's everywhere. Like it's this conspiracy by a segment of the thinkfluencing class to create social pressure to be less refined and erudite.
And... I feel like it's working. In fact, I feel like it has worked.
It's almost rolled around to the other side, where battles break out over cultural production that's the mind's equivalent of cotton candy. And when fights break out over something, well... almost definitionally, that means at least two people are taking that thing... seriously.
I slogged through "Resurrection" by Tolstoy and I'm the better for it I believe. Worth the slog.
That's still on my list...