The Weekly Wrap: July 6-12

The Great Conversation

Mortimer Adler, in connection with the Great Books series of yesteryear, used the phrase “the great conversation.” While Adler’s project continues to be admired and emulated by some and criticized by others, I’ve always been enthralled with the idea of the Great Conversation.

Adler, and his colleague Robert Hutchins believed that when we read “the classics” we joined a great conversation that has stretched through the ages about important ideas: God, meaning, love, the good society and more. Later writers recur to, disagree with, and build on earlier ones.

I just began reading Anthony T. Kronman’s True Conservatism and he discusses the idea of “making friends with the dead.” Kronman is another, with his own canon, who teaches a version of “Great Books.” He argues that true conservatism, unlike the current left or right, maintains friendship with great thinkers of former generations. Otherwise, our thinking ceases to be “humane” and has a kind of “cut flower” existence. Instead, we are just pragmatists after whatever we think will work. We remove ourselves from, rather than build on, and preserve the wisdom of the past.

This makes sense to me. As a Christian, I’ve spent my life reading and re-reading a 2000 year old text, and the reflections on that text of the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Athanasius, Origen, Luther, Teresa of Avila, and many more. When I do so, I’m “communing with the saints” and joining their conversation.

But isn’t this always, to some extent what we do whenever we read? We open our minds to another mind. Our reading list, whatever it is, represents a conversation with a number of people. And we come away changed. But it does give me pause. As in in-person conversations, these literary conversations can uplift, illumine, and inspire, or speak to our baser selves and the darker instincts of fear and suspicion. What kind of conversations do your books represent?

Five Articles Worth Reading

David Brooks published an op-ed piece this week on “When Novels Mattered.” He explores the decline of literary fiction and its correlates, concluding with a note of hope about rising young writers.

“Novels are better than television, but the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind.” This is the contention behind Lisa Borst’s “New TV Novels.” Perhaps this is another reason for the decline of the novel Brooks laments.

Constance Grady explores “The truth behind the endless “kids can’t read” discourse.” Her conclusions after wading through piles of research: “US schools have never done a very good job at teaching kids to read, but it seems as though there’s meaningful evidence that we’re doing a worse job right now. While high-achieving kids are still reading the way they’ve read for decades, the ones to whom reading doesn’t come easily are failing more now than they used to.”

Yesterday was the birthday of E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web and other children’s books as well as co-author of the classic Elements of Style. In Lit Hub article, Sam Weller collects “Writing Advice and Literary Wisdom from the Great E.B. White.”

Remember Westerns? “A Tale of Two Westerns” explores the trajectories of two Western novels that turn forty this year. One is Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a huge success at the time that was turned into a mini-series. The other was Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which received little notice at the time but has grown in literary stature.

Quote of the Week

This quote by Marcel Proust, born July 10, 1871, has me thinking:

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I took the plunge and put in a preorder with Barnes & Noble for four books coming out this fall. (They had a 25% discount, plus my B & N membership, so I saved about $40. Sadly, the discount ended yesterday.) Buckeye by Ryan Patrick has received acclaim and is set in my home state of Ohio. I read whatever R. F. Kuang publishes and so I ordered her forthcoming Katabasis. There is a posthumous collection of David McCullough essays titled History Matters. It does, in my opinion, and I’ve read everything of McCullough’s. Finally, Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm is Charles Mackesy’s sequel to The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

Just to whet your appetite if you didn’t read the E. B. White article, I loved this quote:

“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.”

–from a 1969 interview in The Paris Review

Finally, I’ve periodically posted articles from The Lamp, which describes itself as “A CATHOLIC JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, SCIENCE, THE FINE ARTS, ETC.” Their current issue includes a collection of articles on Pope Francis, including articles by Diarmaid McCullouch, Makoto Fujimura, and Zena Hitz.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America

Tuesday: Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

Wednesday: Justin Brierly, Why I’m Still a Christian

Thursday: Agatha Christie, Black Coffee

Friday: Beth Allison Barr, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 6-12!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page