
Why Read the Classics? (1986) - constantinum
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/10/09/why-read-the-classics/
======
tomcam
I had to visit the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, OR many times as a kid. My
parents didn’t push attendance on me, but nor did my dad explain why
Shakespeare is so great. “It’s classic literature.” “How? What makes it better
than Isaac Asimov or the Hardy Boys?” “It’s just great literature.” I found
this frustrating and started telling people that Shakespeare should be taught
as a second language (a joke one of my college professor friends likes to
repeat even now).

Fast forward 35 years. I have come to enjoy reading Shakespeare on my own.

(Why is it great literature? Incredible prose, insane plot lines, and way way
underrated comedy. Some of the best comedy I have ever encountered is in
Shakespeare’s so-called tragedies, a situation that very much matches my own
tragedy-marred life. Reread “Hamlet”, “Richard III”, and “MacBeth” for a
barrage of hilariously inappropriate one-liners.)

Anyway, a decade and half ago wife wants to take the kids, ages 7 & 9, to the
Ashland Shakespeare Festival. I tell them they don’t have to see any of it. I
tell them I didn’t enjoy anything but the comedies as a kid but that the
staging and costumes were always good. No pressure at all; they are welcome to
hang out in the hotel room with iPads or to watch TV, a luxury they lack at
home.

They go see everything, including histories and tragedies. And they totally
get it. Apparently my children don’t know they’re not supposed to understand
the antiquated English, because halfway through their first play (“Merchant of
Venice”) I am sometimes having to ask them what’s going on, and my 7 year-old
patiently and correctly gives me the 411. They attend pre-play lectures and,
when asked by the lecturer, read better than most actors. We go many more
times in the ensuing years and it’s now among my most cherished memories.

To this day they quote Shakespeare accurately and mumble “Exeunt” under their
breath when they want to get out of a boring situation.

~~~
jl6
What are some great jokes/one liners/scenes that will make me laugh?

~~~
jfoutz
I thought “She is spherical, like a globe.” Was pretty funny.

A lot of it depends on context. A guy trying to be intimidating, but realizing
they’re out of their league.

~~~
toomanybeersies
The entire kitchen scene in _The Comedy of Errors_ is hilarious.

> Marry, sir, she's the kitchen wench and all grease; and I know not what use
> to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light. I
> warrant, her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter: if she
> lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.

If Shakespeare's plays were written today, there would be outrage. Political
correctness was definitely not a concept in 1594.

~~~
EliRivers
It was very politically incorrect to practice (or worse, proselytise) Roman
Catholicism.

------
ksdale
In my effort to read some portion of the classics, I really experienced his
observation of the difference between reading in school and reading later in
life.

I couldn't believe how much more I was impacted by some of these books just 10
years after reading them in high school. Many of the plights of the
protagonists just didn't stir me at all when I was in school, either because I
didn't understand the historical context well enough, or because I didn't yet
have enough empathy to feel their pain and loss (it's always pain and loss in
the classics...)

Anyway, I highly recommend reading some of these books again as an adult. Even
some of the ones I remember hating in school I ended up being engrossed by.

~~~
a_wild_dandan
Nothing sterilizes a book's emotional or intellectual impact quite like being
forced to read it. It's like cultivating a person's appreciation of sushi by
physically shoving it down her throat.

What's worse is that I can only unhelpfully lament the current state of
literature in education -- I have no idea how we may improve the system...

~~~
DubiousPusher
That depends probably on whether you were a lit major or not. I can understand
how someone forced into a lit class under general studies would be irritated
by texts that seem uninteresting or irrelevant but if you're a literature
student that's exactly what you're there for.

Half the use of the classes was getting a syllabus someone had gone to great
lengths to organize around an expert knowledge of some area or string of
thought.

I usually found a good deal of value, even when the author or work was not to
my specific taste.

My classical literature class had a cycle exclusively on Antigone. I was and
am not as enamored by that play as was my instructor and the critic George
Steiner who we were asked to read. But to loathe the requirement and not focus
on deriving the best possible value from that assignment would've been a waste
of money.

~~~
ksdale
Years after college, I still really enjoy walking through a university
bookstore and looking at the books in the curriculum for each major. Pretty
much everything that's not a textbook is regarded as a really important book
by the experts in the field, and a lot of them are quite readable for
nonfiction which I assume is a result of professors wanting to keep students
interested.

------
idoubtit
Italo Calvino is a likable person, and I'm glad he wrote one of my personal
classics: "Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore" is an extraordinary book.
I've also enjoyed most of his works, especially "Le città invisibili" &
"Cosmicomics". If you haven't read any of these, try them or his famous
trilogy: they all have that special signature of his, but they're different
enough that you might like one and not the other.

About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had the
opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a teenager,
but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The translation
played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to rimes, but I
believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully enjoy it.

On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in high school,
and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de chagrin". Somewhere in
my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was awful, so pretentious and
pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the end.

Reading the classics is still the best way to travel for me. I feel I've lived
many years in some kind of half-mythical Russia of the last two centuries. I
saw the whole Mediterranean world through Herodotus' eyes. My years as a child
were heroic thanks to Dumas and Tolkien.

Later on, classics destroyed my condescending attitude to past ages. Reading
"Orlando Furioso", I was astonished to read feminist opinions by a man writing
around 1500. IIRC, Arioste wrote that a woman sleeping with a man before
marriage was no big deal, that they should try a few guys before choosing the
best one. Another Italian classic of the same period, "La Gerusalemme
liberata", had the same impact on my vision of the late Middle Age, and was an
even better read. For another example, as much as I adored Shakespeare as a
young adult, when I discovered the Greek theater of Euripides and Sophocles, I
saw that having emotional and deep characters was nothing new.

Italo Calvino did not mention a special kind of classics that many people know
in an altered way: the religious literature, and especially the Bible (not the
King James). Some of these texts are boring to a non-religious reader, but
other are fantastic, like Job and Qohelet. To dive in an even older world,
"The Epic of Gilgamesh" and a bit of Sumerian literature gave me a strong
connection to people that disappeared milleniums ago.

~~~
nicolas_t
> About reading the classics too early, I've experienced it, but I also had
> the opposite feeling. I had little pleasure reading Homer when I was a
> teenager, but was enthusiastic about the "Odyssey" twenty years later. The
> translation played a big part in that change of heart, going from prose to
> rimes, but I believe my age and my larger culture was necessary to fully
> enjoy it. On the other side, I read quite a few of Balzac's novels when in
> high school, and my favorites were "Eugénie Grandet" and "La peau de
> chagrin". Somewhere in my thirties, I reread the latter and thought it was
> awful, so pretentious and pseudo-philosophical that I dropped it before the
> end

That's interesting to me, I hated Balzac when I had to read it in school but I
loved the Odyssey as a kid. Most of the classics I read and enjoyed as a kid
(Voltaire's Contes Philosophiques, To kill a mocking bird, all the books from
Maupassant, etc...) I read them for fun by myself without the school asking me
to read them, on the other had I hated the books that I was forced to read
(Rousseau's confessions, Balzac, Les Allumettes suédoises by Robert Sabatier)

It does show that being forced to read something does color your perception of
it. I sometimes wonder what the best way to introduce literature without
shoving it down student's throat but still getting them to read good classics.

------
DubiousPusher
I have found the opposite to be true. I had much greater faith in and patience
for the literary cannnon when I was young than I do now.

I think that writing just like everything else has improved with the 20th and
21st century's obsession with design. As such, not all but the best modern
writing is much more expressive, concise and communicative. There is boat
loads of super high quality writing rolling off the presses each year. Having
taken Carl Sagan's axiom to heart that we have a very limited number of books
we can read in our lifetimes and should therefore hold them dearly, I read few
books older than 200 years. It's awfully reductive I know but generally the
value/lb is just lower.

~~~
nostromo95
Have to say I completely disagree with this, especially with respect to 21st
and late 20th centuries. We may be more concerned with design nowadays
(although I'd argue mostly on a commercial level), but to extrapolate that to
an improvement in the aesthetics of writing seems a gross error.

If we assume that reading great books and practicing writing is critical to
becoming a great writer, we've never been in worse time for writing
development. The average person grows up reading--if they read at all-- _Harry
Potter_ , _Twilight_ , etc., being inundated with inane advertising, steeped
in piss-poor social media posts, etc. The most writing the average person does
is work email. Contrast that to, e.g., Herman Melville, who grew up reading
pretty much solely the King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare,
and who probably corresponded with friends and family every day.

I even think the vast majority of 21st century writers would disagree with
you.

~~~
nitwit005
What the average person is reading or writing is irrelevant to whether or not
great writing is being produced.

There are vastly more people who have pursued educations and careers in
literature and writing than any past point in history, including reading the
classics you expect. We've gone from populations that weren't even literate,
to university degrees being normal.

Plenty of people are putting out great writing. The problem has become finding
it in a sea of publications.

~~~
nostromo95
I agree that "vastly more people who have pursued educations and careers in
literature and writing than any past point in history." I don't think that
necessarily means we're producing better writers than the best writers of the
pre-18th century Earth, largely because exemplary writers are formed--like a
Terence Tao in math--at an early age. Anecdotally Faulkner never graduated
from college; Shakespeare never went to college.

Let's go back to the (overly) strong statement our parent post made:

>I think that writing just like everything else has improved with the 20th and
21st century's obsession with design. As such, not all but the best modern
writing is much more expressive, concise and communicative.

Concision is more a modern trend than anything else and not an absolute good
so we'll ignore it.

Name me a 21st century writer more expressive and communicative than
Shakespeare. Or assuming he's too "long-tail," someone more expressive than
Faulkner. And I agree this is completely subjective, so I'd think the best
course of action is seeing if there is any academic consensus on the subject.

Just some quick googling, but here's an article [0] about a Stanford study
showing that modern students are writing more than ever (mostly through text
messages/social media). But one wonders whether text messages are (a) "prose"
in the literary sense, (b) materially different enough on a mental level from
just talking to someone to offer any additional benefit, (c) transferable in
skills to writing a novel. The authors say that the students are good at
"assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get
their point across," but their test subjects are a bunch of Stanford students
who are great at jumping through hoops and conforming to expectations--as
shown by the fact that they got into Stanford. Not to mention that they're not
comparing the papers to a sample of pre-texting papers...

Anyway, not like that article is definitive or anything.

~~~
keithnz
Not sure this kind of comparison is meaningful.

Many modern books when I read them, I'm immersed into the world that is
created, sometimes not wanting them to end. Never felt like that with
Shakespeare. Another book I think that highlights this difference is
Voltaire's candide, such a fast paced fantastic story, but it doesn't draw you
in. But a fast paced dan brown book tends to draw me in way more than Voltaire
did. But Candide is a far far cleverer book I think with a lot of things to
think about. Shakespeare seems similar, great storylines with fantastic prose
but just doesn't draw you in the way modern book (or scripts) do, well at
least not for me.

So expressiveness? the ability to convey meanings and feeling? Most any modern
novelist can do this better than Shakespeare can (for me).

------
robin_reala
As with every thread like this (seriously, tell me if you want me to stop) I’d
recommend the project I contribute to: Standard eBooks:
[https://standardebooks.org/](https://standardebooks.org/) . We take the
Gutenberg transcriptions and prep high quality electronic editions, then
proofread against the original scans to make sure all the formatting is
properly represented, and finally release them as public domain again. Being
limited to pre-1923 means that we’ve focused on the ‘classics’, but we’re
always doing more and should break through the 200 mark shortly. Currently I’m
producing a Woolf and Pepys’ Diaries (although that last one is definitely a
long term project). Let me know if there’s a book you specifically want to see
produced and I can add it to the list or help you produce it yourself.

~~~
mrob
A warning: these books are not the original editions, but edited versions with
modernized spelling and grammar. The editorial changes are kept in version
control so they could theoretically be reverted, but they are mixed with the
technical changes so in practice this is not easy.

Some people might prefer the changes, but when I read classics I want to read
something as close as possible to what the author originally wrote. Despite
the name, "Standard Ebooks" are actually non-standard.

~~~
acabal
To clarify, SE does not modernize grammar. 99% of the (very light)
modernization we do is one-to-one spelling changes for wildly archaic
spellings like "shew -> show" or "swop -> swap" or "to-night -> tonight".
Grammar is left alone.

Whether or not you prefer slightly modernized spelling is a matter of taste,
and something I've discussed at length in previous HN comments. (So I won't
repeat myself here.) At SE we take the same stance as editors going back
generations, who have all been quietly modernizing spelling right under
everyone's noses as a matter of course since Shakespeare's days.

~~~
mrob
From Wikipedia's "grammar" article:

"Outside linguistics, the term grammar is often used in a rather different
sense. In some respects, it may be used more broadly, including rules of
spelling and punctuation, which linguists would not typically consider to form
part of grammar, but rather as a part of orthography, the set of conventions
used for writing a language."

In common usage, punctuation is often considered part of grammar. This matches
well with the computer science meaning of grammar (rules for parsing), because
punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence.

~~~
acabal
Of course. We do not change punctuation, with a few exceptions for some short-
lived archaic constructs like comma-emdash.

We _do_ change from single-quoted British style to double-quoted American
style, but I think most everyone would agree that that is merely a
presentational change that does not change the actual grammar of a sentence.
(And that in and of itself was a very common thing for editors to do going
back hundreds of years too!)

~~~
jjgreen
That seems an odd thing to want to change. Do you also move proximal
punctuation inside the quotes, AE-style?

------
noonespecial
Another good reason to read the classics is to maximize the number of "Darmok
and Jalad at Tanagra"'s _(1)_ you have with the people in the culture
surrounding you. Note that may mean depending on where you are, you might need
_different classics_.

 _(1) And if you understood that reference right away, you got the point!_

~~~
TeMPOraL
:).

But the truth is, that makes Harry Potter and Game of Thrones much more of a
"classic" than Shakespeare.

Shared cultural context is something I believe we're losing anyway, or at
least it's not scaling well with population size and civilization - these days
they're just _so many_ books being published, along with movies and TV series,
that it's increasingly difficult to find things you've both read/watched with
random people. Schools in a given country are forcing the same set of
literature on people partly in order to ensure a shared cultural context, but
as we all know (and as is discussed elsewhere in this comment thread), this
only makes people know the titles but _not_ read the books themselves.

~~~
noonespecial
I dunno. I think there's still a long way to go before Hogwarts is more
generally recognizable than Romeo and Juliet.

Still, there's probably some fascinating anthropology to be had in the idea of
fandom as a new form of nationality.

They say dual citizenship is possible but I'd steer well clear of the dmz
between Trek and Wars.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Still, there 's probably some fascinating anthropology to be had in the
> idea of fandom as a new form of nationality._

I agree. If you think of it, meeting people who identify more with a fictional
culture from a TV show more than with any existing one, that's... something
new, I think. Can't think of any analogue in past periods in history.

> _They say dual citizenship is possible but I 'd steer well clear of the dmz
> between Trek and Wars._

Been there, can confirm. Not pretty :).

~~~
noonespecial
_If you think of it, meeting people who identify more with a fictional culture
from a TV show more than with any existing one, that 's... something new, I
think._

Religion, Christianity in particular, seems a close analog.

------
vjsc
We had Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in school. I was mesmerised by the
incredible storyline and the shocking twist at the end. It introduced me to
western classic literature for the first time and I was really impressed.

Then in college, there was an ongoing bet that who could finish the entire
unabridged version of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It tool me three months to
read the whole of it. It changed me as a person and made me aware of the fact
that the problems faced by humans haven't really changed over the centuries,
but only their manifestation has changed as per the present times.

And what about The Count of Monte Cristo and other books by Alexander Dumas.

The list goes on ...

~~~
cjslep
I had the exact opposite experience reading Great Expectations in high school.
To such a degree that even I recognize that my hatred of it is
uncharacteristic of me.

------
WheelsAtLarge
"Why should we read the classics?" is what I ask. I've read a number of
"classics" that were just not worth the struggle of figuring out the
antiquated vocabulary and sentence structure. The vernacular changes over
generations and figuring out what they meant versus what I understand is just
not worth the time. I can read a few current books vs 1 classic. Yes, some are
worth the trouble but most are not.

Maybe there's a business in updating classics into modern versions. It has
been done with Shakespeare and we see it all the time with movies. Why not
others?

~~~
checkyoursudo
It should be done with others!

Except, how many times are those _others_ merely updating Shakespeare into
their contemporary times? Maybe everything is just continuously updating
Shakespeare at this point.

I jest, I jest.

Or do I?

------
kartan
> "A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the
> most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation."

The article is more poetic than informational. I am so used to technical
readings that I translate the sentences into something more concrete, maybe
more journalistic.

I guess that this sentence means that "classic books" define our cultural
background, differences between the east and the west, between countries and
cultures independently of what you can see now on the news.

Translating it into more plain concepts allows for a better understanding.
With this new wording, I can reflect on how current events, video games,
streamed videos are shaping our society and will be identified in the future
as "classic".

> Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.

I interpret this as you have already "read" the classic as it is part of other
works that you have read or seen. That our culture has been influenced by
"classic" works to the extend that you can feel like you have read them
before.

> The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces
> of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they
> themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through

This confirms my previous interpretation. But, I have then to open the
question. Do "classics" shape society or are only a result of it? If a
"classics" was never written our society will be different our we will just
miss a recorded piece of cultural history?

> If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics
> out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

I do not agree. I am reading "classics" books out of curiosity or even duty
towards being responsible to improve my own education, and last but not least
for pleasure. Different people will have different motivation.

Can anyone try to explain this other one? It sounds good, but if feels kind of
bullshit. :)

> We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to
> the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans. With this definition we
> are approaching the idea of the “total book,” as Mallarmé conceived of it.

This post is an interesting read for a change.

------
hprotagonist
The author of this piece is, himself, eminently worth reading.

“If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller” is just amazing.

------
adiusmus
Why not? They’re called classics for a reason. Should read at least some of
them. Reading the best of a genre is also worth doing, along with
autobiographies of people you admire.

Read Sun Tzu’s Art of War before you need to.

~~~
tw1010
People who ask "why read the classics" might not want to spend their time on
something just because an authority (who decided what the classics are, and
what ulterior motives did they have?) said that's what they are, or because
it's good in-group signaling. For these people, addressing their concerns and
making clear that there's value in reading classics beyond the potential
problems, is a necessity.

~~~
adiusmus
I’m not sure why I would particularly need to address someone’s concerns. I’m
not selling them a book nor am I forcing my choice of what is good on someone
else. Take it or leave it. I’d say that is an issue which a particular person
has with authority in general. “Who decided it was a classic” and “what makes
them so special” and “what right do they have to impose their choice on me”
are all questions that someone should answer for themselves. Likely some deep
introspection about their relationship with authority is possibly required.
I’m not sure.

If you ask someone what is the best book to read and they reply you now have
someone’s preference for a great book rather than a mediocre one. That in
essence is how a classic is determined, but at larger scale. Lots of people
asked and a lot of people answered. Consensus formed and spread.

I’m fairly sure I can ask a film buff what classic movies I should watch and
if I asked a lot of film buffs, some movies would begin to bubble up as being
seen as commonly known classics. Others could be seen as just popular. I don’t
think that would be a surprising outcome. I don’t think it needs to be much
more complicated than that.

------
scw
If you're revisiting the classics I can't recommend enough Doug Metzger's
Literature and History podcast [1]. It covers literature starting with
Mesopostamian stories, at about the level of an undergraduate course, but is
entertaining and insightful throughout. It's clearly had deep research put
into every episode, but at the same time takes great effort to make the
material relatable. Great stuff.

1\. [http://literatureandhistory.com/](http://literatureandhistory.com/)

------
adamnemecek
I’m in the other camp. Reading unpopular books has been much more valuable to
me than reading popular books. If the classics are good, you’ll understand
them by osmosis even without having read them.

~~~
wiredfool
That explains a recent conversation from work.

“”” They want their pound of flesh. That’s from Shakespeare or something.
Macbeth I think.

Me: headdesk. Merchant of Venice. “””

~~~
projektir
I'm always amused by these because it signals the information source wasn't
that important. Why does it matter where the phrase came from in most
contexts?

Unfortunately, I've found that even with things I _have_ fully read, I
sometimes mix them up and confuse what came from where. There's just not
enough distinction sometimes and it smears into a blob.

~~~
wiredfool
It's not so much what from where, but if you don't know the context, how are
you going to be sure that you're not unintentionally libeling your client.

I'm aware that meanings change, and culture has its own uses for expressions.
But the source is there for you to examine, there's no real excuse to use it
wrong. We're not (yet) at the point where we have an oral culture tradition,
but we're getting damn close.

------
bsenftner
Reading the classics is learning the state of civilization, learning the
breath of human cruelty and understanding why it is essential to the human
experience, essential to progress of the species, and is essential to the
structure and formation of justice and law. The classics give one the
background why things are they way they are, and why as messed up as things
appear to be, they are the best we can manage. If one is not at least exposed
to a few of the classics, I wonder what value foundation one has beyond their
potential one sided religious up bringing. Without exposure to the classes,
one is adrift in a sea of unknown pop cultural references, only picking up the
severely watered down and over exploited Classic Themes when they appear on
popular TV, film, and comic book quality regurgitation of their ideas.

I tend to consider myself "over read" \- I have read everything published by
my favorite authors, their followers and their students. When I find a voice I
like, I'll finish that entire school of thought. But I'm also very extreme in
my reading. I started reading very early, isolated in Christian rural Iowa as
a youth, I had a severe stutter, and read the library rather than engage in
the other kids I could not manage to converse without sounding stupid. So, I
sorta ignored "childhood" until the end of elementary, after which I was the
oddest over intellectualized little shithead one could encounter.

Why read the classics? They locate you in time and space to understand the
state of society. That pretty valuable.

------
coleifer
I got my degree in English lit, but it's only as an adult, with the benefit of
life experience, that I feel I can really appreciate so many of the books I
read in college and high school. The best books seem to say something true in
a way that goes beyond black and white. A truth you can only find in the
experience of living.

------
mannanj
Lots of talk about fiction books here, but what are the classic nonfictions?

------
lou1306
This essay is required reading in many Italian high schools, especially in
Liceo Classico, one of the few secondary school types where ancient Greek is
still a compulsory course. After all, the questions "Why learn ancient Greek?"
and "Why read the classics?" are quite intertwined.

------
sdrothrock
This post is really well-timed for me.

I've been trying really hard to up my reading numbers to what I remember them
being 5 or 10 years ago. As a part of that, I've been trying to keep an even
spread of fiction and non-fiction.

The other day I decided I should also revisit books I remember loving as a kid
that I haven't read in decades. Specifically, The Count of Monte Cristo and
Mysterious Island. I started the latter the other day.

One of the things that strikes me again and again while I read this book is
how much it embodies great improvisation; the characters are all "yes men" in
the best possible sense of the phrase. When one character encounters a problem
or has an idea, the rest are quick to say "yes, and!" to go on to cooperate to
find a solution.

This is especially amazing considering that the book is set at the tail end of
the Civil War.

I can't imagine a book like this being written today. The characters are so
humanist in believing that they and each other can accomplish anything they
set out to do; they cooperate without struggle; there are no hidden pasts or
ulterior motives threatening them. It's really quite refreshing and
invigorating. I wish I could read aspirational(?) fiction like this all the
time and feel like my mood would be much better for it.

------
Ice_cream_suit
I listen to Librevox podcasts when I go for my morning walk. I have finished
listening to Tacitus' Peloponesian Wars, Xenophon's Anabasis and am now on the
seventh book of Plato's Republic.

------
rumcajz
There is stuff that you can't learn anywhere but classics. Take, for example,
Nazi Germany. We tend to have this stereotypical image of it as evil murderous
empire where everyone was either a murderer or a victim.

Heinrich Böll's "Group Portrait with Lady"[1] is a book about that period. You
expect particular kind of stuff in such a book: Gestapo officers torturing
dissenters. Jew hunts. Nurnberg rallies. Etc.

Then you read the book and Hitler or concentration camps and not mentioned
even once. It's full of people trying to live their lives. Teenagers are in
love one with another. People go to work. Try to build a business. Pay their
taxes. Play piano. They have problems with their children and extramarital
affairs. They have varied political opinions. They die of natural causes.

It would be pretty hard to get that kind of (very terrifying, in a way)
understanding of the period through history books.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Group-Portrait-Lady-Essential-
Heinric...](https://www.amazon.com/Group-Portrait-Lady-Essential-
Heinrich/dp/1935554336)

~~~
bloak
Nazi Germany? Only from classics? Perhaps you were born too late and too far
away... I've drunk wine with people who were in the Hitlerjugend and fought in
WW2. (As far as my politically and militarily uninterested informant was
concerned, Hitlerjugend was mostly about camping and raft building, and
fighting was mostly about keeping your head down, literally and
metaphorically.)

~~~
rumcajz
It's 73 years since then. They are dying out.

------
rectang
Because it preserves the power of those who are already familiar with them.

~~~
quotemstr
I knew that something like this comment would crop. It's a damn shame: there's
a great deal of complexity, elegance, and meaning in the world, and choosing
to see literature through the hateful lens of power dynamics robs you of the
change to see this beauty. One of my hopes is that we return to teaching the
classics as timeless universals.

~~~
TuringNYC
I havent heard this sentiment in literature much, but i've witnessed insulated
and exclusive sentiments w/r/t other art. For example, I was once told that
not knowing some rare Broadway was uncultured of me. I'm thinking: \- No, that
is _your_ culture. It is valid culture, but not the _only_ culture. I watch
films tackling other issues in other subsets of the population. Their issues
may not be the mainstream issues, but that doesnt make it not part of culture.

This has nothing to do with books, or music, or art. It has to do with people
who want to use beautiful art to create a wedge or power dynamic or culture
dynamic rather than simply enjoy or learn from the art. And it is a dangerous
behavior, because as soon as one brands others (mentally) as uncultured or of
a lower class, it helps them justify unjust behaviors.

------
elvinyung
Here's a corollary: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-
philoso...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/11/read-history-of-philosophy-
backwards/)

tl;dr read the works of thinkers who were wrong in the past, in order to
expand your search space to find out what you're wrong about in the present.

