'Before the Clouds Darken the Horizon'

A longtime reader, a retired attorney in Philadelphia, writes: 

“[A]n intrusive suggestion for a blog post: what books MUST your readers read before reaching the end zone? Or what have they required themselves to read before the clouds darken the horizon? Also, anent the above, do your readers shape their day around their reading ? Quite simply, in what works do readers discover ‘Joy in the Morning’?”

 

The “MUST” part annoys me but I get the idea. Reading is strictly a laissez faire way of life. I always resent being told what I must read, though I’m wide open to interesting suggestions. I’d like to think that everyone will get around to reading Proust. I do keep a mental list of writers and books I intend someday to read. In no particular order:

 

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, William James’ Principles of Psychology, George Santayana’s The Last Puritan, Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, at least a couple of Anthony Trollope’s novels, Winston Churchill’s The River War.

 

Like other resolutions, this list is probably  a delusion, exposing my childish, deeply selfish strategies for reading. I’ve never had anything like Clifton Fadiman’s “Lifetime Reading Plan.” The way I read is so subjective, so curiously unpredictable even to me, that not reading any of these books will not surprise me. I’ve set out to read in their entirety, chronologically, the works of only two writers: Shakespeare and Melville. But I was young and had bottomless energy. By chance, also on Saturday, I happened on an interview with the poet Aaron Poochigian. Asked to name a book everyone ought to read, he replies:

 

“It’s thick, but I would recommend the English poet W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems. It’s like a Bible for living in our contemporary world. He turns the British idioms of his day into incantatory magic. He captures the Zeitgeists of the several ages he lived through. Still more, he was so clearly a good person. His conscience spoke loudly in him, and he refused to become desensitized to violence and other vices that recur in the human condition.”

 

Poochigian says Yeats’ The Tower had the biggest influence on him: “W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin are my heroes. Yeats is my god. When I assess the merits of my own work, I ask myself, ‘Is this poem good enough to be in Yeats’ Tower.’ He is my weathervane and lighting rod.”

 

He tells us he is rereading Shakespeare: “I started with the earliest plays, the ones about the Wars of the Roses. I have just finished Henry VI, Part III. It gives me great pleasure to see Shakespeare emerge as a genius as I make my way chronologically through his works.”