Literature that changed your life?

Dream - your experience is very interesting.

Joanne - are you willing to say how Wolfe and Dickinson have shaped your life?

Gala - how interesting! I need to read that Quartet. Can you comment more on your reactions to Dante?

Lightwizard says: ". It also made me aware that the single creative mind is what is really important in this world. If we make any life choices that are influenced by books, movies, or any art that is outside of us, I don't believe we are always conscious of it and perhaps are unwilling to admit it."

Yes - but LW, can you comment more on how Proust influences your daily reactions?

Babs - I read Pearl Buck assiduously as a child - and LOVED her evocations of China. It was wonderful to be transported to another culture in that way, and to begin, at a very early age, to get a sense of colonialism and its impacts. But - any more about how your reading has AFFECTED your life, as well as giving you pleasure.

Hazlitt, and yours was a lovely response to read. Any chance you can bring to consciousness any other effects upon your life of what you have read? It is fine to mention non-fiction - I will in a bit!

Well, dlowan, I began reading The Divine Comedy shortly after I got my first real and decent paying job. So a whole level of concern ($) was erased from my life. I was able to read the text with a fair amount of empathy having lived through a different kind of internal hell, but having come out of it... The quest for a meaningful life seemed to me to be embodied in the book, and I was at long last able to focus.

Also, I was learning how to read the Tarot cards at the time, and all the references in Dante were so much more satisfying then the New Age bullshitty text. Because the roots of the Tarot are based in the Kaballah, Dante gave me an excuse for relating the cards to what he was writing about, love, struggle, depths of hell, conflict, joy, emnity, reunion, etc. And, like the Tarot I found the divine Comedy to be visual reading.... Same context, just some bang-up writing that puts more demands on the imagination. It beats those superficial new-ager wankers any day...

Okay, Dlowan, I do have a story that I like regarding nonfiction reading. The bad thing is that I've told it on an abuzz thread in which Babs was involved, but maybe she, being a good sort of person, will forgive the repeat. I did mention this in connection with politics once on A2K.

It is my contention that for many people, political persuasion is not a rational function. By this I mean many of us are liberal or conservative not because of careful rational and objective study, but because circumstances over which we have no control have made us what we are. Arguments for or against what we are only tend to reenforce our already entrinched position.

Here is my personal proof of the above. I graduated from college in 1955 with a major in history and minors in philosophy and literature. Now during those years in college, almost my total interest, obsession and focus was upon my personal salvation. I pause for you to have a good laugh. And I freely acknowledge this all to have been a waste of time (except that there may have been a good side to the whole awful thing, but that's another story). I graduated from college totaly ignorant of political theory. I had no idea of the difference between a liberal and a conservative.

I got a job in the printing industry, and presently was given a very bright young high school graduate as a helper for the summer (she went to college in the fall). This was the summer leading up to the Goldwater/Johnson election. Suzie, for such was her name, quickly realized that I was living in ignorance of how the issues fit into a coherent theory of politics, gave me two books to read: "The Conscience of a Conservative,"by Berry himself, and "The Coming Poitical Breakthrough," by Chester Bowels. I read these two books and knew instinctively that I was a liberal and a Democrat, and so I have been to this day. As I read the Goldwater book, I was appalled over and over at what seemed to me his mean spirited ideas. When I got into Bowels, it was as if I was right at home. Everything he said made perfect sense.

What I'm saying is that some people, myself included, are pre-primed somehow to accept certain lines of thought.

I sometimes think about Suzie and wonder if she had any idea what a difference her books made in my life.

Eeek a book report, two book reports actually more than two book reports. Well now I have to think about it first and will post them so that I make sense.

One book which definitely changed the way I see the world is Flaubert's SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION, which I read in French my freshman year at Yale. I don't think I've ever gotten over the experience. Flaubert stripped bare the illusions and self-delusions of his hero so mercilessly that I've never been able to look at my own quite so fondly. Also, reading Flaubert carefully in French was a lesson in literary style with applications to my own writing even today.

In the tenth grade I had an English lit teacher who loved Shakespeare, and suggested that we take something (anything) into the bathroom and read it out loud. I did this with Othello, shouting and waving my arms around, and scaring my family outside the door who had no idea what was going on and thought I was having a fit. It was a turning experience for me. I had been an omniverous reader for years, but this was my first experience of active participation with the written word. I love Shakespeare, and quite often to this day will read aloud to myself. The line that begins with "To thine own self be true..." turned out to be almost a mantra, one I have tried to live by.

I read all the Mary Renault books, too, and was also influenced by them. She was the first I read who made the ancient Greeks come alive.

And something maybe a little silly. "Goodnight Moon," a classic children's book, is one I bought and read aloud to each of my grandsons (and to my kids before them). Not great literature, but one where I could whisper, make gestures, look around the room with them. I still like that book.

Larry, mentioning Flaubert, the same woman, Suzie, who gave me the books on politics, also gave me Madame Bovary. What do you make of that?

Interesting coincidence, Hazlitt. I myself make it a point to read books my friends recommend--it's the best way to learn of good books.

mamjuana, "Goodnight Moon" is a classic indeed. I never knew it until I had a child -- my parents were somehow against "old fashioned" children's books, with a few exceptions. The pacing is amazing... fast and tumbling with all those "ands" and then slowing down and down... my daughter always yawns at "Goodnight room..."

Book reports?

I wonder, indeed, Hazlitt, what are the pre-primed things? Some analysts have many pat answers to these things, but pooh to them, I say!

I find Flaubert so merciless that he is hard to read.

Mamajuana - has your mantra altered your behaviour?

I had an argument about with Merry Andrew once, about how seriously we were supposed to take all Polonius's rules for living, since he is such an idiot! Were these the driest of boring contemporary moralisms? However, Merry thought that Polonius is a perfectly reasonable and sensible person, and argued this so well that I felt I needed to go and re-read Hamlet. Which I haven't!

Flaubert is no more merciless than most realistic novelists. I doubt he is more merciless than Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Eliot, James, Conrad, or even D.H. Lawrence.

the Count Leo was a very bizzare creature indeed

Literature that changed your life?

"Accounting is an Art"

Bill W - LOL!

Larry - I find Flaubert more merciless than any of these, as it happens - but I would have to re-read him now to remember exactly why. I find him more merciless than all except a juvenile Austen - though he is far more polished than the extraordinarily cynical wee-Jane..

Great question, very difficult to answer because quite a few books over a lifetime have knocked me sideways. There were several when I was a child -- stories. Then Zola, Emerson and 17th century English poets when I was in college. Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom just out of college and at the same time I read for the first time Josiah Gregg's account of crossing the prairie which undid me for several years.

Then the Alexandria Quartet. And Borges' Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. And Prokosch's The Asiatics. Peter Handke's Slow Homecoming (and later, pretty much everything he's written). Orhan Pamuk's Black Book (ditto).

I remember also reading The Road Less Travelled, Babsatamelia, and loving and hating it at the same time (and being influenced by it). Also (in the same era, when I was doing a lot of travelling alone by car and reading at every meal, in every motel room), William Least Heat Moon. (Speaking of cars, for the times when they break down, when you have to wait in a garage for a couple of hours, having a copy of Chekhov's complete short stories under the front seat really helps.)

Don't want to forget Merton. Every word. Everything he wrote, everything that's been written about him. Some good, some bad, but all of it deeply affecting... then, when I read him twenty years ago. Would I feel the same way now? Don't know.

Sometimes you read a book which gives you a handle on your deepest concerns/needs at that time. I'd put Durrell, Fromm, Gregg, Handke, Prokosch and Merton in that category and also a book not mentioned above because it didn't change my life but rather seemed very, very close to home, and that was Yehoshua's Journey to the End of the Millenium.

The cumulative effect is on my frame of reference in day-to-day existence, the connections I make. I'm an artist, so observing with the whole mind -- in addition to seeing with the eye -- is what I do, who I am. Each influential book tends to add to the context, meaning -- the purpose -- of those observations. Just now, thinking about this, I tried to imagine subtracting some of the books mentioned from my cumulative existence and found that unimaginable. Adrift in the Sargasso Sea I'd be.

One book which definitely changed my life was LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD by Denis De Rougemont. I read it at just the right time in my life, when I was trying to understand a painful love affair I was in. Rougemont's analysis of romantic love is so profound and so unsettling that I never felt the same way about it since.

Interesting, both of you, tartarin and Larry.

Any more detail you care to share about HOW these books changed you?

Rougemont's book made me see that romantic love is a social construction, that the emotions we associate with romance derive from a set of conventions that date back to courtly love and the legend of Tristan and Isolde. In other words, the association between romantic love and suffering is not one that alll cultures share, it is a specifically Western love myth--hence his title LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD. It was quite a shock to realize that my "profound" feelings had actually been dictated to me by the culture that formed me. I have ever since been very skeptical about romantic love and, indeed, about most conventional feelings, given that we experience them inauthentically, or through the medium of our culture rather than authentically, through our own promptings.

larry r

I discovered the same thing through experience.

Interesting stuff, Larry - though there is, I believe, a complex series of physical things that happen when we are "smitten" - but doubtless the subjective experience of this is mediated through culture.

I once commented, elsewhere, that the internet is, sometimes, in my view, returning to us some of the experiences of courtly love, due to the distance factor.