'Seven Books'

“Decline and Fall is still worth reading, not just for historiographical, literary, and psychological reasons, but also for what we still learn from it about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire through the eyes of a highly talented person who spent long years reading and thinking about it.”

Nicholas Tate refers not to Evelyn Waugh’s first novel but to Edward Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). Tate is the stubborn sort of reader who sees no reason why we shouldn’t read the books that nourished our forebears, who kept them in print for centuries.

 

Last month I wrote about a friend who is reading Gibbon’s masterwork for the first time, and he has sent along an interim report on the experience. “I’m reading the book in the [David] Wormsley edition, as you suggested,” he writes. “I’m going about it systematically and reading 10 pages or so every evening, after dinner. I’m taking notes and looking up a lot of information on the internet as I’m reading. I look forward to this time every day.” Precisely the sort of news I like to hear.

 

I stumbled on a pdf of Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. I know nothing about Tate but I suspect there’s a story behind his choice of that imprint. I’ve only skimmed portions of the book but already I admire his resolve and scholarship. Here are the other books he devotes chapters to:

 

On Duties (44 B.C.), Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

Parallel Lives (early second century A.D.), Plutarch

 

The Consolations of Philosophy (524-525 A.D.), Boethius

 

Le Morte Darthur (1469-70), Thomas Malory

 

The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), John Bunyan

 

Waverley (1814), Walter Scott

 

Nothing exotic or arguably obscure. The only volume I’ve not read is Malory’s, mostly because I’ve never had much interest in the Arthurian legends. To his credit, Tate several times refers to Theodore Dalrymple’s These Spindrift Pages (Mirabeau, 2023), which he refers to as “a book about the thoughts that spring from looking through the books in the author’s library, reminisces about second-hand bookshops and books he has bought with traces of their previous owners.” Tate is never scolding or snobbish. He loves these books, of course, but more importantly he knows our ancestors did as well. Their endorsement speaks to us. I plan to read Seven Books in its entirety. In a chapter titled “Why the ‘Great Unread’?” Tate writes:

 

“We have also moved away from a society with an educated class associated with the fostering of a ‘high culture’, and permeated by the Aristotelian idea that the superior life is the life of thought, to one that Mario Vargas Llosa has described as a ‘civilisation of spectacle’, in which cultural objects are assumed to be ephemeral (como el popcorn), exist solely for purposes of entertainment and are evaluated in terms of their financial success, and in which the old notion of cultural hierarchies has largely been lost.”

 

[Tate refers to Vargas Llosa’s La civilización del espectáculo (2012).]