The Great Conversation

Browsing through Chapters the other day I noticed that another bookshelf had vanished. The situation with books is not as dire as with the recorded music business, but there are fewer titles in stock as the years go by. The classical and jazz sections in A&B Sound shrank again a few months ago and I can't find the SACDs at all. I can neither afford the price of books, or find a place to put them in my little apartment so when I see something new I want to read I check for it at the library. And I have been known to read a book right in the store. I got through Steve Wozniak's memoirs in an afternoon. I didn't feel guilty, he's got lots of money and anyway he's a liberal minded guy. Good book, though. Another I read there a few years ago and enjoyed immensely was Flame of Pure Fire, a biography of Jack Dempsey, the famous heavyweight boxing champion of about 75 years ago. More than a biography, it was about how tough someone had to be to survive in those days.
But usually I prefer meatier reading and have a policy of only buying books I will read regularly and refer to often. I read the Odyssey about once a year, Parsifal and Herodotus, too. When I'm in the mood for a rousing adventure story Xenophon's Persian Expedition is hard to beat. A Greek army is hired under false pretenses by a Persian noble who wants to use them to help him sieze the throne from his brother. Cyrus dies in a battle and the Greeks, not too popular with the king they were there to usurp was none too happy with there presence, leaving them stranded somewhere not far from present day Baghdad, abandoned by their former Persian allies who have skidadelled, their generals killed through treachery. What do they do? Read it to find out from a narrative written by one of the participants. It's a long walk home.
I have a few anthologies of poetry and philosophy I often refer to. Some pedants dislike the idea of anthologies (from a Greek word meaning flowers) but too much poetry and philosophy has been written for a mere mortal like me to plow through it all so I appreciate the zeal and scholarship of the dedicated souls who assemble them. And I am often led thereby to investigate an author further thanks to his good work.
A poem is a thing best read when it catches you unawares. A good poem is savored and should be memorized so you can roll it around, listen to its music and ponder it at leisure. Donne's "Air and Angels" is one of my favourites. Twice or thrice have I loved you before I knew thy face and name/ So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame angels affect us oft and worshiped be. The prologue to the Canterbury Tales I like to recite when spring approaches, rolling my r's as if I was from Inverness: When that Aprille with its showeres Sweet the drought of March hath pierced to the root and so on.
Philosophy is much harder for me, not because I'm not interested in the topics. Au contraire, when I encounter some of these subtle and profound ideas my little noggin explodes at every line. I have objections, arguments. And every philosopher seems to invent his own language of terms and definitions that has to be deciphered before much sense can be made of it. This is especially true of 20th Century philosophers who are so dense and obtuse as to be virtually impenetrable. And the question that arises when attempting to read them is of course, "Is this crap going to be a total waste of my time and effort?" Because it seldom looks very promising. So I rely on the selections made by anthologists when I want to explore the thought of a philosopher new to me. I do think it's far better to get it straight from the horse's mouth rather than through somebody elses idea of what is being said.
I noticed on my browse through Chapters that Penguin has added a Great Journeys series to their Great Ideas series. I haven't read any of those yet but the teasers on the cover are tempting. Mark Twain, at the Moulin Rouge: Heavens! Nothing like it has been seen on earth...I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers." But the Great Ideas is an admirable collection covering a multitude of finely chosen essays from philosophers, saints and assrted essayists. Schopenhauer, Nietszsche (I can never spell his name), Ruskin, Marcus Aurelius (one of Rome's great emperors and a philosopher of the Stoic school: A little flesh, a little breath, and a reason to rule...that is myself), George Orwell (Political Language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind)
This is The Great Conversation in action and there is no more exciting game, sometimes taking the form of music, sometimes art or architecture, sometimes ideas, sometimes religion, but it's the real thing, the big leagues. It makes football, hockey, mountain climbing, and even sex seem dull and boring. Over the ages men have starved, fought, frozen, for the sake of the Great Conversation. For the sake of Marx probably 100,000,000 people died in the last century to explore the significance of his ideas. Every society is an expression of some facet of it. We are now living in an era molded largely by the idea of Nietszche that God is dead. And it is a man's game, the only game in town that really matters. In a very real way we inhabit the brains of Nietszche, Marx, Plato, Muhammed, St Paul. We see through the eyes of Rembrandt, Degas, DaVinci, hear through the ears of Beethoven or Alice Cooper. It matters, seriously and grievously matters. It's best that we can at least read the program.
These little Penguin volumes are only ten bucks each, or three for the price of two and they will help. But they are hard work, too, like training for a triathelon is hard work. Now, it's a peculiarity of our time that treasure troves of music, poetry, philosophy can be had by anybody for the price of a couple of big macs. It's as if on one table someone was offering for sale some flashy glass beads, and at an adjacent table someone else was offering for sale diamonds and rubies. Or if you had a choice of eating moldy bread and dirty dishwater or roast turkey and all the trimmings. And it turns out that most people prefer the coloured glass beads or the moldy bread when they could have the other.