"Why I Write" (1946) by George Orwell

From http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/why-i-write.htm :

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious — i.e. seriously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had 'chair-like teeth'— a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's 'Tiger, Tiger'. At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished 'nature poems' in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d’occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my 'story' ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: 'He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf', etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The 'story' must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. 

The lines from Paradise Lost,

So hee with difficulty and labour hard

Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose.— Using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By nature — taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained when you are first adult — I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my dilemma:

I am the worm who never turned,

The eunuch without a harem;

Between the priest and the commissar

I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune

While the radio plays,

But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,

For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

And woke to find it true;

I wasn't born for an age like this;

Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art'. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. 'Why did you put in all that stuff?' he said. 'You've turned what might have been a good book into journalism.' What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

The Story of Zopyrus, True or False?

The Story of Zopyrus,  True or False?

From the book The Histories by Herodotus.  Translated by Robin Waterfield with an Introduction and Notes by Carolyn DeWald.  First published in 1998 by Oxford University Press.

Book Three

p. 231
In the context of this prediction, Zopyrus came to the conclusion that Babylon could now be captured; after all, a god must have guided the man to say what he said, and his own mule to give birth.
Having come to the conclusion that Babylon was destined to fall now, he went to Darius and asked him how important the capture of Babylon was to him.  Darius replied that it was very important to him, so Zopyrus next began to try to find a way whereby he could be the one to bring about the fall of Babylon, as his own achievement, because among the Persians a high value is placed on services to the king, and those who perform them are greatly honored. Now, the only plan he came up with which would enable him to make the city his involved him maiming himself and defecting to the Babylonians. So he coolly gave himself crippling, permanent injuries: he cut off his own nose and ears, roughly shaved his head, and flogged himself. Then he went to Darius.

Darius was very shocked at the sight of a man of Zopyrus' standing with such terrible injuries. He jumped up from his throne with a cry and asked who it was who had disfigured him and why.  Zopyrus said, 'No one did it to me my lord; after all, you are the only person who could.  I did it to myself, because I think it's dreadful to have Assyrians mocking Persians.'

'No, that won't do at all,' Darius replied.  'To claim that you have given yourself these permanent injuries as a way of doing something about the people we are besieging is to gloss over the utter vileness of your deed. It's just stupid to think that your injuries might hasten our opponents' surrender.  You must be out of your mind to have disfigured yourself like this.'

'If I'd told you what I was intending to do,' Zopyrus said, 'you'd have stopped me. Instead, I took it upon myself to act. And the result is that we will now capture Babylon, as long as you don't let me down.  Here is the plan. I will go as I am to the city wall as a deserter, claiming that it was you who mutilated me like this. I am confident that, once I have convinced them of the truth of my claims, they will give me a military command. What you have to do is this. Ten days after I have entered the city, post a thousand expendable men opposite the Gate of Semiramis. Then, seven days later, post another two thousand men opposite the Gate of the People of Ninus. After an interval of another twenty days, take another four thousand men and station them opposite the Gate of the Chaldeans. Neither the first two groups nor this last contingent are to have any means of defense except their daggers; that's all you must let them have. Then, the very next day, order the rest of your men to attack the walls from all sides, but post the Persian troops opposite the Belian and Cissian Gates. I think my substantial achievements will have won me the Babylonians' complete confidence---and in particular that they will have given me the keys of the city gates to look after.  After that, it will be up to me and the Persians to do what needs doing.'

After issuing these instructions, he made his way to the gates of Babylon, looking over his shoulder all the time as if he really were a genuine deserter. The look-outs posted on the towers spotted him, ran down, opened one of the gates a crack, and asked him who he was and what he had come for. He answered that he was Zopyrus and that he was deserting to their side. At this, the gatekeepers took him to the Babylonian council, where he stood forth and complained to them about his sufferings. He blamed Darius for his self-inflicted injuries, and claimed that he had received them as a punishment for advising Darius to draw off his forces, when there seemed no way to take the city.  'Men of Babylon,' he said, 'my presence here will be a huge boon to you---and a huge bane to Darius and his army. He will certainly not get away with mutilating me like this. I know his plans inside out.'  That, or something like it, is what he said.

The sight of one of the most distinguished Persians without his nose and ears and covered with blood and welts from being flogged inclined the Babylonians to believe that he was telling the truth and had come as their ally, and they were happy to entrust him with everything he asked of them---and he asked them for an army.  Once they had given it to him, he put into action the plan he had arranged with Darius.  On the tenth day he led his Babylonian forces out of the city, surrounded the thousand troops he had told Darius to deploy first, and massacred them.  When the Babylonians realized that he was as good as his word, they were absolutely delighted and were willing to do anything he told them. After an interval of the agreed number of days, he again led out a select body of troops and massacred the 2,000-strong contingent of Darius' men.  Following this second achievement, praise of Zopyrus could constantly be heard throughout Babylon on everyone's lips. Once again, after an interval of the agreed number of days, he led his men out to the pre-arranged spot, and surrounded and massacred the four thousand.  This feat, on top of his earlier exploits, made Zopyrus the leading light of Babylon, and he was appointed commander-in-chief of the army and also put in charge of the defense of the city walls.

At the agreed time, Darius had his men attack the city wall from all sides---and then the full extent of Zopyrus' guile was revealed. While the Babylonians were busy defending the city from the walls against the onslaughts of Darius' army, Zopyrus flung open the Cissian and Belian Gates and let the Persians into the city. Some of the Babylonians saw what he had done and managed to take refuge in the sanctuary of Zeus as Bel, but those who did not remained at their posts until they too realized that they had been betrayed.

So that is how Babylon fell for the second time.  Now that the Babylonians were in his power, Darius demolished the city wall and tore down all its gates (both of which were actions Cyrus had failed to do when he had taken Babylon earlier), and he also had about three thousand of the most prominent men impaled on stakes; however, he returned the city to the remaining Babylonians and let them live there. As was explained earlier, the Babylonians had strangled their wives to ensure that they had enough to eat; so in order to make sure that they would have enough women to have offspring, Darius ordered all the nearby peoples to send women to Babylon, and gave each a quota, which resulted in a grand total of fifty thousand women congregating there.  Today's Babylonians are descended from these women.

To Darius' mind, no Persian ever performed a greater act of service than Zopyrus---no one ever did later, and no one ever had before, except Cyrus---no Persian would ever compare himself with Cyrus.  It is said that Darius often expressed the opinion that he would prefer to see Zopyrus without his injuries than gain twenty more Babylons.  He valued Zopyrus a great deal.  Every year he presented him with the most precious items in Persia, and among a number of other gifts, he gave him Babylon to be his own domain, free of taxes, for as long as he  should live.  The Megabyzus who commanded the forces against Athens and her allies in Egypt was the son of this Zopyrus; and the Zopyrus who deserted from the Persians to Athens was the son of this Megabyzus.


Zopyrus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Zopyrus   (ca. 500 BC) was a Persian nobleman mentioned in Herodotus' Histories.

He was son of Megabyzus, who helped Darius I in his ascension. When Babylon revolted against the rule of Darius I, Zopyrus devised a plan to regain control of the vital city. By cutting off his own nose and ears, and then having himself whipped, he arrived at the court of Darius. He told the ruler of his plan: He would go before the people of Babylon and proclaim himself an exile punished by Darius. Gaining the Babylonians' trust, Zopyrus soon became commander-in-chief of their army, allowing him to weaken the city's defenses. With this, Darius' armies victoriously reconquered the city. Zopyrus was made satrap (provincial governor).

The veracity (truth) of this story is debatable.  First, the story resembles Homer's description of Odysseus, who spied on Troy after mutilating himself. Second, no cuneiform sources mention Zopyrus as satrap of Babylon.

According to Herodotus, Zopyrus had a son named Megabyzus.

Of What Use the Classics Today? by Jacques Barzun in 1987

From "A Jacques Barzun Reader." Copyright © 2002 by Jacques Barzun. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, NY.

p. 412  Of What Use the Classics Today?

Obviously the first service that a classic does is to connect the past with the present by stirring up feelings akin to those that once moved human beings---people who were in part very much like ourselves and in part very unlike. That is an interesting experience in itself---as interesting as traveling to Tibet or studying the home life of the kangaroo.  It is in fact travel, travel in time as well as in space.

But before going on with the other uses of the classics, we should perhaps ask, "What 'is' a classic?"  Many definitions have been given, which involve such words as "universal" and "permanent." I distrust what they imply. The merest reflection shows that a classic in one country is hardly known in another---therefore not universal. Certainly the classics of the Far East do not exist as such in the Western world. And the Far East is not very far off---it begins in Russia, where, for instance, Pushkin's 'Eugen Onegin' is a very great classic. How many people know it over here? Only specialists, like those who know the classics of India, China, and Japan. So much for universality. As for permanence, history is there to tell us that over the centuries the great writers change in value like the dollar or the pound. Who today thinks of Cicero as a tremendous literary figure? Yet he was the idol of the Renaissance. And where was John Donne before T. S. Eliot and his followers made him their master? Shakespeare himself was canonized only 150 years ago by the Romantic poets and critics.

So our first notion about a classic should be that it is a variable designation: it is applied, or can be applied, to works that possess a certain potential of classicality. And it follows that there is no set number of classics---not one hundred or one thousand---no definitive list, even though today in the West a very small group of works have held their own for about four hundred years. This is what has given the illusion of permanence. But there are thousands of works in many languages that are or could be treated as classics.

The question, then, shifts to what makes a work potentially a classic. Here one can point with more assurance to certain features. The first is "thickness," as Henry James called it, referring not to the width of the book on the shelf, but rather to the density of its discourse: much is going on in every line or paragraph; every sentence contains an idea; the whole work covers acres of thought and feeling; whereas the ordinary book, no matter how thick in physical measurement, pegs away at one or two little matters---anything from 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' to any of the recent discussions of Japanese industry. Likewise, the poems and novels of our daily fare may be enjoyable or instructive, but they do not recast for us the whole world into a new shape. They throw a few glancing lights on what we already know or suspect.

A second mark of the classic might be called its adaptability. When first launched, it fits an existing situation, perhaps an existing demand. Homer's 'Iliad' was doubtless in request by the descendants of the conquerors of Troy. It entertained and flattered them to hear the tale of past glory, not too far in the past. Or, jumping to a much later book and a different situation, the English Civil Wars prompted Hobbes to write "The Leviathan' as a guide to political action. The work suited neither side in the struggle, but that doesn't matter---it did fit the actual predicament, though partisans could not see it.

Today, that same work fits the recurring situation of nationwide disorder and compels us to think not only about the nature of the state, but about the nature of man. For Hobbes begins with a short treatise on psychology. A classic's thickness makes it serve more than its original purpose. It is owing to this capacity that the classics come and go at different times. Shakespeare did not suit the Augustan age (relating to or denoting Latin literature of the reign of Augustus, including the works of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Livy), because he was irregular, wild, and ignorant of all that mattered to the Age of Reason.  But to the Romanticists who came next, these very defects became great qualities, and Shakespeare was rapidly promoted a classic.

The successive situations that a classic must fit are not of the same kind: the first time it is usually the state of society at the moment; later, it is probably the state of mind of artists and thinkers in search of what Coleridge called "elements that are wanted." These elements, to be sure, have some relation to society, but it is never the general public that digs out, or as we say, revives, the neglected, half-forgotten classic.

This fact leads us to the third requisite that a classic must have---another obvious one: it must gather to itself enough votes to be openly, publicly 'called' a classic. The number required is indefinite, of course, and the vote is never unanimous. There is always, about every classic, an unconvinced minority. For example, in each generation many scholars think Virgil's 'Aeneid' a feeble plagiarism of Homer, just as in the eighteenth century many believed Homer a barbaric sketch that Virgil had wonderfully perfected. Today, there are plenty of people who think Shakespeare a mediocre playwright, beginning with the theater people who produce him, since they cut, change, add, and generally spice up his plays with novelties before they let us see them on the stage. But an opposition, no matter how large, is usually silent.

One last point about classics; after a work or an author has been voted in, it is the academic community that records the vote and prolongs the term of office. Generally, one masterpiece is chosen as 'the classic' by the given author and it is made compulsory reading. Editions with notes and introductions are published and thrust into the hands of the young, who suffer or not, depending on the teacher. In either case, the label is fixed in the minds of the next generation; no doubt is possible: Shakespeare, Milton, Keats; Homer, Virgil, Dante; Twain, Melville, Poe; Dickens, Fielding, Swift are classics for the English-speaking world---today. By a further wrinkle, there is often a discrepancy between academic and what is called critical opinion. In my youth, Dickens was still read in high school, but leading critics thought him an inferior novelist. He has made a comeback, thanks to a few critics, followed by most, but not all, of the others. The main body is made up of sheep, led by a shepherd and a barking dog.

By now you are doubtless impatient to get to the further uses of the classics, beyond the first one I mentioned, that of establishing a live link with the past. To understand the next use required our going into the nature of a classic, because this second use is: to teach how to read. I mean "read" in the honorific sense of read intelligently and thoroughly. Because a classic is thick and full, and because it arose out of a past situation, it is hard to read. The mental attitude and attention that are good enough for reading the newspaper and most books will not work. We read ordinary matter by running the eye over the print at a steady rate, rarely stopping to think or wonder. The material was chosen and written precisely for this rapid, effortless pace. This easy progress is habit-forming and that is why the overwhelming majority everywhere, including most of the college educated, read only contemporary books, and of these only the read-as-you-run. In college these people may have struggled with a handful of classics and escaped unaffected, but more probably the curriculum was adapted to their tastes, and the readings in English and American literature were of the current sort. Then, once a B.A.---good-bye to all that!

But why, after all, learn to read differently by tackling the classics?  The answer is simple: in order to live in a wider world. Wider than what?  Wider than the one that comes through the routine of our material lives and through the paper and the factual magazines---Psychology Today, House and Garden, Sports Illustrated; wider also than friends' and neighbors' plans and gossip; wider especially than one's business or profession. For nothing is more narrowing than one's own shop, and it grows ever more so as one bends the mind and energies to succeed. This is particularly true today, when each profession has become a cluster of specialties continually subdividing. A lawyer is not a jurist, he is a tax lawyer, or a dab at trusts and estates. The work itself is a struggle with a mass of jargon, conventions, and numbers that have no meaning outside the specialty. The whole modern world moves among systems and abstractions superimposed on reality, a vast make-believe, though its results are real enough in one's life if one does not know and follow these ever-shifting rules of the game.

Since it is a game and a make-believe, anybody who wants access to human life and its possibilities---to thoughts and feelings as they occur natively or by deep reflection---must use another channel. One such channel can be cut by using the classics of literature and philosophy; a second can be made through the fine arts and music. I say "made" and "cut" not "found," because of that "thickness" to which I keep coming back. The great works do not yield their cargo on demand; but if one reads them with concentration (for one "reads" works of art too), the effort gives us possession of a vast store of vicarious (indirect) experience; we come face to face with the whole range of perception that mankind has attained and that is denied by our unavoidably artificial (manufactured) existence.  Through this experience we escape from the prison cell, professional or business or suburban.  It is like gaining a second life.  Dr. Johnson, who was not given to exaggeration, said that the difference between a lettered man and an unlettered was the difference between the living and the dead.  

(Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), British lexicographer, writer, critic, and conversationalist; known as Dr. Johnson.  A leading figure in the literary London of his day, he is noted particularly for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), his edition of Shakespeare (1765), and The Lives of the English Poets (1777). James Boswell's biography of Johnson records details of his life and conversation.

. . . . . . . . . . A famous anecdote makes the point. The poet Coleridge was once lecturing in London about English literature and happened to mention that Dr. Johnson, coming home one night, found a woman of the streets who had fainted and lay in the road. He picked her up and carried her on his back to his lodging, where he revived and fed her and housed her until she was well. Coleridge's fashionable audience snickered and clucked, the men amused, the women shocked. Coleridge stopped and said gravely: "I remind you of the parable of the Good Samaritan."  Ten quick words settled the murmuring. The appeal to a common cultural example, in this case from the Scriptures, had dispelled foolishness and made the crowd think and feel as one. An hour's preaching about charitableness and the virtue of forgetting conventions when human life is at stake would have had no such decisive force; it would have been explanation and apology, whereas the allusion to the Bible instantly evoked the right emotions in harness with the right ideas.

The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and, as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself. Otherwise, with the unstoppable march of specialization, the individual mind is doomed to solitude and the individual heart to drying up. The mechanical devices that supposedly bring us together---television and the press, the telephone and the computer network---do so on a level and in a manner that are anything but nourishing to the spirit. Even the highbrow programs on television present literature and history in garbled forms; the medium requires that costume, scenery, and moving vehicles upstage philosophy. What is worth noting is that the public seems to be vaguely aware of this great void: programs high and low are falling in popularity and the suppliers are in trouble.

From one who feels deprived in this way, recourse to the classics requires nothing new; it does not call for superhuman powers. To earlier generations, books were as natural a source of information and entertainment as broadcasts are to the young today. It was the urge to learn from books that made the common people clamor for education; they were willing to pay for public schools so that everybody could read and write. Rising in the world was a strong motive, but the satisfaction of curiosity about life was another. William Dean Howells tells us in his autobiography how people felt about books in his native town on the Ohio around 1840. The river steamer would come up to the pier every so often---nobody knew exactly when---and amid goods of all kinds would unload a barrel of books. Within a few minutes these books would have been sold. The buyers were farmers and small tradesmen who had never been to high school, let alone college. Howells's self-education, like Lincoln's, came from these books.

What constitutes today the cultural heritage which formerly was automatically taken as known by people who were educated and who educated others? The quandary is real, because of the large number of classics piled up during the last five hundred years, and because the study of the languages needed to read the ancients has virtually ceased. Being troubled by this uncertainty, three thoughtful and learned persons have recently drawn up an inventory of nearly five thousand facts, names, ideas, and technical terms required for cultural literacy. that is their term for the minimum portion of the heritage they think adequate to maintain a national culture.

Having made and published the list, they are now at work on a dictionary that will explain the five thousand terms. This double effort is praiseworthy; it should call attention to the spread of a damaging ignorance. But the remedy seems more mechanical than educative. To learn "the facts" about Aristotle and Luther and Alexander Hamilton and 4,997 others, all in the air, so to speak, would be a gigantic feat of memorization, whereas to learn these facts and much else while studying history and reading the classics is by comparison very easy. The facts then stick in the mind like the names of the streets around your house: you never set out to learn them, they come as part of your direct acquaintance with the place. This difference seems to me all-important; and it points to another use of the classics: they educate you as you read---provided you read them in the right manner and at the right time. Consider this last condition: when and how should the classics enter our lives?  I have said that the classics cannot be read like a magazine article. It takes some form of compulsion to get started, and often the eager starter bogs down in difficulties. To give help, therefore, and to apply the steady pressure, coaching is necessary. Hence the classics must be met and conquered at latest in college.

At latest: the really appropriate time would be the last two years of high school, when the onset of maturing stirs feelings and thoughts about the meaning of life and the nature of society. Our obtuse (slow-witted) educational experts would be astonished to see how passionately a group of perfectly average fifteen-year-olds can be brought to discuss Machiavelli's 'Prince' or the 'Confessions of St. Augustine.'  But the opportunity is missed, and college offers the last chance of initiating the habit of reading and enjoying solid books.

Having so far sketched the advantages to be derived from the classics---their enlargement of the spirit by vicarious experience, their use as a medium of rapid and comprehensive communication, their influence in building a Self and strengthening the judgment---I am bound before closing to add a word of caution. Like all good things, the classics can be misused.

Studying the classics can wind up in mere bookishness. Their contents will have been absorbed faithfully and accurately, but the mind that holds them seems unable to get outside its acquisition and use it. If this is not due to an incurable flaw of the mind, it is due to teaching that has trained perception and left out imagination. By imagination I do not mean undirected fancy or daydreaming. I mean imagining the real, making a successful effort to reconstruct from words on a page what past lives, circumstances, and feelings were like. This ability does not come to everybody by nature, but any germ of it can be developed by practice after teaching has shown the way. It is anything but unchecked speculation.  To imagine---say---the life of a medieval serf, one's ideas must conform to a large number of facts found in the sources as well as catch somehow an impalpable (intangible, untouchable) atmosphere. Usually, one must first unlearn the many thought-cliches absorbed from miscellaneous reading, bad films, and cheap romances.

Imaginative understanding is what enables the mind to transfer its knowledge to new situations. The England of 'Tom Jones,' the Russia of 'War and Peace' are gone, but the tribulations of Tom and of Pierre can still serve as touchstones in the present, provided our imagination clearly sees how the growth of a young soul has been changed by a changed state of society and how it has remained the same.

Again, for this play of the imagination the works themselves must be read and read whole, not the summaries in reference books. Only at this price can the mind form true and distinct images. If, for example, one goes to essays or handbooks on "The Legacy of Greece," Homer, Plato, Thucydides, and the rest merge into an idyllic (Utopian) picture of a joyful pagan people, all connoisseurs of fine art and expert mathematicians. The developed imagination rejects such a picture at sight. It knows that such things cannot be, because it has acquired the power of seeing the world in three dimensions---fact, connotations (qualities), and general truth or probability.  The mind does not get stuck in the first or second position. [The mind goes all the way to the general truth or probability].

To develop in the young this power to move freely among perceptions, teachers must exhibit it themselves. They must of course know how to prevent misconceptions and how to coax and cheer the weaker spirits over the hurdles. But if they happen to be specialists, they must not abandon the readings to teach the scholarship that relates to them. Some of the results of scholarship may be brought in to shed occasional light on and around the work, but the work is there to shed its own light; it is not material for dissection or dissertation.  And everything in it may be usefully related to the world and to the Self (soul); it is the role of the imagination to forge the links.

No doubt there are dangers in this free open realm as in every other. It is easy to talk nonsense and make false connections. But the reward is not in doubt: it is pleasure, renewable at will.  That pleasure is the ultimate use of the classics. All the great judges of human existence have said so, from Milton, who called reading "conversation with the master spirits," to Virginia Woolf, who imagined the Almighty saying to St. Peter about some newcomers to heaven: "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. . . . They have loved reading."  I can only add one thing: it is always time to stop repeating the wise sayings and begin to believe them.