To live a rich reading life, all readers, not just critics, should resist the imperative to treat reissues as particularly pertinent to our current moment, and instead view them as objects through which to experience a different moment.
My former boss and mentor, the writer Lewis H. Lapham, is a great fan of communing with the dead. "You can hear them better at night," he advised during one of my first meetings with him. One of his favorite anecdotes is the story of the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli in exile, working in a grove all day and then coming home and getting dressed in his best finery before entering his study to begin his nightly reading. Machiavelli wrote that he would "enter the ancient courts of ancient men," to "ask them the reason for their actions." Whenever I picture this beautiful scene, I see Machiavelli looking like Lewis Lapham, poring over his books, searching for guidance from previous eras on how to live in our own time. This is not to say that the stories from those previous eras need be described using contemporary ideas and vocabulary, but that by reading those stories we might expand our world, live across different time periods as Lewis does, sympathize, as he does, with authors "reporting from the front lines of different centuries." I learned much of what I know about the importance of reading historical works of literature under Lewis Lapham's influence. Last year, I recalled the story of Machiavelli when a debate started online about our tendency to use historical works as an excuse to talk about ourselves and the issues of our day, a topic I delve into in my recent essay for Times Opinion. The story seemed to me a useful counter to the picture of us — readers, publishers, critics — dragging dead authors into the 21st century for no good reason. It's much more interesting, I decided, to get up, wander toward them, and meet them where they are. As I argue in my essay, the literary world — including publishers and readers — should value books by authors of the past because they are an expression of their own time and context, not because they can be made into a commentary on our own.
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Saturday, March 2, 2024
Opinion Today: We need to read the forgotten geniuses, not rescue them
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