[HN Gopher] Why Read Classic Books?
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Why Read Classic Books?
Author : tosh
Score : 61 points
Date : 2021-03-04 09:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (literaryforge.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (literaryforge.blog)
| tanseydavid wrote:
| Here's a really great quote (cannot remember who it is attributed
| to):
|
| "Want to learn something new? Read an old book."
| coldtea wrote:
| Because book quality has nothing to do with release date.
|
| Books aren't fruit.
|
| And because "classics" means a huge, multi-century or millenia
| long filtering process, where it has been found good, useful, and
| insightful for generations upon generations of people.
|
| Also, because all the best of your modern books will soon enough
| be "classics" too, and you'll be as dead as the people who wrote
| the older classics. So what makes you think you or your
| compotemporary authors have some unique insight just because you
| happen to be living at the moment?
|
| Only a belief in an arrow of progress where non-technical things
| (morals, books, ideas) get monotonically better (or at least,
| where the dominant vector over time points to better) would
| justify not reading the classics. But then again only someone
| ignorant enough to not have read the classics would believe such
| an idea. So reading the classics will cure you of that too.
|
| (Even for technical things it's not always the case - there were
| civilizations more advanced than those that followed them, or
| periods where we went backwards in quality of life, knowledge of
| science, etc., for centuries - but at least with technical
| knowledge it's possible to amass and improve. You don't amass
| morals however, and even the higher moral ideas and ideals can be
| used for the worst attrocities).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| ...Also, because the "classics" are so readily available
| online, free of copyright and in easy-to-use, open formats. You
| can't really say that about much modern literature; of course
| there's plenty of good content on the web, but if you're
| actually looking for actual 'literature' meaning stuff that's
| been commercially published, that can be quite hard to access
| in anything other than dead-tree format.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Also, because all the best of your modern books will soon
| enough be "classics" too, and you'll be as dead as the people
| who wrote the older classics.
|
| > So what makes you think you or your compotemporary authors
| have some unique insight just because you happen to be living
| at the moment?
|
| Because you just stated in the previous sentence that they are
| soon to be considered classic?
|
| > So reading the classics will cure you of that too.
|
| ...
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Absolutely right. There are many attitudes in modern life that
| apply the new=better consumerism fallacy where it doesn't
| belong: code, people, experience, restaurants, ideas, values,
| music, art, film, food, literature, and durable goods. Throwing
| away ideas, objects, and preferences of the past wholesale
| loses the lessons of history, reinvents the wheel, and repeats
| said history.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Because book quality has nothing to do with release date.
|
| Quality has a lot to do with release date, although in the
| opposite direction you seem to imply here. Books that have been
| part of the discourse for hundreds or thousands of years are
| likely of significant value because they have been hammered at,
| turned upside-down and kept people engaged for a very long
| time. That's a pretty good indicator for their value, and it
| also increases the chance that the books are still going to be
| relevant in another 50 years.
|
| So cultural artifacts are actually like reverse-fruit. The
| older they are, the likely they have struck a nerve and found
| something that's meaningful regardless of what age we happen to
| find ourselves in. If you have to choose between a classic and
| a random politician's campaign memoir published half a year
| ago, picking the former based on age is actually a really good
| idea.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Cabernet Sauvignon ;-)
| OJFord wrote:
| You can leave it at filtering, really.
|
| Is there anyone alive and writing today that anyone, seriously,
| ranks among the pan-century greats?
|
| I think it takes time to realise anyway, they're old or dead by
| the time it's clear how great they are (or were).
|
| There's no point naming them, but of the three ~contemporary
| authors I thought of, two are dead and one I came to realise
| only really had the one hit I was aware of.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Beauty is in the eye...
|
| There can be no honest absolute ranking of subjective
| artistic works. It's NY Review of Each Other's Books to lull
| oneself into ranking apples with oranges.
| [deleted]
| hirundo wrote:
| Because the past is a foreign country, the classics are an
| excellent guide to that country, and foreign time travel broadens
| your perspective, making you a cultural and chronological
| cosmopolitan instead of a hick with the stifling horizons of your
| own local spacetime. They embiggen us.
|
| Plus a lot of them are fun as heck to read, page turners, not at
| all difficult, e.g. Pride and Prejudice or The Hunchback of Notre
| Dame, The Count of Monte Cristo and so many others.
| retrac wrote:
| A broader perspective can never hurt. And you can't get more
| different than by going back.
|
| I'm currently reading Sei Shounagon's The Pillow Book. The
| author was a woman in the Heian court in Kyoto about 1000 AD,
| attendant to the Empress. By tradition it is a collection of
| her dairy entries, letters, poetry drafts and other personal
| papers, not intended for distribution, at least in the form we
| received them. It's unclear if the whole work is even a single
| author's.
|
| I went in expecting not to understand parts of it. And that has
| been true. But I also didn't expect to laugh quite so much! At
| one point, she has a list of grievances over the aggravations
| of daily living and bad etiquette. The more irrelevant and
| trifling, the more hyperbolic she is. At one point I fell right
| right into it and I was in the scene. I have lived those very
| moments. And I feel her same bizarre gulf between the urge to
| be polite outside, and the frustration with the people being
| impolite on the inside. I am pretty sure I have felt some
| shadow of what she felt in Kyoto some thousand years ago. It is
| both jarring and pleasing to have that momentary connection to
| someone who is about as alien to me, as anyone who has left a
| written work could possibly be.
| mgreenleaf wrote:
| It feels like going back one or two hundred years is, in some
| ways, even more of a cultural shift than going to another
| country is today. I come across gems all the time that are
| products of the times and deeply insightful. Which happens with
| interacting with other countries today too. Both are profound
| and in similar, but different ways.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| The past is a foreign country, and yet people are basically the
| same, and subject to the same conceits, failings and heroism
| too, whether from thousands of years ago or across the street,
| competitors or customers. I frequently thank Thucydides for
| that lesson.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian...
| ajarmst wrote:
| I agree on all of that, but advancing age has forced me to
| qualify it. I now own more books that I want to read than my
| expected life span and average reading speed can support. I
| don't regret a single moment spent reading crap genre mind-
| candy. I regret every single moment spent forcing myself
| through a book that I wasn't enjoying, because it was something
| I 'should read'. I don't regret starting any of them, and I've
| enjoyed the hell out of some Dickens and Shakespeare, T. S.
| Eliot and Tennyson. I studied Latin and Hebrew at school. I've
| read half of what Kipling wrote and everything Keri Hulme did.
| Hell, I used to _teach_ the publication history of the Bible.
|
| But I've read four Jane Austen novels (three for credit, one
| for a failed shot at a Women's Studies major) and not enjoyed a
| moment of the experience. Intellectually, I get the quality of
| the work, but it wasn't entertaining. It wasn't pleasant, and
| life is just way too short for that. Books, even technical
| ones, get about three chapters to make their case now, if I'm
| not voluntarily choosing to read it after that, I'm moving on.
| loblollyboy wrote:
| Bump
| ajarmst wrote:
| Funny aside: for my sins, I own a complete more-than-a-
| ventury old set of leather-bound Jane Austen works, because I
| was the family member who was 'into books'. I've promised
| myself to make sure they go to someone who will enjoy them
| when they pass from my custody.
| veddox wrote:
| I like reading ,,classical literature", and I find I enjoy a
| lot of it more than I expected to. Often I do have to push
| myself, because it can take a fair bit of
| concentration/perseverance, but it's usually worth it.
|
| However, I do know the feeling you describe: sometimes, it
| just doesn't ,,click". And in that case, I will eventually
| move on to the next book, and try not to feel guilty about it
| ;-) (I started ,,Paradise Lost" twice. I love the absolutely
| epic poetry and vivid imagination, but I still ended up
| getting stuck both times...)
| jrumbut wrote:
| I'm a believer in audiobooks as a great way to experience
| the classics, you don't get derailed when there's a lengthy
| genealogy or dedication to a long dead patron. It's true to
| the original experience of the works too since there was
| much more recitation and reading aloud when copies were
| scarce.
|
| So many are free on librivox (or from a library):
| https://librivox.org/
|
| PS no audiobook version could redeen Paradise Lost for me
| either, it was my peast favorite reading in high school. To
| paraphrase, better to be ignorant in hell than well read in
| heaven if you have to trudge through Milton to get there.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| Your point is much closer to the articles main question,
| which I understand to be "should you force yourself to read
| the classics" as opposed to "sould you consider reading
| classic literature".
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| I've been into this idea for a while and even created a side
| project to help read the classics instead of social media, or HN
| (you can check my profile if interested)
|
| The books I absolutely hated being forced to read in school have
| been much more enjoyable as an adult.
| lionhearted wrote:
| While we're on the topic, Xenophon's "Anabasis" is probably both
| the greatest military memoir of all-time and the greatest
| adventure story of all-time.
|
| Heck, maybe also a candidate for greatest learning-on-the-job and
| leadership story too.
|
| It's really an incredible work. The "Why am I lying here?"
| monologue still gives me chills.
|
| Edit -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)
| http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1170
| agomez314 wrote:
| When you read about the Classics (stories that have stood the
| test of time because of how well they convey human truths), it's
| as if you are living a thousand different lives instead of living
| just one. As a humanities major working in tech, I observe daily
| how the miopia of living with the experience of the present only
| can have negative effects on the products it produces. For a
| distillation of this thought I recommend reading this short story
| (15min) by Anton Chekhov: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-
| stories/UBooks/Bet.shtml
| trendoid wrote:
| >As a humanities major working in tech, I observe daily how the
| miopia of living with the experience of the present only can
| have negative effects on the products it produces.
|
| Interesting. Is it possible to elaborate on this? I enjoyed the
| short story you linked (thank you) but still would like to
| understand your unique perspective.
| behnamoh wrote:
| How about just read reddit and learn about real experiences of
| real people?
| cambalache wrote:
| Yeah the timeless universal appeal of white ,15-25,male,
| nerdy American sub-urbanites. They are like 0.001% of
| humanity at best (talking historically)
| jfk13 wrote:
| And that's before you consider that much of what appears on
| reddit isn't "real experiences of real people" anyway, it's
| self-indulgent, exaggerated or downright made-up rubbish
| posted for meaningless "karma".
| loblollyboy wrote:
| This isn't 2010. There are now female and middle aged
| redditors as well
| jweir wrote:
| It is impossible to understand what has been lost and gained
| by looking at the current moment.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "Real lived experience" is heavily overrated nowadays, in all
| sorts of domains. A bunch of individual anecdotes is not data
| - at least not before people have taken the time to tally
| them up properly, which usually happens on generation-level
| timescales.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| The comment you replied to already answered your question:
|
| "I observe daily how the miopia of living with the experience
| of the present only can have negative effects on the products
| it produces."
| mellosouls wrote:
| It takes longer to sift through the dreck of reddit curated
| by popular vote of random people on the internet (who might
| be expert in a sub's subject or might just like funny
| pictures) to get to stuff worth reading than it does browsing
| through a list curated into a canon by civilisation over
| millenia.
|
| Signal, noise, etc.
| based2 wrote:
| https://www.thehindu.com/books/why-read-the-classics-by-ital...
| [deleted]
| rossdavidh wrote:
| It is a fine thing to revisit the question from time to time, but
| I doubt we will ever get a better answer than C.S.Lewis gave:
| https://stmonicaacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/C.S.-...
|
| Which is not, again, a reason not to try.
| jwilber wrote:
| To be honest, reading that essay reminded me why I (personally)
| don't enjoy classics more than modern work: the language of
| modern works is already familiar, making for a far more
| enjoyable experience.
|
| I do enjoy some classics (love Dostoyevsky), but in general if
| I open a book and find the prose to be more of a hike than a
| stream, I don't open it again.
| jweir wrote:
| Keep in mind many classics are translated and retranslated in
| a contemporary tongue. I was reading some Plutarch and found
| it incredibly accessible and easy to read - most Latin texts
| that I have read are quiet easy.
|
| Until I started reading them I was expecting something more
| like the Bible - so terse it is exhausting.
| veddox wrote:
| That essay was the first thing I thought of when I read the
| title :-)
| loosetypes wrote:
| > [...] he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who
| had not been dead at least 30 years.
|
| > "That's the only kind of book I can trust", he said.
|
| > "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he
| added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book
| that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.
|
| - Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| The same logic is applicable to news headlines. I purposely avoid
| consuming major news outlets because their job is to sell my
| eyeballs to the highest bidder. If I instead focus on learning
| about the most significant events starting at N years in the past
| and going backwards, I'm much more likely to be learning about
| only those events that history has judged to be historically
| significant.
|
| There's a saying that "You always read about the one plane that
| crashes, not the millions that land safely." The job of news
| media is to shock, awe, and transfix the public for the benefit
| of the shareholders. My bet / hope is that authors of history
| books don't operate under the same economic model.
|
| Jeff Bezos admonishes his employees to focus on the things about
| society and human nature which _don't_ change, rather than the
| things which _do_ change, if they hope to move the needle at
| Amazon. I feel like that advice is broadly applicable to the
| public and those who are generally civic-minded, not just those
| who want to succeed in business.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I don't subscribe to the idea that all classics are mandatory.
| However, there is a certain amount of homework you would have to
| do if you want to understand the culture you live in. The Bible
| and Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Goethe, etc. Stories
| that other stories build on and extend, down through history.
| Scratch any contemporary book, movie, video game, whatever, and
| those sources are right under the surface. They're in the
| language you speak, the music you listen to. You are well served
| by having certain classics as part of your education, but if you
| are not curious about that stuff I am sure you can live your life
| without knowing.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I would say that reading the whole bible to "understand the
| culture you live in" is a massive over-investment of time, even
| if you're in a country where the culture is Christian or
| Jewish.
| einpoklum wrote:
| There are far too many "classics" for even a person who is
| invested in reading them, to read.
|
| So, the question is moot, unless you contrast it to dogmatically
| refraining from reading any classics.
|
| The real questions are:
|
| 1. How to decide which classics to choose to read?
|
| and of course
|
| 2. What constitutes the classics, or perhaps who do you trust to
| list the classics for you?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Art makes allusions, and is inspired by, and builds off of, other
| work. There's even great work that, when you boil it down, is
| done in homage to earlier creations or creators.
|
| Being familiar with classic literature is one way to appreciate
| the rest of culture, as it gives you a reference for everything
| that comes after it.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| and let's not forget the classic "Why Read the Classics?"
|
| https://whumspring2010.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/calvino.p...
| [deleted]
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| For a while I tried to do the opposite and only read very
| contemporary books (harder than you'd think). I had three
| reasons:
|
| -I felt (still feel) a lot of pity towards new authors. It's hard
| enough to break through in any field, imagine having to compete
| with millennia worth of people. Man that has to suck and the
| easiest way I had to give them a leg up is to give them priority.
|
| -I'm lazy and hope contemporary authors will digest all of those
| classics for me, even if only through the culture, and give me an
| easier to assimilate message. There's an ease to reading someone
| from your generation that really helps with comprehension.
|
| -This sentiment is as old as the hills and I'm a contrarian.
| Can't deny that particular emotion rules over my decisions now
| and again.
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