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  Praise for Michael Dirda and BOOK BY BOOK

  “Michael Dirda is one of our best, a national treasure for those of us who care about the printed word.”

  —The American Enterprise

  “A slender but pleasing volume that shares some of what Dirda loves in literature and at the same time offers tips for finding a fuller life through books. . . . Dirda reigns as one of the premier book critics in the United States.”

  —Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor

  “The sheer array of literature our dedicated guide, advocate and connoisseur surveys in Book by Book cannot profitably be absorbed in one reading. It would be well worth the reader’s time to revisit the text and rediscover its gems of observation, the author’s own and those from the abundant provocative quotations Dirda also includes to amplify his themes. . . . Keep Book by Book on your nightstand and refer to it often. Its lessons will help you attend to the prosaic and cope with the unexpected, the difficult and the tragic. It is an indispensable literary resource.”

  —Chris Byrd, America: the National Catholic Weekly

  “Dirda’s interests are wildly diverse, so he writes a little about many different writers who have touched him in some way, or left ideas that have stuck with him and helped him understand his life. . . . The result is a small book that is nevertheless best read in several sittings to more easily digest the many nuggets of wisdom.”

  —Dennis Lythgoe, The Desert Morning News

  “A lovingly crafted volume.”

  —Library Journal

  “Chapters consist of wise musings on learning, work, eros and art. The knowledgeable Dirda tells us which authors make us laugh, which make us question our daily routines.”

  —Jeri Krentz, The Charlotte Observer

  “Highly cultured yet never pretentious, Dirda’s survey convincingly demonstrates what a wealth of life lessons—moral, emotional and aesthetic—a good library can contain. For those who enjoy books about reading, and for all those seeking to encourage others to read, Dirda’s brief yet suggestive book will inspire.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This book is compassionate, but it also means business. . . . It is clear that its author truly believes (as I do) that books have all the answers, especially when the answer is that there is no answer except that this is life here upon earth.”

  —Katherine Powers, The Boston Globe

  BOOK BY BOOK

  ALSO BY MICHAEL DIRDA

  Bound to Please: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books

  An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader’s Life

  Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments

  Book by Book

  NOTES ON READING AND LIFE

  MICHAEL DIRDA

  Holt Paperbacks

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  A Holt Paperback® and ® are registered trademarks of

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2005 by Michael Dirda

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  “Book I” by William Carlos Williams, from Patterson, copyright © 1946 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Sappho” (excerpt) by Guy Davenport from 7 Greeks, copyright © 1995 by Guy Davenport. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dirda, Michael.

  Book by book : notes on reading and life / Michael Dirda.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8338-5

  ISBN-10: 0-8050-8338-3

  1. Books and reading. 2. Dirda, Michael—Books and reading. 3. Best books. 4. Reading—Social aspects. 5. Commonplace-books. I. Title.

  Z1003.D575 2006

  028.9—dc22 2005055451

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2007

  Illustrations © Elvis Swift

  Printed in the United States of America

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  To Oberlin College

  The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

  — MICHEL FOUCAULT

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE: At Home in the World

  ONE: Life Lines

  TWO: The Pleasures of Learning

  THREE: Work and Leisure

  FOUR: The Books of Love

  FIVE: Bringing It All Back Home

  SIX: Living in the World

  SEVEN: Sights and Sounds

  EIGHT: The Interior Library

  NINE: Matters of the Spirit

  TEN: Last Things

  A Selective and Idiosyncratic Who’s Who

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  AT HOME IN THE WORLD

  Live-and-let-live over stand-or-die, high spirits over low,... love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle.

  — MARVIN MUDRICK

  Over the past fifty years I’ve spent a lot of time—some might say an inordinate amount of time—in the company of books. Storytelling has always enchanted me, and early on I found myself reading just about anything that came my way, from Green Lantern comics to the great classics of world literature. My memoir, An Open Book, recounts a young life unexpectedly shaped by this omnivorous and indiscriminate reading. After childhood, though, I ceased being a purely “amateur” reader, only to become a professional one, first as a graduate student in comparative literature, and since 1978 as a professional reviewer and columnist for the Washington Post Book World.

  During these past three decades the Post has kindly allowed me to write about nearly any sort of book that caught my fancy, and my fancy can be quite promiscuous—ancient classics one week, science fiction and fantasy the next. Despite all these hours of turning pages, I don’t view myself as a bookworm, one of those bald-pated Daumier scarecrows peering through bottle-top spectacles at some tattered, leather-bound volume. There’s more to life than reading. I’ve also fallen in love and married, spent Saturdays ferrying noisy offspring to soccer games, mowed grass, folded laundry, and suffered my share of what Shakespeare called “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”

  A normal enough life, then. Yet even as a kid back in working-class Lorain, Ohio, I decided that what I wanted most of all was— how shall I put this?—to feel at home in the world, which meant to know something of the best that has been thought, believed, and created by the great minds of the past and present.

  In some ways, that ambition must sound odd, even slightly romantic. But let me explain. About the age of twelve or thirteen, I grew enamored of the story of the Count of Monte Cristo. Suave, cosmopolitan, wealthy, charismatic, the count actually starts life as a naive young sailor named Edmond Dantès, betrayed by those he trusted and imprisoned on the Château d’If for a crime he never committed. At first he despairs. But one day he hears a quiet scraping noise coming from inside his cell wall—tunneling—and in due course meets the learned Abbé Faria, who eventually teaches him everything an accomplished man of the world should know. The young sailor studies, practices, learns, remembers. And so when, after many years, he is finally able to
escape and seek a reckoning with those who wronged him, Edmond Dantès has transformed himself into the urbane and accomplished Count of Monte Cristo.

  Alexandre Dumas’s novel remains a great parable about the power of learning and education and calls to mind one of our most fundamental American convictions: that any of us may, through hard work, fashion a new and better life for himself. As Henry David Thoreau long ago observed, “If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

  In childhood and early youth most of us naturally read for escape, pleasure, and inspiration; as young adults we use our school texts to learn a profession or trade; and then as full-fledged grown-ups we add yet another, perhaps deeper purpose to our reading: We turn to books in the hope of better understanding our selves and better engaging with the meaning of our experiences. Let me say, right off, that I believe a work of art is primarily concerned with the creation of beauty, whether through words, colors, shapes, sounds, or movement. But it is impossible to read serious novels, poetry, essays, and biographies without also growing convinced that they gradually enlarge our minds, refine our spirits, make us more sensitive and understanding. In this way, the humanities encourage the development of our own humanity. They are instruments of self-exploration.

  For Book by Book, I’ve set down some of what I’ve learned about life from my reading. In its character the result is a florilegium: a “bouquet” of insightful or provocative quotations from favorite authors, surrounded by some of my own observations, several lists, the occasional anecdote, and a series of mini-essays on aspects of life, love, work, education, art, the self, death. There’s even, occasionally, a bit of out-and-out advice.

  Though my emphasis clearly remains on books as life-teachers, readers searching for any definitive answers or gurulike pronouncements won’t find them here. Soon enough one learns that there are no straightforward solutions to most of life’s perplexities. Great fiction, in particular, eschews the reductionist and obviously didactic, instead reveling in complication, pointing out options, at most revealing the consequences of one course of action over another. Contradiction, not consistency, second thoughts, rather than dogmatic certitude, lie at the heart of humane understanding, and all those who try to simplify experience usually only succeed in narrowing it. To my mind, life should be complex, packed with questioning, full of misdirection and wasted effort—a certain number of mistakes is, after all, the price for “living large.” Arthur Schnabel remains the nonpareil interpreter of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, yet he made occasional fumbles in his fingering. But to play such music as it should be played required the pianist to push himself to his limits. Schnabel’s motto was that of all great souls: “Safety last.”

  As I assembled these pages, my intention was to produce a book that could stand, however sheepishly, on the same shelf as Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, Robertson Davies’s A Voice from the Attic, and W. H. Auden’s A Certain World. Above all, I hope the resuit is, to echo the poet Horace’s old formula, duke et utile— enjoyable and useful—a book to read slowly, to browse in, and return to.

  For just this reason you might want to keep a pencil nearby to mark favorite quotations or to scribble in the margins and on the endpapers. These are the sort of pages that demand to be “personalized,” amplified, and enriched with your own reflections, made uniquely yours. Perhaps Book by Book may even encourage you to start creating a reader’s guide of your own.

  N.B.—Some of the authors cited use the generic “man” or the pronoun “he” to refer to the totality of humankind. The female half of the population will, I trust, make allowances for this largely outmoded convention.

  Quotations are usually identified simply by author; uncredited material is my own.

  BOOK BY BOOK

  One

  LIFE LINES

  Much of Book by Book has been gleaned from a small notebook into which I have copied striking quotations and passages from my reading. Such volumes are typically called commonplace books, though their contents tend to be anything but commonplace. What follows are a number of general axioms about life, a few well known and some contradictory, but all of them worth carrying around in your head for their insight, solace, and counsel.

  Character is fate.—Heracleitus

  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.—Joseph Conrad

  There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. —Thomas Hobbes

  Remember that every life is a special problem, which is not yours but another’s; and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.—Henry James

  What others criticize you for, cultivate: It is you.—Jean Cocteau

  Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.—Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  The point is to . . . live one’s life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.—Thomas Nagel (summarizing the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche)

  To enjoy yourself and make others enjoy themselves, without harming yourself or any other, that, to my mind, is the whole of ethics.—Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas de Chamfort

  Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.—Sydney Smith

  Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and—if at all possible—speak a few sensible words.—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  People must never be humiliated—that is the chief thing. —Anton Chekhov

  Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.—Thomas Carlyle

  There is only one line to be adopted in opposition to all tricks: that is the steady straight line of duty, tempered by forbearance, levity, and good nature.—Duke of Wellington

  The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice.—Mortimer J. Adler

  It is a good lesson for a man to step outside the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all he achieves, all he aims at. —Nathaniel Hawthorne

  We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  In life, I have learned, there is always worse to come.

  —Julian Maclaren-Ross

  Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well. —Kenneth Clark

  Two

  THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING

  Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon. —ALEXANDER POPE

  THE START OF SOMETHING BIG

  For many grown-ups, long past the age of scissors and coloring books, September provokes a familiar frisson. Something in our cortex sparks to the memory of Big Chief tablets, three-ring binders, stiff leather shoes, scratchy clothes. Come September the past is mentally recaptured, and we are again second or seventh or twelfth graders. A new teacher, a strange desk, different classmates await. This year we will learn cursive or algebra, study Greek mythology or physics, read Bread and Jam for Frances, take the SATs. We will also keep journals and suffer through gym class, deliver oral book reports, and debate whether the United States should withdraw from the United Nations. Many of us will naturally try out for the class play or just miss being elected to the student council or fall hopelessly in love again or get into a fight on the blacktop, not far from t
he swing sets and the old teeter-totter, where we skinned our knees.

  Some fall mornings such unspoken, almost unthought memories just barely break the dulled surface of our adult minds; perhaps only when we glimpse little kids waiting for yellow buses, or hear the distant, muffled brass of a high school marching band practicing on a brisk Saturday afternoon. And the joy of learning? Yes, for a week or two in those early Septembers, we might feel eager, even downright industrious; but then the steady grind of homework would inevitably turn us back into our normal sullen selves, again fearful of the pop quiz, terrified that we would be called on next to go up to the blackboard, frantic in our attempts, always vain, to remember the formula for calculating the area of a parallellogram or the spelling of “supercilious.”

  THE POINT OF IT ALL

  The aim of education is “to develop in the body and in the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.”—Plato The first object of education is to teach the young mind to foster the seeds of piety, the next to love and learn the liberal arts, the third to prepare itself for the duties of life, the fourth, from its earliest years, to cultivate civil manners.—Desiderius Erasmus

  Charles Fourier “believed that the aim of education was not to impart a body of knowledge or to wash children free of sin, but rather to make it possible for them to discover and express their true natures.”—Francis Beeding

  We call the higher education that part of human training which is devoted specifically and peculiarly into bringing the man into the fullest and roundest development of his powers as a human being.—W. E. B. DuBois

  To “rouse and stimulate the love of mental adventure ... To give this joy, in a greater or less measure, to all who are capable of it, is the supreme end for which education of the mind is to be valued.”—Bertrand Russell