A Micro Canon of Joy

The trouble with a day job spent defending Western civilization and the Great Books canon is that you obsess over what clueless eighteen-year-olds desperately need to have assigned to them in class. They are blank slates who know nothing earlier than Friends re-runs; how do we convey to them most efficiently the thread from Plato to Pareto? Then, too, the revolutionary siege of our nation inclines you to skew your proposed syllabi toward the spinach of political theory that formed and justified America—Aristotle and Machiavelli, Madison and Tocqueville. Western civ reduces to the essential texts needed to inspire citizens to defend the Republic. Eric Clifford Graf, in his fine “Micro Canon” essay, puts it this way: “Which three books would you take to steel our future civilization against its subterranean enemies?”

An understandable priority, but there are other questions to ask. What do you read when you’re out of college? What do you read to deepen your knowledge of Western civ, beyond the civic anthology? What, above all, do you read for pleasure?—the books that make Western civ worth loving in the first place because they provide happiness, and the Republic worth defending as a way to pursue that happiness. What is the canon of joy, distinct from the canon of virtue?—the joy acquired piecemeal over a lifetime of reading, rather than concentratedly in a core curriculum?

Tastes differ. But just to try to answer the question opens up a different way to think of Western civ, a different canon, for when the Republic’s guardian has put down his spear, kicked off his shoes, and set himself down on a wicker chair on the lawn with a lemonade and a paperback.

I’d start with Rolfe Humphries’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Most Great Books introductions to the ancient world start with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles—but that’s the syllabus of ci-devant German scholars in American exile, those heirs of the German allergy to a Rome that reminded them too much of France. When these syllabi do bring in a Roman author, it’s usually Cicero, so students can think deep thoughts about the fall of the Roman Republic and get a more complicated version than the one provided in George Lucas’ Cliff-Notes-in-Space.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, now—that lengthy poem’s just an endless series of entertaining yarns, the West’s own One Thousand and One Nights, a vast selection of Greek and Roman myth and mythic history, story succeeding story in fluid variety. Some are tales of terror, for sometimes the gods transform us mortals against our will. The book nonetheless may inculcate a protean point of view, a predecessor of the corrupting and dissolving fluidity of modern times—but it corrupts so well! Humphries’ elegant prose allures the reader, in fair competition to Ovid’s Latin, and makes of us the civilized Augustan aristocrats listening in pleasure to a chain of tales well told. Aristocrats who had failed to resist the end of the republic; but life went on.

The Metamorphoses are too long to assign easily in a class, and extracts don’t give the full sense of Ovid’s facile variety. Imagine if students were introduced to the ancient world by Ovid! Imagine if they learned first not the reason of Athens, nor the revelation of Jerusalem, but the refinement of Rome that used words to play, and not just to ponder or preach.

At the very least, they and we should read Ovid to enjoy this ancient masterpiece of homo ludens. Consider the judgment of Joseph Brodsky:

The semester after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the poet Joseph Brodsky was teaching a class on Russian poetry to a group of juniors and seniors. They were reading a poem by Osip Mandelstam that made reference to Ovid. When Mr. Brodsky asked how many had read Ovid, not a single hand went up. Mr. Brodsky said, “You’ve been cheated.”

Then, Montaigne’s Essays. Against stiff competition from his peers, but Shakespeare’s better on the stage than on the page, and Cervantes still sounds best in Spanish. Montaigne, though, has the elegant Donald Frame to translate him—and he is the hinge of Western civilization, all the knowledge of Greece and Rome at his fingertips and conveyed through the form he is inventing, the essay, the modern evocation of self, the fusion where the author’s character is always the subject, whatever else he discusses. All we modern epicures of experience are Montaigne’s epigones.

Montaigne has spinach aspects to him—one thousand pages of essays on stoicism and skepticism and melancholy evocation of lost friendship can’t entice as readily as Don Quijote charging at a windmill or Prince Harry rallying his men on Crispin’s Day. But the thousand pages of essays are also a thousand pages of Montaigne, a middle-aged man in the sticks of southwestern France writing more and more of who he was, and ever more, and thereby making a friend of an unknown reader across an ocean and an even greater gulf of time. Take the time to read Montaigne, and you will read as closely as you listen when someone you love opens up his heart.

[Related: “A Micro Canon: My Three Essential Books”]

The Renaissance bequeathed so much to us. But Montaigne is greatest of its treasures, for he, above all others, showed us how to use words to share our souls.

Next, Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Austen is the novelist Vermeer, with a limited oeuvre, extraordinarily fine detail, and a focus on domestic scenes. And she is funny!—an early master of the acid, deadpan description, of the dialogue that reveals more about the character than the character realizes, of the comic distance between how we see ourselves and how we are. She is also serious, of course, as she explores how her heroes and heroines seek to act well and find true love, in books that meld wit and sadness in a single sentence.

Persuasion is the last and finest of Austen’s six romances—the story of Anne Elliot’s second chance for love, after she mistakenly cast aside the first. That’s not really a story for college students, who are fortunate if they’ve had a first chance. Austen’s portrait of Anne’s family is as cruel as any in the modern novel—not Gothic monsters, just ordinary egotists, who threaten to snuff Anne’s chances of happiness from callous indifference rather than from malice. Austen adds to Ovid a tale of metamorphosis that ends happily, the protean world taking love away and then returning it.

Platonists may argue that love fuses with the search for God, truth, and other such abstractions, but Austen gives us the best story of the triumph of love between man and woman.

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest has to be on any canon of joy. It is a play about nothing but cucumber sandwiches, imaginative diaries, and misplaced handbags, a sheer exercise in frivolity, wit with no excuse save its own exercise and the audience’s laughter. Would-be ernste Menschen desperately need to read Wilde, to watch the play if they can, to learn that, indeed, there are more important things than being earnest. So, too, do apprentice English teachers and English professors, to have it demonstrated that the justification of literature is not that it is about some Issue of presumably greater import, but that it creates delight as it plays with words.

Well, and there should be some lyric poem in the canon of joy, some quintessence of beauty that demands to be read aloud, to be savored syllable by syllable with both ear and eye. We all have our favorite poets to relish for sheer gorgeous sound—a Donne, a Hopkins, a Lorca. My canon has Robert Frost’s “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be The Same”:

He would declare and could himself believe

That the birds there in all the garden round

From having heard the daylong voice of Eve

Had added to their own an oversound,

Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Admittedly an eloquence so soft

Could only have had an influence on birds

When call or laughter carried it aloft.

Be that as may be, she was in their song.

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed

Had now persisted in the woods so long

That probably it never would be lost.

Never again would birds’ song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

We do need to read books on how to seek the truth, and to know why we should fight to defend our republic. Maybe we even should read them first. But that shouldn’t be where we stop reading. We also should read for play, for the friendly sharing of our souls, for love, for laughter, and for beauty. Those are the books for beyond the classroom, in the lawn-chair and lemonade of life.

I read none of these books in college. Maybe it’s better I didn’t. But we should at least let college students know that they can read for such pleasures, and not just to gird their loins.

Image: Adobe Stock