Like most of you, the only things I’ve been reading recently have been for class. I don’t really mind that though, I find having deadlines helps motivate me to actually read, more so than when I’m just reading for fun. Most of the reading I’ve been doing has been for my American Renaissance class. I signed up for this class because the syllabus was basically a long list of classic books I’ve always wanted to read (and maybe have tried to read) but never had the time or patience to do so. It’s been really helpful to be guided through stuff like “Self-Reliance” and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and I feel like I have more of a deeper understanding of them than if I were just reading them on my own.
This week, we started reading Thoreau’s Walden, which, in the past, I’ve tried to read whenever I’m feeling ~earthy~ but never really been able to stick with. I love the way Thoreau writes about being alone, and how it’s always accompanied by little vignettes of morning baths and bird songs and cool stuff like that.
As an English major, I keep thinking about one chapter of Walden that we read this week called “Reading.” Thoreau talks about the importance of reading classics rather than “Easy Reading.” He writes:
“The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness...The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.”
It’s funny to think that I’m a student in the 21st century reading an old and confusing “classic” that’s saying: “Don’t read this! Read an old and confusing classic!” I feel like conversations about media and literature can often involve a thread of “kids these days” kind of thinking. We tend to think that modern media is somehow less valuable or worthy of study, but this thinking is not unique to our historical moment.
I’ve now read a lot of “classics” from the American Renaissance, what we now consider to be cornerstones of the “canon.” But I’ve actually never really read Thoreau’s “classics” like Homer and Aeschylus--and certainly not in the original languages. Now that we have our newer “classics,” should we still read the more archaic Greek and Latin works?
This week, we started reading Thoreau’s Walden, which, in the past, I’ve tried to read whenever I’m feeling ~earthy~ but never really been able to stick with. I love the way Thoreau writes about being alone, and how it’s always accompanied by little vignettes of morning baths and bird songs and cool stuff like that.
As an English major, I keep thinking about one chapter of Walden that we read this week called “Reading.” Thoreau talks about the importance of reading classics rather than “Easy Reading.” He writes:
“The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness...The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.”
It’s funny to think that I’m a student in the 21st century reading an old and confusing “classic” that’s saying: “Don’t read this! Read an old and confusing classic!” I feel like conversations about media and literature can often involve a thread of “kids these days” kind of thinking. We tend to think that modern media is somehow less valuable or worthy of study, but this thinking is not unique to our historical moment.
I’ve now read a lot of “classics” from the American Renaissance, what we now consider to be cornerstones of the “canon.” But I’ve actually never really read Thoreau’s “classics” like Homer and Aeschylus--and certainly not in the original languages. Now that we have our newer “classics,” should we still read the more archaic Greek and Latin works?
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