In the past couple of years, I have gravitated more and more towards reading the classics and the classics only. Before, I used to go to bookshops and pick up books by contemporary authors or follow the shortlists of major literary prizes and read what was on them. But lately, I’ve pretty much given up on all that. Now, if I’m reading fiction, you can bet good money on it that I am reading a classic. Admittedly, I’ve read several classics before in my teens and twenties, and this current interest in them is not exactly new. Still, it is only relatively recently that I actually made them the sole focus of my reading habit.
Why this shift, though? Besides turning me into an obnoxious book snob (which I totally am), who boasts whenever someone mentions a particularly difficult book (Ulysses? Yeah, I read that) what does dedicating my limited time to reading a bunch of old stuff instead of enjoying the best of what the contemporary literary world has to offer actually do for me?
Wrestling with this question, I turned to Italo Calvino’s classic (?!) text on the subject, “Why Read the Classics?,” from which I partially borrowed the title for this piece and which also gave me some clues that helped me settle the matter in my own mind.
There are two main reasons, I figured, why I have been paying more and more attention to the classics recently. The first one is this: classics give me points of reference—a roadmap, if you will—in my efforts to grow and become a better human being.
Calvino writes that reading the classics, especially in our youth,
gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty.
I’m obviously not in my youth anymore, but I do agree with Calvino here. For me, classics are works of art where the complexity of human existence, distilled through the ages, is laid bare for us readers in various shapes and forms. For me, reading them is almost a dialectical process. The more I read them, the more I discover myself in them as a complex and fallible human being, and the more they influence me, the more I feel like I have the tools to become a better version of myself and aspire to reach higher levels of the collective human consciousness.
I remember reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at a time when I was heartbroken and going through an emotionally difficult period. The fact that I was reading that particular book at that particular time wasn’t an intentional choice on my part but more of a coincidence.
As I read Proust’s incomparably beautiful expression of pain and suffering upon Albertine’s disappearance from the fictional Marcel’s life, I felt a deep connection with what he was saying. I felt like this French guy who lived a hundred years before me was describing my experience, my feelings more accurately and more beautifully than I could ever articulate them myself. It was almost a mystical experience, seeing myself on the page. “Ah, that’s what I am feeling,” I remember saying to myself. “That is where my pain and my grief come from.” As Calvino put it, the whole experience provided me with “ways of dealing” with what I was going through then, and I was grateful to Proust for that.
The second reason I have turned towards the classics is also related to being a part of the collective human consciousness, but from a different angle. Reading the classics, I believe, is a gateway for us to transcend the imaginary national boundaries that I feel are drilled into us from an early age and that are especially potent if you are coming from a culture that is generally perceived to be a latecomer to modernity, as I do.
It was while I was reading Witold Gombrowicz’s Diaries that this idea first started to crystallize in my head. Gombrowicz (1904–1964) was a Polish author who spent more than 20 years in exile in Argentina, where he came right before the start of the Second World War. In his Diaries, he repeatedly comes back to the tension between the “universal” and “particular,” questioning what came first for him as a writer in exile: being a “Polish” author or being simply an “author,” whose primary responsibility is to speak to the whole of humanity. He writes, for instance:
Only a universal culture can come to terms with the world, never parochial cultures, never those who live only on fragments of existence. Only he who knows how to reach deeper, beyond the homeland, only he for whom the homeland is but one of the revelations in an eternal and universal life, will not be incited to anarchy by the loss of his homeland. The loss of a homeland will not disturb the internal order of only those whose homeland is the world. Contemporary history has turned out to be too violent and borderless for literatures too national and specific.
This idea of prioritizing our “humanness” to transcend our assigned national identities has stuck with me ever since. Maybe it was because I never felt at “home” anywhere and felt deep down that I was in a kind of perpetual exile, even when I am back in Turkey, that I felt a need to go beyond my assumed identities of “Turkish,” “male,” or “immigrant” and try to become a “human being” above everything else. And the best way I could find to do this was to steep myself in the classics.
I also soon came to realize that this meant that I would need to broaden my perspective and not limit myself only to the books written by male authors from the “Western” world (something that we sadly often tend to do), but diversify the canon as much as I could.
I know that what I set out to do for myself is bound to be a long and probably never-ending journey. And what better guide could I ask for to lead me on this path than the classics?
Until next time!
This is a very nice piece and joins my tendencies now too to privilege the classics. But I also am trying to find what are the classics of other civilizations. Like for the Chinese I know that "Journey to the West" is one of them, but what is the classic canon for Islamic countries
Can we say, though, that a "canon" of literature is truly diverse if it remains fixed in genre? If all the varied people we see are still doing the same things, living out the same scenarios? Classical works are certainly worthy of our attention, and one can argue that the attrition of the ages makes it likely that the average "classic" work is of a higher quality than the average contemporary work, but this is only an artifact of the way these works come to us, not an inherent trait. If you say that you focus on classic or canonical works because you want to, because the context of their canonicity makes them interesting to you, that is a framework I can easily accept. But I will never agree that these supposed classics have some inherent quality that I must bow to.