Every summer, I look forward to reading new books in the months between classes, but this year I’m determined to finish the ones I’ve started.
The word “graduation” in most people’s minds means something like “the end of an education,” even though the word “commencement” (used for this ceremony at least since 1387, according to the Oxford English Dictionary) ought to prevent such misconceptions—commencing a new life, yes, but the word also means the real beginning of lifelong education. In the demanding curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College, even the best students might come away with a few of the great books they were assigned still unfinished. When I ask graduates what they are going to be doing, they sometimes say that they are going to finish this or that book or reread another. Perhaps it’s The Brothers Karamazov or Paradise Lost or St. Thomas Aquinas’s Compendium, one of Shakespeare’s plays or the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy.
When do you ever “finish” reading one of the great books, in any case? The more you find in a first or second reading, the more the discovery propels you to another reading — and still another. I remember the passage at the end of the “Cetology” chapter in Moby-Dick when Melville’s narrator Ishmael excuses the incompleteness of his work of classification and tells the reader that all truly important works remain unfinished, “even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower” (as must have been the case in 1851). Inimitably sardonic, Ishmael claims that, of humanly made things, “grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything.” Perhaps in this spirit, we should never “complete” a reading of the great books, including Moby-Dick (which my wife and I will discuss at next week’s Circe Institute Conference in Denver).
But speaking of unfinished books, there are other, more ordinary ones that we might start and not finish, and this summer, instead of taking up new books (and making Amazon happy), I’ve decided to finish five or six of those. Last week, it was The Deep Places, a beautifully written autobiographical account by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about his long struggle with chronic Lyme disease. It interested me because our youngest daughter suffered with the disease for years, and Douthat’s narrative of his many experiences with unbelieving or misleading doctors, experiments with remedies other than those provided by ordinary medicine, and simply the long, maddening frustration of it rang entirely true.
By the grace of God, our daughter (like Douthat) has made her way back to a full life, though she is still susceptible to mild relapses. But reading the book struck home for another reason. Toward the end, as he is writing about the “ragefulness” that would sometimes overcome him because of his condition, Douthat spends two or three paragraphs describing the play Heroes of the Fourth Turning. He concentrates on its depiction of the character Emily. “The playwright’s sister suffered for years from chronic Lyme disease, and we are invited to suppose that Emily has the same affliction.” I cannot quite describe how it felt to read those paragraphs, especially when Douthat says that some of Emily’s lines are “the best description of the pain of Lyme I’ve heard or read,” because his pages were open in the very house the description came from.
Reading Christian Wiman’s memoir My Bright Abyss, which I have resumed but not yet finished, has had almost the same impact. In his description of the struggle to know God authentically in the contemporary world, he speaks intimately of what art might do to the emotional and perhaps spiritual life of the artist. “If you’ve never been consumed by an art,” Wiman writes, “it might seem strange to think of it in these terms — as an antithesis to life, almost, or at least as a kind of parasite. But the fact is, art can compromise, even in some way neutralize, the very experience on which it depends.” The Irish poet W.B. Yeats said it a century earlier: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.” Yeats does not mean that all artists go to Hell; he does mean, no question, that if perfection of “the work” takes precedence, “the life” and ordinary happiness must in some sense be sacrificed to it.
It is good to remember, in other words, that great books come at a price. The other book I’m finishing (with several others still to go) reminds its readers that great works of engineering make the same demands. David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, one of his first major works, instructs his readers about the astonishing, years-long effort of building the Brooklyn Bridge from its conception in 1867 until its opening in 1883. The cast of characters is memorable in itself, from engineers John Roebling and his son Washington to Henry Ward Beecher to Boss Tweed and many others. That past world rises before the reader with extraordinary vividness, and McCullough excels in making even the details of the construction itself compelling. It is difficult to forget his account of the sinking of the massive pneumatic caissons on both sides of the East River with cases of the bends increasing in deadliness (including their effect on Washington Roebling, the chief engineer) and still not understood.
Several other histories will follow McCullough’s—Twilight of the Gods, the third volume of Ian Toll’s massive account of the naval war in the Pacific in World War II; Tom Holland’s Dominion about the extraordinary transformation of the world through Christianity; and Norman Davies’ Europe. In one of his meditations, Christian Wiman quotes the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: “Memory is the basis of individual personality just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people.” The West is these days “encouraged to hate its own past in its entirety,” as the theologian John Milbank puts it, so we need to recover that past even more intentionally. The tradition does not stop any more than history does. We keep earning it to remember who we are—a task we can never finish, truly.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
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The featured image, uploaded by www.nivaagaard.dk, is “Double portrait of royal actor Emil Poulsen (1842-1911) and his wife Anna, born Næser (1849-1934)” (1885) by P. S. Krøyer. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.