The Canadian dream of paradise surely includes a book on the dock in the dog days of summer. Or possibly on the screened-in cottage porch given the Canadian deer fly’s dream of tearing out a ragged chunk of your meat, inspiring the further Canadian dream of a dragonfly’s jaws piercing the absconding miscreant with an audible crunch. Paradise Regained.
Perhaps a dissenting voice will be heard objecting that the whole cottage/book thing is the dream only of a certain slice of the populace. And I do worry that it’s a dwindling slice. For instance Jonathan Kay, a brave dissenting urban leftist literary snob, just forwarded a tweet (already you feel the great books turning over in their dusty mausolibraries) of a Toronto bookstore’s display of “BOOKS WE PRETEND WE’VE READ”) and I found myself wishing we still did.
No really. Because what interest would it hold for a young person today that I would not for all the world pose as the sort of litterateur who’d read Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”? (She visited Afghanistan under the Taliban and had an epiphany about American oppression of women. Nuff said.) And speaking of epiphanies, we were also forced to read Joyce’s “The Dubliners” in high school, and I had the epiphany that he wasn’t worth the dreary slog. Apparently even his wife and partial muse Nora Barnacle once asked him, “Why don’t you write books people can read?” and I second the motion.
I also felt smug about not having heard of most of the books, as I routinely do when the latest Nobel Prize-winner in literature is announced, or the new U.S. poet laureate. Everyone went (Lady) gaga over Amanda Gorman, “an American poet and activist” whose work, Wikipedia says, “focuses on issues of oppression, feminism, race, and marginalization,” bold orthodoxy I imagine making Atwood gape with envy. But when’s the last time someone offered advice on life’s difficulties based on some verse by this person?
I literally have heard strangers dissecting one another’s love lives based on St. Paul. And men approaching the beaches on D-Day really found Shakespeare playing unbidden in their heads (“He that outlives this day” etc.) and helping them rally their courage in that crisis. Whereas Gorman?
Who in fact is the Youth Poet Laureate, a job that if it did not exist would not be necessary to invent. The new grown-up one, chronologically, is Ada Limón, who doesn’t like the American national anthem or the word “wife.” Oh, that’s original. But I won’t pretend to have read her and assume you won’t either. I Googled.
Among the other titles I could discern from the tweeted photo were “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. Ditto. And something Amazon claims is “a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society.” Gee. Wait until Charles Dickens gets wind of that theme.
Or the youth of today get wind of Dickens. Or get Bob Newhart’s joke that you can generally fake cleverness by throwing in a reference to Kafka “[e]ven if you never read any of his – or her – works.”
Not anymore, I fear. And there’s my real objection. There might be merit in some of these books I don’t pretend I’ve read, though to posture about modern transgressive works when you have no idea whether Jane Austen spent her time poking fun at traditional gender roles and conventional pomposity is ignorance on steroids. But even that attitude would be preferable to people whose world doesn’t include swimming in a real lake, playing a physical board game, or getting knowledge of “the world” from anything but TikTok and YouTube videos “curated” to reinforce their existing prejudices and rage at all the intolerant people who don’t instantly accept their ill-shaped views as the ultimate in wisdom and morality.
I’ve never held with folks gasping “You haven’t read Pentacles’ Extramagan?” and I grew up in academia. But I’d prefer people who pretend they’ve read books they haven’t to ones who think knowledge, including of the best (and worst) ever said and thought, is “cringy,” including because it’s unnecessary now that they’ve come along.
Thus I find myself crying “Where are the pomposities of yesteryear?” Without pretending I ever read a word of Proust. For my money, the deer flies can have him.
