'Let Us Read Only the Dead Men'

Another happy convergence: While reading G.K. Chesterton’s “History Versus the Historians” (Lunacy and Letters, 1958), I came upon this:

“Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.”

Let’s concede that Chesterton was a provocateur who couldn’t breathe without exhaling a pertinent paradox or two. But a visit to most any public library substantiates his claim. The 800 shelves are clogged not with poems and essays but commentaries, exegeses, explications and plain old criticism. Libraries ought to be pleasure domes of serendipity where readers – especially young readers – happen upon good books independently. Never underestimate the lasting power of self-discovery. It beats what a teacher or critic tells you every time. Were an alien anthropologist to visit one of our public libraries, he would assume that books were invented in, approximately, 2015. The past (including all of our culture’s best books) has been erased.

A friend who is about my age is reading Buddenbrooks, a novel I haven’t read in forty-eight years. He consumed the first one hundred pages or so in a single setting Thursday morning, and he’s having a good time.

“I was enthralled,” he writes, “the way I was when I was ten and read John R. Tunis’s book All-American. I think we sometimes forget the fun of getting lost in a book, the almost sublime feeling, immersed in words, so much so that the vastness of the universe shrinks to one man in a room with a book. Though it’s an illusion, one is to some degree outside of the machinations and strictures and melancholy tunes of Time.”

Serious readers know the feeling, one that can be repeated daily:

“Sure, I’ve read Mann’s book before, but as you say, the books we love are worth reading again and again. God knows how many times I’ve read Swann’s Way. Buddenbrooks affects me the way Anna Karenina does. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

The last book read (that is, reread) by William Maxwell (dead at ninety-one) and Simon Leys (dead at seventy-eight) was, sensibly enough, War and Peace.