Reading the Classics in the Age of Instant Electronic Gratification

I managed to get free from The Symposium. What a disgusting experience; an entire book dedicated to predatory gay relationships, with a side order of specious, disappointing argument. I’m so glad I’m finished with it.

I’m now working on The Aeneid, Virgil’s book about the founding of Rome. In case you’re interested, Virgil had a last name. His full name is Publius Vergilius Maro. Sounds Italian. Maybe he wore shiny suits without vents.

“Hey! You leanin’ on my chariot?!”

I was hoping for a quick read, but according to Amazon, the book has 400 pages. It makes me wonder if I want to go on living.

I say “according to Amazon” because I don’t have a hardcopy yet. I ordered one, but I got a head start using Kindle. I’m using Kindle for PC, and it doesn’t show page numbers, so I’m not sure what’s going on. I do know this: after one 30-minute session, I’m 1/12 of the way through it.

It makes me wonder how anyone survives Columbia College. According to the syllabus, you get one week to read this book. I read faster than other people, and it will clearly take me six hours to get through it, not including side excursions to look things up. So for a real student of average ability, let’s say ten hours, all told. How are you supposed to cope with that while carrying at least three other courses?

More and more, I understand why people use Cliff’s Notes.

I do not like The Aeneid. It is extremely boring. It is very badly written. I guess that’s heresy, but we always cut the ancients more slack than we do contemporary writers. Homer was a terrible writer; he was verbose, repetitive, and totally unfamiliar with structure and pace. Plato is somewhat better; his big problem is his subject matter. Virgil is a horror.

Shakespeare was magnificent. Voltaire wrote well. Rabelais wrote well. I’m not prejudiced against all dead writers.

Unfortunately, I found a page on Columbia’s website that suggests I may have to read stuff beyond the list I already have. They provide a list of all the works known to have been read for Lit. Hum. since the earth cooled. If the list is correct, my 2015 syllabus doesn’t cover all the junk I chose not to read a thousand years ago, when I was supposed to. I may have to read The Golden Ass (totally serious) and a number of other things I would rather use as doorstops.

What drives a person to become a classics scholar? How can they take the pain? Maybe it’s not so bad, because there aren’t that many classics. It’s not like Virgil is still writing in a converted barn in Vermont. If he were, we could hire someone to bump him off. But that won’t be necessary.

Check this out; it’s some text from Virgil:

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;
His banish’d gods restor’d to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome.
O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate;
What goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate;
For what offense the Queen of Heav’n began

I didn’t bother looking for a good place to end the excerpt. It doesn’t matter; the point is to show you what I’m dealing with. The above bit comes from a translation Columbia doesn’t use. It was handier to access for copying. Can you imagine sweating through 400 pages of that?

Here’s something that will chill your bones even further: many of the paragraphs are over a page long. That’s inhumane. It must be due to translator ineptitude. I doubt Virgil used paragraphs at all.

I don’t care what you’re writing; you can break it up better than that. Long paragraphs are for the lazy and the uneducated.

There must be 500 words to a page. It’s crammed in there as if paper were platinum. To get another turgid word into a page, you would have to grease it and use a hydraulic press.

No one actually enjoys reading this crap. No way. They can pretend all they want. No one wants to read 500 convoluted words that add up to, “Aeneas raised his sail.”

I guess two things have to be considered. First, ancient people had almost no entertainment, so they probably wanted books to be as long as possible. They were probably like people who didn’t want Breaking Bad to end. When your book ended, you went back to your grimy, unpunctuated, hopeless potato-eater existence. Second, they didn’t have a lot of works to compare. Maybe they thought Virgil did a fine job.

You don’t read books like this one in order to enjoy them. You read them to gather information which, it is to be hoped, improves your mind.

That’s not true. In reality, that’s a loftier motivation than most of us have. We really read them (or the Cliff’s Notes) in order to get grades and get dreary classes behind us.

It appears that writing is a lot like blogging. The earlier you started, the more likely you are to receive attention and praise, regardless of the quality of your work. If Virgil wrote The Aeneid today, he’d be held for observation and banned from owning a computer.

I’m forcing myself not to look, but I’m afraid Dostoevsky is in my future. I have tried to read him before. I thought it would kill me. You read a paragraph, and you pause to regain your strength. You read another paragraph. You look out the window. You read another paragraph. You flip to the end of the book to check, and yes, it’s 900 pages long.

Maybe I’m secretly (or not so secretly) a lowbrow. Maybe I need the pop-up Aeneid. Maybe I need a version edited by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, with car chases inserted in random locations. I want the Nicholas Cage Aeneid: Gone to Rome in Sixty Seconds.

Here’s what my review of Citizen Kane would look like:

The best thing is to think of these books as trips to the dentist. It’s impossible to enjoy many of them, so why try? You don’t come home disappointed when you don’t enjoy getting a filling. Fillings are good for you. Spinal taps are good for you. Having a gangrenous leg amputated out in the woods with no anaesthetic is good for you. Don’t feel bad about not enjoying it. Just lie back and think of England.

The problem is that so many people pretend to enjoy boring books. They make the rest of us–the honest ones–feel guilty. I’m not afraid to confess my inadequacy. This book is boring. I do not like it. If that bothers you, shoot me. Pierce me with a dart from Phoebus’ gilded bow.

It could be worse. I could be Kanye West, a self-proclaimed “proud non-reader of books.”

Maybe he’s not crazy after all. Maybe he’s right when he says he’s a genius.

He also said, “I would never want a book’s autograph.”

I’ll just leave that there.

I don’t enjoy Charlie Parker, either. Shoot me some more. I proclaim it from the rooftops. His music sounds like hailstones falling on a cement patio. I don’t care if it’s brilliant. I don’t turn on the stereo to be lectured.

Perhaps I have now purged to the point where I can force myself to read more. I wish Virgil were still alive. I would create a very scathing Internet meme with his picture on it.

Don’t buy this book. Read the Cliff’s Notes. I absolve you.