Why Am I Doing This?

This is a pure reversion site, a means to cope with various disappointments and resignations of middle age that can impinge upon one's ability to live contentedly. While it is true that this page's mother site (bourgeoissurrender.blogspot.com) was wrenched into being six years ago for largely these same reasons, and has been on the whole unsuccessful in its purpose, this sideline is much more modest about what it is and can be expected to be, and is intended to be a place where such unburdening as must go on can be indulged in as minimalist and prosaic a manner as can be mustered.

The main disappointment that this site particularly addresses is my failure to become in any meaningful way a lettered person, the attainment of which would also imply cosmopolitanism and acceptable intelligence and a number of other desirable qualities that I actually once took for granted I would be identifiable as possessing regardless of what heights I should have scaled in the field of literature. It seems now that the appeal of this calling to me was emotional and romanticized only; if I had any understanding of the real nature of the skill and intelligence and spirit involved in the production of literature or history or geography, let alone any of the 'hard' areas of learning and achievement, it was a flimsy one. So now, at age forty-two, flummoxed by a lack of development and progression that seems impossible to effectively counteract, I am retreating into the comfort of adolescent nostalgia, for my earliest experiences of books, and especially literature, as a component of one's sensibility or worldview, so I can try to figure out why it struck me that this was to be my life's path; which it still has been, however unobservable the influence is from almost any distance.

I was thirteen or fourteen when my parents brought home, on a whim, a full set of the 1966 edition of the Illustrated World's Encyclopedia that they must have picked up cheaply. The writing level of the body of this reference book was in many respects almost babyish, and of course it was already nearly twenty years out of date, but: I had always wanted a set of encyclopedias, even at the age of thirteen I did not think it a great loss that the advancements of knowledge and history of the two last decades should be missing, there were a number of features in it such as explanations of the rules of various card games which I had not previously realized I had wanted, and the photographs and illustrations seemed to me to depict a more optimistic, happier and educationally exciting world than that with which I was familiar. That it was (probably) a particularly insidious lie did not have any effect on my feelings; I liked and welcomed it. The main attraction of this set of books, located in the rear of every volume, were short blurbs, plot summaries and amusing line drawings of scenes from their selections of the World's Greatest Literature, the books--mostly novels of the most recent one hundred years--that could form the foundation of a decent middle class American education, which the presentation made seem to be something worth having. The genius of this list's conception was in having popular--and either legitimately or plausibly good--American and British literature of the 1900-1950 period, which even at that time held a great appeal for me, as its anchor, though it only accounted for 30-40% of the total books selected. The rest was filled in by a good but not overbearing scattering of Greek and Roman authors, most of Shakespeare, 17th and 18th century classics, the Regency and Victorian novelists, a broad sampling of the classic, and once thought to be possibly classic, French writers, the Russians of course, more German novels than would be common on such a list today, a substantial selection of currently almost unknown Scandinavians, a smattering of Italians and even a few Spaniards. Given the nature of the encyclopedia, many children's classics are cited,  though these share their place with Dostoevsky and Hardy and Proust. Of course there are multitudes of worthy books, and many authors, left off, and many dubious and even embarrassing choices that were included, though I have read a few of the more forgotten titles and in certain instances found them good enough that in combination with their evocation of a sliver of the past, and their present obscurity, gave them a highly poignant quality. I am not here going to concern myself with who or what was left off, but my intention is to revisit the effect upon my imagination and relation to the entire world that this rather stupid list had upon me.  

So I read from this list rather haphazardly--I cut strips of paper, each bearing the title of one of the 300-400 books, which I kept in a plastic cup on my desk, which I shook up and drew a winning ticket from whenever I needed a new book--for close to ten years, though the most dedicated and prolific years of reading were the first two or three, from ages fourteen to sixteen. I was not a complete fanatic at this time. There were several books--I remember off the top of my head Diana of the Crossways, All the King's Men, and Nana being among them--that I found completely impenetrable and had to abandon to keep my momentum up, and there were many others--pretty much all of them that weren't middlebrow 20th American works probably--that I was able to get through but understood very little of. Still, I found a great deal that I enjoyed and took inspiration from in these efforts. During the later high school years my dedication fell off and there was a two year period from about eighteen to twenty when, despite not even being in school at the time, I read nothing at all, most of my energies at that time being devoted to wandering around anywhere there might be a hope of my encountering any kind of social life (there was none). I did spend a lot of time in libraries in these years but my reading consisted mostly of newspapers and magazines and skimming easily readable books--I evidently could not concentrate on anything very long at this period. Eventually I did make it back to school, and on occasion, in the summer especially, I would dip back into the old list again, and after I finished/graduated I thought I would perhaps continue on with it. But about six months after leaving school, with my life in considerable disarray with regard to finances and employment, having gotten through about one and a half books, completely unable to undertake any writing, and my literary needs with regard to quality and high historical importance having at that time been raised quite a bit as a result of my time in college (this stringency of taste has abated some in recent years as it becomes rarer for anything to affect me intensely), I determined, curiously, that the first thing I had to do to restore some sense of order and purpose and self-respect to my life was to start on a new, and better, reading list. And to a great extent this did work, and although I have never made much advancement in my economic or career status--while I have some sense of how to organize and build a foundation, I have, sadly, little of how to advance from there--I have largely avoided experiencing again the total emptiness and self-hatred I felt when I was on no such regular plan.

I am not returning to the old list in order to read through it, not yet anyway. I do however feel that in my writing, and doubtless by extension in my thinking also, I have gotten away in recent years from some of the things I do, if not well, at least more characteristic of my best self than what has passed for those exercises with me lately. I think that entering again more frequently into the slower, blithe, almost heartbreakingly innocent milieu of my earliest introduction to the world of literature may restore some of my lost optimism about not only it but the whole of life as well as mitigate some of the agitation and distractedness that have affected my ability to write, which is the only real adult activity I can plausibly see myself engaging in with any degree of competency enthusiasm during the remainder of my life. There are references to literary tourism throughout the site, which are primarily amusements though I do believe these excursions can contribute to one's general education if indulged in earnestly enough. Travel is still best undertaken I think as a long immersion constituting a distinct epoch of one's experience--probably a full year at least--in order to approach being serious.

As noted in one of the initial posts, after I go through and do write-ups on all the authors, I may go back and make similar notes on various of the subjects, people and places and events, I am not sure yet what the criteria would be. After that I may undertake similar reports on such of the authors of the Britannica Great Books set who were not included here, as I would like to have their destinations in my travel lists; but these undertakings, should I ever get to them, would be years in the future.