Its late, but as many of you know, this is when my brain functions at its best. Usually my papers are churned out at the hours between twelve and three. There is fervent praying, reading and re-reading, and of course caffeine consumption. However, I was just reading through the magazine The Week and decided to comment on books chosen by this week's selector of must read books, director James Toback. I don't think I will be viewing Mr. Toback's upcoming film; and to be honest I am not sure I am interested in his previous work. However, it is impossible for me to overlook his taste in literature.
But, I am getting ahead of myself. Let me explain about all of this. The Week is a magazine that attempts to synthesize and paraphrase the news reporting from the week.1 Among its articles is a section where a personality (usually an author) describes his or her favorite books. This week's picks were selected by the afore mentioned James Toback, who is directing the upcoming film "Tyson". His selections were of works that he had used in his movies. While he never goes into depth about what each and every book is about, he takes a different tack and shows how he used them in his film.
I personally am a fan of four of the six author's mentioned, but I have only read two of the works mentioned. These authors are Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Shakespeare, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Oscar Wilde. Their selected works are Notes From Underground, Hamlet, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol respectively. I am not trying to say anything here except this. You should go and read these works. (I know I should.) Life is too short to read the average stuff.
Between Hamlet's indecisions about life and death (and the innumerable other questions found in this brilliant work) and the Tractatus's exploration of humankind's relationship to language and words (as well as the innumerable other questions found in this brilliant work); we find authors trying to come to grips with the unknowable answers. Perhaps they are answers that we will never ever know fully. I believe they are beyond our grasp. To some this would cause fear and because it is fear, it is best left unsaid.2 Yet, one cannot totally ignore these questions and so we disdain those who ask them. We hope that maybe if we insult, cajole, and intimidate enough; the questioners will go away and with them, maybe, just maybe, so to will the questions.
However, our hatred for the questions shows our contempt for our own lives. In cursing the unknowable we are cursing the very universe in which we live. You and I do not have the answers, we just have the questions. What the questions mean is as useful and necessary as our daily job. Each day we will have to struggle at our jobs. We are defined by what we do in large degree, but at the same time we should be judged by what we think. If we think great thoughts, there is no guarantee we will be great; but if we think small thoughts, it is fairly assured that we will be small.
We talk as if we are great innovators and adventurers who push the envelopes of science and the humanities, but our fear of being wrong often relegates us to the weaklings of history. We are afraid to take the serious questions as seriously as we should; that is with the smile and joy that we approach our daily job. I think that is what Mr. Toback was trying to get across. Great novels, tracts, essays, poems, and cetera don't exist in a vacuum and never were meant to do so.3 They are to remain accessible to us at all times. We should feel a joy at being able to bring a work into the thread of a conversation. We have, so to speak, brought another voice into the the story we are trying to tell; the story of our lives.
Perhaps one of these days I'll get around to writing my top must read books, but for now I am content to give kudos to other people's selections. After all, it is very late and while my mind does work at its best during these hours, I never said it worked for very long.
- Much like the fine, and now quasi-defunct, World Press Review. While the World Press Review still exists in a way in cyber-space, it ceases to exist as the magazine that would arrive weekly in my mailbox at college. I'll never forget the day it stopped being printed and I was given U.S. News and World Reports in its stead. This is partially the reason why, to this day, I cannot tolerate U.S. News and World Reports; but most of that hatred is because the magazine finds better use in starting grill fires or composting mulch beds than as a credible periodical.
- If death were sitting before us at the dinner table we would not desire to acknowledge that he was there.
- If a book is built to stay in some lofty ivory tower, than the author is a fool. The purpose of a work is not to show what you know, but what you've learned. It should be the secret hope of every author that his or her work is surpassed and never surpassed by a member of a succeeding generation.
No comments:
Post a Comment