Don't Read 'The Canon'
Reading and traveling have been similar for me
Reading and traveling have been similar for me.
I spent my earlier years doing a lot of them. In school and college, I read obsessively, everything I could get my hands on. Samuel Beckett, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Cervantes, Simone Weil, Foucault, Anne Carson, The KJV, Pynchon… whatever was at hand, whatever was supposed to be good, I gobbled it down.
After college, all through my 20s, I traveled and lived abroad. Paris, Barcelona, Bangkok, Seoul. I spent months settled down in Ukraine, northern Thailand, Indonesia. I lived for years in Korea and Vietnam. I hiked Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines.
And now… now not so much, on both counts. A few thoughts here:
Reading ‘The Canon’ is a lot like traveling to see ‘The Wonders of the World.’ A couple of them will undoubtedly impress you, but on the whole, you’re going to spend a lot of time either a) disappointed in yet another overcrowded overpriced tourist trap that you put so much time and effort into reaching, or b) so caught up in your knowledge about this Wonder (it’s history, what you’ve read about it, etc) that you barely even see the thing itself; you spend the whole time in your head.
Occasionally, you’ll be surprised by something you thought was just a formality mark off the checklist — it turns out to be a total delight! (Two of my reading experiences like this were Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky, and The Winter of Our Discontent, by Steinbeck. For travel experiences: Prambanan temple, Sagrada Familia, and the mountains of Nepal.)
But just because you find serendipitous joys in these categories, that doesn’t mean you should keep marching, hoping for the next hit. Most of The Classics, and most of The Wonders of the World, are probably not going to be worth the time and effort for you. And there’s good reason for that.
Things aren’t generally, globally wonderful. There’s no abstract Greatness. Everything that’s great is great for something, or great at something. And if the reason it’s great doesn’t line up with you and what you care about… what are you doing?
Great Books (and places) are kind of analogous to celebrities, actually. For example, if you introduced me to the world’s greatest cricket player, I… really don’t think I’d get much out of it. Don’t get me wrong, in my head I’d recognize “oh, this is a cool opportunity that millions of people would surely be very excited about,” but to me it wouldn’t mean much of anything. I’d probably ask to get a picture, in case I run into someone later who does care a lot, but — yeah, I just don’t care about cricket. The experience is wasted on me.
The reason I haven’t read much of Herodotus’ Histories is basically the same reason I haven’t sought out meetings with any World Champion cricket players. I’ve poked around a bit at Greek histories, I’ve seen a bit of cricket. I’m not convinced there’s much reason for me to spend much more energy on either one — even though I know for a fact that there are many, many people for whom either options would enrich their lives immeasurably. I just ain’t one of them.
People will say stuff (out loud! in front of people!) like “don’t waste your time reading non-classics; just find the highest-leverage top-1% of Great Books and study those.” This is — and I can’t believe I have to even point this out — very stupid. It’s not even “a dumb person’s idea of a smart thing,” it’s just a dumb dumb thing to even think to yourself in the bathtub, and an entirely baffling thing to say out loud to an audience. It’s kind of like telling people that instead of visiting their family in Tuscon, they should go to the Louvre.
“Forget the guys in your casual soccer league — you should be pursuing friendships with only the top 1% performers. If you’re not making friends with Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, you’re wasting your life.” —Just completely missing the point of what we’re doing out there.
There’s a book called The Avian Gospels, by Adam Novy. I’ve never seen it on a ‘Best Of’ list. I’ve never met anyone else who’s read it, besides a couple people I recommended it to. If I were looking around to ascertain the top 1% or 5% of Great Books to read, it would never once hit my radar. —And yet, no contest, I’ve gotten more enjoyment, depth, writing skill, and emotional payoff from that book than from any of the 5 Vladimir Nabokov books I’ve read, the 2 Jane Austen books I got through, or anything by James Joyce.
I’m not making some claim here that The Avian Gospels is a Greater Work than Ulysses, and must be hoisted up into The Canon — I’m just noting that the top 1% of books FOR YOU is what matters, not some abstract, general “tOp oNE hUNdRed BoOKs oF aLL TiME.”
Once again, same with travel, same with people. I got much less out of visiting Varanasi, the “Holiest City in Hinduism”, than I did from taking a 3-day hike across some random stretch of Myanmar. I got much less out of getting drinks with some Korean tv personality than I did from getting drinks the next day with my buddy Cam. Specifics matter. You, specifically, matter.
Basically, just develop your own taste, learn the ins and outs of your own soul. Trust yourself to figure out which parts of The Canon call to you, and when you should instead pick up a book that no one’s ever heard of but whose back cover intrigues you. Stop — and you know what, let’s put this in all caps:
We're conditioned to find meaning "out there" somewhere, as if it exists independently, but meaning is just what we call the experience of having our own values reflected back to us in some way. If a thing, no matter how hyped by everyone else, doesn't provide that experience we just won't care about it all that much.
Lovely stuff. Thank you.