I like looking at lists of classic books, which people are free to take or leave, although the lists tend to turn into syllabi on college campuses and become serious instead of fun.
The lists make me wonder. Why are some enduring books, let’s say Joyce’s Ulysses, loved by some readers and hated by others?
Here is the poet Christian Wiman:
The greatness of James Joyce’s Ulysses is partly in the way it reveals the interior chaos of a single mind during a single day, and partly in the way it makes that idiosyncratic clamor universal. However different the textures of our own lives may be, Bloom’s mind is our mind; the welter of impressions he suffers and savors is a storm we all know. And that is the book’s horror too: some form of this same fury of trivia is going on in the mind of every sentient person on the planet.
If that torrent of consciousness is something we all experience, why do some of us hate the book?
I had a friend who was a teacher of transcendental meditation. He tried to shut down that stream of impressions. He sought to quiet his mind, to let it be empty. To him, thoughts were intrusive, the cause of anxiety. He saw meditation as a kind of therapy.
My friend hated Ulysses, a book I like.
I like the stream of impressions. I like to fish items out from the stream. I share some of them in this collection of notes.
I think the answer to the question about lists of classic books is that humanity is an elusive form. Individual humans are just too diverse to fit into it.
• Source: Christian Wiman, “Hive of Nerves”; The American Scholar, June 1, 2010. It’s here:
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