'To Think, to Read, to Meditate, to React'

Often, I think of the late Adam Zagajewski urging young poets – and by extension, the rest of us -- to “read everything.” The suggestion is not dictatorial. The Pole even admits he is a “chaotic reader,” as most of us are. I’ve never been systematic about much of anything and inevitably there are embarrassing holes in my education. Call it the Autodidact Syndrome. When it comes to books, we never know in advance what will come in handy, which volume will help solve a problem we didn’t know we were asking. Here is Zagajewski the literary cheerleader: 

“Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry, sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t yet understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.”

 

Zagajewski’s enthusiasm is almost embarrassing but the juggernaut of aliteracy and the threat it poses to Western Civilization may already be irreversible. My friend Cynthia Haven published an interview with Zagajewski not long after his death in 2021 in which she reminds him of his “read everything” essay. He replies:   

 

“What can I say? I’m in favor of reading and taking into consideration past writers. But you know, I don’t know ancient Greek, my Latin almost doesn’t exist; I’m not one of those lofty professors who know everything and terrorize others with their perfect erudition. What’s important is to think, to read, to meditate, to react, to be imaginative. Sometimes a reduced reading list, if given strong attention, can be better than a classical education when pursued somewhat mechanically. Of course I want the past writers to persist but first of all I want thinking and being moved by intelligent texts to persist.”

 

Good advice. Don’t be intimidated by the vastness of the reading list. Choose a volume someone once mentioned he enjoyed or that had a strong emotional or intellectual impact on him. Say, the Life of Johnson, Richard Wilbur’s poems, Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, a novel by P.G. Wodehouse or Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Read it and see where it carries you.