Remembrance of Things Not Yet Past

by Michael A. Steen

October 23, 2005

    When Margaret first asked me if I would be willing to give this address, I wasn’t sure. After all, what authority have I got to stand in front of anyone and speak for an hour or so (just kidding) on the value of classic literature? But then I began to think that, yes, I do have some authority. It’s what I do for a living. For 180 days a year over the last 33 years I have stood before students and tried to convince them that the classics are worth reading, that great literature not only stands the test of time, it is in fact the literature we most need to read.

    Last week, during the rainstorm, Margaret and I went to Barnes and Noble to look around. As always, I was stunned by the volume and variety of books. Self-help books, craft books, mysteries, Hollywood biographies, bestsellers by John Grisham and Janet Evanovich and Nelson DeMille. There were books on the occult and New Age philosophy and astrology and time management (ha). There were even books suggesting what books we should read.  How could anyone ever hope to read them all, or even to read a tiny portion of them? It seemed an impossible task. And then I wandered to the front of the store and saw, on a revolving rack, “the classics.” Inexpensively priced, attractively bound, they sat quietly, waiting to be noticed. And there were Frankenstein, and Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter and Walden. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was there, along with Wuthering Heights and Dracula and Plato’s Republic. Yes, I thought to myself, these are the books. Forget the rest, the temporary and the topical. Forget the books written merely to thrill or entertain or titillate. Concentrate on what is true and lasting.

    But why? Why should we read Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, Dante’s Divine Comedy or Frost’s poetry in preference to the latest novel by Stephen King, Belva Plain, or Mary Higgins Clark? After all, reading is reading, isn’t it? No matter what you read, it’s better than sitting in front of the TV watching Fear Factor or The Apprentice. (Apologies, of course, to fans of those shows). Of course that’s true. Reading of any kind engages us in ways that other forms of entertainment simply do not. We use our imagination, our inner eye. We create entire worlds out of those little black squiggles on the page, and there’s no commercial interruption. But we know all that. After all, we work in schools and libraries; we don’t need to be told the value of reading.

    But the classics—ah, that’s another matter entirely. Mark Twain once labeled a classic as a book everyone wants to have read, but no one wants to read. He was undoubtedly talking about the reputation the classics have for being dull, lengthy, impenetrable, confusing, and serious. After all, Paradise Lost and War and Peace are no walk in the park. Wouldn’t we really get the same thing out of some lighter fare? Alas, I have to say no.

    During the school year I spend my days and nights reading and teaching about little more than the classics. Macbeth, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Divine Comedy, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Madame Bovary, and the Odyssey make up my world. So you’ll understand when I tell you that I look forward to the summer and an orgy of reading mysteries, spy novels, and horror stories. But every summer those books fail me by about mid-July. After I’ve read a few Jonathan Kellerman mysteries, a scary story by Dean Koontz, and a couple of thrillers by Tom Clancy, I get dissatisfied and empty-feeling. I’m reading only to get to the end, to turn the last page of the page-turner in the middle of the night and then to race on to the next “must read.” But they don’t stay with me. Standing here, right now, I couldn’t tell you the plot of a single one of those books that I read this summer. In fact, I keep a list of books I’ve read on my computer so that I don’t make a mistake and read one of those novels again. After all, once the mystery is solved and the murderer caught, there’s no reason ever to return to that novel.

    The great classics, though, have staying power. Not only do we not mind reading them again, we look forward to them. A fellow I know from school has read The Lord of the Rings once every year for as long as he can remember. The heroism displayed by Frodo and Sam is as great as any displayed by Odysseus or Achilles—perhaps more. And their quest to destroy the ring, to stamp out evil in the world, is as old as the day after Adam and Eve ate the fruit. I’ve probably read Macbeth with my classes nearly a hundred times over the years, but it never gets stale. How can we tire of reading about a man and woman seduced by evil, by the promise of ultimate power? And we have been reading and performing Oedipus the King for over two thousand years. Here I have to share with you a story that happened to me nearly twenty years ago now. I was standing by the card catalog in the library (Remember those? Where we used to find books before computers?) and one of my students came up to me and said, “Mr. Steen, I have to give you a lot of credit as a teacher.”

    “Well, thank you, Heather,” I replied. “Why’s that?”

    “How you can stand up there day after day and act like you enjoy this stuff is beyond me.”

    I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I DO enjoy this stuff. In fact, I NEED “this stuff” as she called it. But why?

    Well, I could trot out the banal old “teacher reasons” for teaching and reading these books—that  they’re educational and part of our cultural heritage and every person ought to know them and you never know when you’ll be on Jeopardy and they’ll be the answer for the Daily Double. But we all know in our hearts that that’s a bunch of baloney. No, the real reasons that we read them are more subtle.

    First, we read them because they make us more human. Think about it—most of us lead pretty solitary existences, separated from our fellow humans by shyness or distance or political correctness. We talk with our friends about TV or the weather. We talk with our spouses about the day at work, the latest gossip, or redecorating the den. In the classics, though, we get to know people like Emma Bovary, whose desperate cry “Why did I ever get married?” leads her to two affairs and her suicide. We meet Hamlet, who famously observed, “To be or not to be. That is the question.” Not A question, but THE question: to live or to die. Does it get any more fundamental than that?  And of course Oedipus, whose determination to escape his terrible fate caused him to run right into it and ruin the lives of everyone he knew. He married his mother and fathered his own brothers and sisters upon her. We look upon him with horror and pity, yet we cannot look away. And his story never gets old.  Through the classics we get to know intimately people from Dickens’ London or Homer’s Greece. We read stories of undying devotion—Odysseus to Penelope—and stories of impossible heroism—Achilles in the Iliad, fighting Hector to avenge his fallen friend, Patroclus.  We can even meet knights in shining armor riding out of Camelot—a place that doesn’t even exist, yet for some of us exists more real and truly than Kunkletown. After all, have you been to Kunkletown? I told my students last year that I probably know Hamlet better than any living person I’ve ever met, with the possible exception of my wife. At first they didn’t believe me. Surely they knew their friends and parents. But I asked them—how many people do you know who stand before you and share every one of their inmost thoughts with you? Who tell you about their feelings of suicide and inadequacy and cowardice? Unless you’re in therapy, no one. Hamlet reminds us that we are not alone.

    Another reason to read the great books is that they’re an island of peace amid the chaos of this modern world. We read every day about hurricanes and a failing economy and bird flu and earthquakes and terrorists and scandals and missing persons. We are inundated by a constant flow of dire crises that threaten to choke us with fear and confusion. We think, “What should I worry about now?” “Am I concerned enough about this issue?” “Am I perhaps too concerned?” The classics, though, provide an antidote. They are an island of calm amid the insanity. Over 150 years ago, in Walden, Thoreau reminded us that “Our lives are frittered away with detail. Simplify. Simplify.” He spent two years living in a cabin that he had built himself on the shore of Walden Pond. He said that he wanted to confront life as it is, to reduce it to its simplest elements and get from it all that he could. And any time we want—no matter how busy our lives—no matter how filled with committee meetings and soccer games and bills and taxes and volunteer banquets—we can sit with Thoreau on the shore of Walden Pond and reflect on what’s truly important, on what lasts. And that’s what the classics help us to do—simplify our lives. There will always be stories about natural disasters, corrupt politicians, murders, theft, scandal, and skullduggery. But when we open to the first page of Dante’s Divine Comedy and read “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself / alone in a dark wood,” we realize that here is the center of existence. Here is a man grappling with who he is, how he became himself, and how he can get back to righteousness having strayed into sin. This is a story that never gets old, that never goes out of date. Usually we can safely ignore the screaming headline of the day, but we cannot ignore Hester Prynne standing nobly against the hypocritical Puritans who would condemn her for adultery. We cannot turn our eyes from Galahad going in search of the Holy Grail. These stories are forever because they deal with the most essential questions of existence: How should I live? What am I willing to die for? What is my heart’s truest desire? Does my life, after all, mean anything?

    Even Oprah Winfrey, who for years ran a book club that introduced America’s readers to the best new authors of the day, has reformatted that club to go back to the classics. Since she restarted her reading program a couple of years ago, she has urged us to read Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Patton, a novel about apartheid and human dignity in South Africa; East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and, just this summer, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August by William Faulkner. These are not easy books. Faulkner, in fact, is by far the most formidable of the authors listed here. But Oprah knows something that we all need to know: The greatest treasures are hidden behind the stoutest locks. But once we have found the key, cracked the combination, great riches await us.

    In the year 1950, as the Cold War was beginning, William Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. . . . I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” That’s what the classics do. They help us to endure, to prevail.

    But all I’ve talked about is the literature of the past. What about the present? Where are the books that will be the classics of tomorrow? Well, they’re out there, but right now we can’t see them. They are lost in the glaring spotlight of publicity and hype that’s focused on The South Beach Diet and The DaVinci Code. But the classics of tomorrow are already on the shelves, waiting for their time. Samuel Johnson said that a classic is any book whose greatness has outlived its own time—that has gotten past the petty squabbles and strife of the society in which it was written and has continued to speak to men and women over the generations. So we are reading them today. Will tomorrow’s great book be A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving? One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Perhaps tomorrow’s classics have already been penned by Margaret Atwood or Ann Tyler Perhaps some small poem published in a minor magazine will emerge to be the next “Richard Cory” or “The Road Not Taken.” We cannot know today. But our grandchildren will tell us. Greatness will find its way.

Thank you.