ou've thought you should read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or maybe Plato's Republic, and you dreaded it. Here's twenty-two year old Winston Churchill's reaction: "all through the glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it . . . and enjoyed it all." And then, "the eighth volume of Gibbon is still unread as I have been lured from its completion by [Read's] The Martyrdom of Man and a fine translation of the Republic of Plato: both of which are fascinating." Devoured? Rode triumphantly? Enjoyed? Lured? Fascinating? Hardly words that we are accustomed to hearing in reference to "classic" literature. But when I read that passage, I began looking around at my shelves to see if I had Gibbon.
We all know that we should read good books and we try to read well. But it is much more difficult to read because you know it is good for you than to read because you want to. Sometimes, of course, you simply must whether you want to or not, and the reading will do you good, and the act of forcing yourself to do something on principle will also do you good.
But isn't it more pleasant when you want to read something good? Of course it is, and you are also more likely to benefit from reading well out of desire rather than compunction.
The difficulty of course is in making the desire coincide with the good books. Undisciplined desires will, if followed, lead you to books that have little value -- so how can you discipline your desires? One way is to just do it. Books on how and what to read abound. But most people shy away from books of criticism and reading instruction because those sorts of books make reading seem hopelessly esoteric or arduous. Another (albeit less common) danger of books about books is that if the criticism is really good, the reader will come away satisfied with that alone and never encounter the original at all.
There is a different kind of critical advice, the kind that is not meant to be advice at all. This is not prescriptive ("you must read this book because . . ."), but descriptive ("I rode triumphantly through it . . . I have been lured . . ."). It makes you want to read the book not because the author insists on its quality, but because his description of his own experience with it is so appealing that you "fling him impatiently aside," as Lewis says, and rush out to find the original about which he is speaking. One of the surest marks of a good book of criticism is the effect it has on the reader--if the critic drives the reader to put down the critic and seek the original, the critic has done the greatest service; he has drawn the reader's attention, not to himself, but to his subject.
We've heard Churchill; here are two more examples about books you might never expect.
C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy how he learned Homeric Greek: "Day after day and month after month we drove gloriously onward, tearing the whole Achilleid out of the Iliad and tossing the rest on one side, and then reading the Odyssey entire, till the music of the thing and the clear, bitter brightness that lives in almost every formula had become part of me." Gloriously, music, brightness -- he is only recounting his own experience, not asking us to learn to read Greek also, but his sheer delight in it makes us want to run out and find a Greek tutor!
Some ancient writers say of Thucydides, the great Greek historian from the Golden Age of Athens, that as a boy he wept when he heard the older historian Herodotus recite from his History at the Olympic Games. Those people who, upon hearing this anecdote, snicker incredulously at the idea of weeping under the spell of great writing, will continue to thirst and perhaps never understand why. But those who gaze off into the middle distance and wonder where they can lay their hands on Herodotus are being drawn to water.
The intellect and imagination are tied together, and the imagination, which longs for and responds to beauty, must be appealed to and trained also, to "discern good from evil." Before a spring can satisfy a man's thirst, he must believe that it will, or he will not drink. The testimony of those whose intellectual passions have been stirred is invaluable, for by it we are drawn to the water.
