If you asked me what makes a book enduring, you'd probably say popularity and the quality of writing. That's what I would've said if someone asked me that question.
As it turns out, popularity, quality, and acclaim are no guarantee that a literary work will endure. In this absolutely brilliant post,
offers a thoughtful view on why some books age well and others don't.I could go on and on with examples of how art fades. Perhaps the most interesting question is what makes something endure. What makes a work speak through time to multiple eras and contexts? There are certainly works from 1924—100 years ago—that are read today: A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, Billy Budd by Herman Melville, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, multiple books by Agatha Christie, etc. I would like to think that quality helps determine what lasts yet it is obviously more than that. Melville and Kafka, for example, both went through long periods of obscurity before being “rediscovered” decades after their deaths. They are two of my favorite writers, but I have to sadly admit it is possible they will lapse into obscurity again in the future (and perhaps be rediscovered yet again and then forgotten again and so on).
Lastly, I do have to acknowledge that we currently live in the “franchise era” in which the biggest works are not actually individual works by individual artists, but sprawling multimedia empires with video games, movies, TV shows, action figures, and even amusement parks attached. Perhaps this means that the rare super franchises—your James Bonds and Harry Potters and Star Warses—can never die. I’m not entirely convinced. Even this shall likely pass. Time is fleeting. The brief candles flicker, even for sprawling multibillion corporate franchises. All we can do is write what we like and read what we love, and hope others like it too either now or in the future.
Reading this post led to a bunch of random and disparate thoughts. Since they're bothering me, I feel compelled to share them with you.
Considering the enormous role luck plays in what books remain popular and what books don't, I wonder how many unknown Kafkas, Tolstoys, and Shakespeares are out there, just waiting for us to discover them. If that's the case, how valid are two pieces of reading advice that you hear often:
What's popular is rarely good.
Read the classics. In other words, read Lindy books.
If this is bad advice, how do you go about picking what to read? I don't think "follow your interests and passions" is helpful either. You still have to pick books in those categories.
More often than not, people tend to start by reading the books that are having a moment. With enough reading, they tend to develop the mental muscle required to discern the good books from the books that shouldn't even be used as toilet paper. After that, they tend to gravitate towards books that the world has deemed to be classics. More often than not, people tend to rely on lists—I know I do—but that means there are entire forests that we'll never go through.
So how do you discover your next favorite author? I've got no answers; maybe explore randomly?
Speaking of lists,
writes what I've known all along deep down—most book lists are terrible and are often an exercise in ego masturbation and virtue signaling. I'm not going to lie; at one point, I was tempted to publish my own “The books I read this year” post, but after reading Sam, the enormous arrogance behind that delusion has left my brain.It’s not just Obama, though. I’m starting to find the whole business of making lists of books disgusting, no matter what the books are and no matter who makes the list. Any list of books is ultimately a way of describing a certain kind of ideal person; it’s a way of telling other people how they ought to perceive you. Accessorising. Ugly behaviour. Case in point: earlier this year, the New York Times produced a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century, with the fantastic innovation that you can check off all the books you’ve read, and afterwards you get a fun shareable image to show off to your friends. Look, here’s mine:
The point isn’t to read these books; the point is to have read them. Actually dragging your wet eyeballs over all that scratchy paper is just an awkward chore you have to go through, so afterwards you can ask people at parties if they’ve read The Line of Beauty, and then, before they’ve even had a chance to respond, tell them that you’ve read The Line of Beauty. You’ve read Cloud Atlas. You’ve read Outline. Yes, you would like a medal, thank you very much. You grew up reading books to earn stickers, and now every time you finish one you start looking around for your reward. But of course some of you are bigger and better and more literate than that. So you get to progress on to the second level of the game, where instead of pointing out all the books on the list you’ve read, you point out all the books you’ve read that didn’t make the list, and complain that they should have, because you’ve read them. The list needs to be a more accurate reflection of you.
Pair this post with this thought-provoking post by
Many of us are thrown into games we don’t even like playing. At some point, one realizes the only games where you can get edge or flow are the games that you custom-make for yourself.
I like this idea of love as edge a lot, and I have absurd faith that following the feeling will take me where I need to go. Play the game where you have edge is another way of saying: play the game that you love.
On that, I discovered a new author in this delightful post by
. I loved this passage:I never met the couple who lived there, but I sensed they had no grandiose ambitions for loftier ceilings, a dining room suite or a gravel driveway. They were, I imagined, finding contentment, not by retracting the scope of their dreams or denying an impulse to seek and acquire, but by attending more to people and ideas than to things, and by preserving their attention for one of the greatest luxuries available to us – creativity. Their lives were full of colour, appreciation and friendship, and their horizons were moderated to a tolerable, happy balance of freedom and boundedness. It was a modest house, but it contained the world.
With each passing month of my life, I am starting to appreciate the idea of “enough” more and more.
Pair this with this warm and evocative post by the amazing
on what it means to pay attention:As the art historian Jennifer Roberts argued several years ago, “Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.” Or, as she also puts it, just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Seeing, in this sense, is a form of knowledge arising from a way of being that brings a greater measure of the fullness of reality to consciousness. According to Roberts, achieving this kind of knowledge and quality of experience requires “time and strategic patience,” which is a form of “immersive attention.”
To speak of attention in this manner, as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”3
That’s it for this week.
What did you think?
Interesting question but I was left feeling that the answer was a vague, "Enough." On this subject, here's my favourite quote - Kurt Vonnegut's eulogy to Joseph Heller:
Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
— Kurt Vonnegut
The New Yorker, May 16th, 2005
This piece, from a writer of prodigious insights and talent, remains on of my favourites.
Beautiful. I'd say each one's "enough" is different and some some falsely assume their "enough" is not a moving target.