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Books That Made You Go Hmmmm….
In this week’s Podcast From Hell, Rob Long made the stunning admission that he never read the Italian side of his college Dante book – putting his Ivy bona fides in severe jeopardy. This admission came during an interview with Rod Dreher, author of How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem.
In this interview, Rod mentions how, during a dark period of his life, he was struck by the opening lines of the Inferno:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark
And thus begins an extraordinary work. For my money, the greatest work.
I first sat down with the Divine Comedy in my mid-30s. My 20s were a rather hellish period. In and out of college, struggling with depression, lonely, lost… but moving. Forward. In those years, I had sown the seeds of intellectual and spiritual growth. By 30, I had begun to seek out the wisdom of the Great Books. My efforts were scattershot and the journey difficult.
Then I picked up Inferno. Difficult, but familiar.
I pushed on. Purgatorio. These lines:
And he to me: “This mount is such, that ever
At the beginning down below ’tis tiresome,
And aye the more one climbs, the less it hurts.
These lines at that moment. This is where I was. The lines required no memorization. They were instantly memorable to me.
Everything before these lines was familiar. Everything after these lines was where I was going.
An extraordinary moment. Purgatorio: Canto 4. Unforgettable.
Have you a memorable book moment?
Published in General
“Lorie darlin’, life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life. If you want any one thing too badly, it’s likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself.”
I read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove in the last few days of summer my junior year of high school, in between double sessions for soccer. I would come home from the morning session, read for 4 hours, go back for the afternoon, and read when I cam home until I feel asleep. I think I read the book in 4 days. The richness of the story jumped out at me, and for all the reading a had done to date- nothing ever took hold of me like that book. I was thrilled to finally understand what people who loved to read were talking about.
Best book ever.
Guess I’ll keep trying. . .
“Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.”
From the days when childrens’ books did not talk down to them, when they had plots with consequences, when right and wrong were distinct and knowable, and when the semicolon still ruled.
The Fatal Conceit by Hayek. It gave me a jolt, delivering a ‘why’ for the widespread distrust of freedom. Atlas Shrugged for, weirdly, giving me permission to abandon the enterprise in which I’d been engaged for a couple of years: attempting to believe in God. The forcefulness in Galt’s seventy page speech brought me to re-assess this struggle to believe, this unanswered act of faith. I allowed myself to stop. Oh, what a relief!
As a child and teen, I was formed significantly by Robert A Heinlein’s novels. Not one in particular, but the overall sense of individuality, self-reliance, loyalty, rationality, suspicion of authority. I hadn’t put it together into the conservatively inclined libertarian I now am, but he fertilised the field and planted the seeds.
“I shall always be grateful for the woman and the child who were not remarkable in any way but for a moment seemed mine.”
—James Branch Cabell in Something about Eve (I think—it’s been forty years since I read a lot of Cabell).