Tapping Out

I feel like I should write about my Literature Humanities project. I am still working my way through the syllabus for Columbia University’s Literature Humanities syllabus, and I am somewhere in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

This book is entertaining, and I’ve enjoyed it, but I’m thinking it’s time to move on. I’m a third of the way through it, and I feel like I’m not getting much out of it now.

The book is about a group of young Italians who flee the plague. They decide to tour their country homes as a group and entertain each other telling stories. The stories make up the bulk of the book. As far as I know. I haven’t finished it.

At the beginning, I found the descriptions of plague-era Florence interesting, and the stories themselves weren’t bad. Now that I’m a couple of hundred pages in, it’s dragging. The stories all seem the same. Venal medieval nobles have problems, and they solve them in venal ways. A man’s title and wealth are taken, he and his family endure various ordeals, and then Boccaccio ties everything up with a nice resolution. Things like that happen over and over. It’s starting to be like watching Scooby-Doo. The variety of the plots is way thin.

The book is just too long for the concept.

Boccaccio lived in an age when people were short on entertainment, so I can see why he would want to prolong his book. I don’t live in that age, so I’m not desperate enough to keep clinging to this mammoth anthology.

The syllabus doesn’t call for students to read the entire book, but when I started reading and enjoying it, I felt I should finish it. I didn’t want to have to spend the rest of my life telling people I had read part of The Decameron. Now I regret that decision.

I may get back to the syllabus and stick to the assigned portions of the book. Life is too short to read six hundred pages of very similar stories about the problems of medieval Europeans.

Boccaccio has failed where Matt Groening succeeded. The Simpsons is the longest-running sitcom on TV, and it’s still fresh enough to enjoy. Boccaccio got boring after two hundred pages.

Boccaccio’s characters provide a disappointing picture of medieval Catholics. They are completely lacking in grace and spirituality. They have sex whenever they get the chance. They equate money with happiness. They kill and steal without remorse or self-examination.

One story features a man whose reliance on a saint is vindicated when the saint gets God to provide a wealthy prostitute to take care of him (in every way) and become his wife. Seriously? We’re supposed to believe God rewards people with fornication? Boccaccio apparently believed it.

Boccaccio reminds me that people don’t change that much. We are much more openly rebellious to God than we were back then, but his characters, like us, sin without hesitation. It doesn’t faze them. Like us, they don’t take God seriously.

The Revelation says that when the Tribulation gets into gear, people will refuse to repent. They’ll see death and supernatural phenomena all around them, but they’ll continue sinning. Boccaccio shows us that this shouldn’t surprise us. The people of his time watched something like half of the population of Europe die, and many used it as an excuse to sin with abandon. That’s crazy. You would think people would want to hold onto salvation when they knew death could come at any time. They don’t react that way.

Human behavior has never made sense.

When I get done with this, I move on to Montaigne, who supposedly invented the essay (French essai, meaning “attempt”). I’m not sure that’s true, since people have been writing short bits of nonfiction since the dawn of literacy, but it’s on his resume.

I can’t recommend the full book to anyone, but I can see why every educated person should have a basic familiarity with it. That’s the heartiest recommendation I can summon at this time.