The Classics

Mark Twain defines a classic as "something that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read." I wrote this quote down when I first began my collections because it amused me, but now I see a deeper meaning to it. We assume it means that people want to be "cultured," whatever that word means, because reading something somebody defines as a "classic" is one way to go about it. We would like to take the easy road, to be able to discuss the ideas present in the literature without having to actually read it. Again, I implore people to take the higher, more difficult path. You cannot skip important ideas without reading the full text (why Cliff notes are only good for high school English exams). The ideas inherent to the novel are not just about being "cultured" because you have read a certain piece of literature, but something far greater than can only be discovered as you work through the mythology that is inherent in it. What is "culture" anyway?

"Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit." -Arnold (emphasis mine)

Having just finished Rollo May's book The Cry for Myth, I am under the influence of his (and of course my dear friend Jung's) ideas about mythologies being inherent in our being. Regardless of the philosophy or psychology that you ascribe to, we love great stories because they present to us over and over again truisms about human beings, the way we are and act or could possibly act in given situations. Even before reading this book, I wrote in my writing journal three years ago, "Good writing is difficult to define because good stories come as close as possible to sharing the meaning of life-profound truth itself. When we write we must make our readers feel as if they are actually experiencing what we have experienced-our stories-and by doing so we share a little piece of life's grand puzzle." When we read literature we are in some way, whether we realize it or not, working through our own problems because the situations mirror our own.

"The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self." -Harold Bloom [The Western Canon]