C.S.Lewis ‘There is hope for a man who never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets; but what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once and that settles the matter?”
Reading Lewis the critic and medieval scholar is always a pleasure. It's an educated conversation with a very well-read man, who has spent time thinking about his reading and who is keen to share his enthusiasms with the person he's talking with.
Some of his critical work may now be dated, but the Allegory of Love and the Discarded Image can still be read with profit, as can his essays.
I read that sentence and agreed. Good books reward rereading. Great poems need to be reread because what you get the first time through is never the whole experience. It might almost be a criteria.
But at the same time as I agreed, the sentence seemed dated, At first I thought it was the choice of pronoun. Today we'd find a more inclusive term.....
But then I realised that what really dates Lewis's statement are two assumptions.
The first is that that there are books which are the common heritage of any educated English speaker regardless of race gender or class. And that reading Malory, or Tristram Shandy is what a literate reader, interested in a thing called literature, should be doing.
The second is that reading 'difficult books' is good for you.
In a world where the AI can produce a synopsis, where you can google 'What is Tristram Shandy about' and get a two sentence answer, or buy The Idiots Notes for Unthinking People who can't be bothered to read the book but what to sound as though they have'...
The assumption that an educated person will have reread books or authors seems quaintly old fashioned.
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