Just another November evening. The wet cold outside invites staying indoors, fighting the melancholy induced by the grey days and sunsets at 4 pm with scented candles and tea.
I'm sitting on the floor in my living room, writing on a notepad as I shift through the quotes and excerpts I accumulated over the past few days in my blue notebook.
My eyes, relieved from the blue lights of the screen, now relaxed, chasing my fingers scribbling.
The world online continues spinning out new things to read - so does Amazon - despite limiting publishers to now just 3 books a day (lol).
The small little world of my immediate surroundings offers no such tsunami of the written word. The flickering candlelight illuminates the rows of books on my shelf, among them countless old books.
Why read old books in such fast-paced times?
Surely, they can't be all that relevant to our modern days?
Some say.
Not so quick.
It's so common to assume progress is linear when we have so much evidence to the contrary.
Take the Antikythera Mechanism. When found, scientist changed their view of how progressed the Ancient Greek civilization was, indeed so much that it's been hailed as the first computer.
And then for centuries after, we went back to more rudimentary tech, the mechanism lost until in late 1900s re-discovered. The story in the movie The Dig (based on a real story & treasure) highlights a similar arc where the find of intricate jewelry prompts the archeologist to proclaim, "The Dark Ages aren't dark anymore."
The science of Kliodynamics, attempting to turn history into a hard science, has similar lessons to offer, suggesting that civilization goes through boom and bust cycles (they call it integration & disintegration) on a 150 - 200 year time scale. Logic then suggests that we can learn a lot from prior cycles.
But that's far from the only argument, maybe not even the most persuasive for me.
George Orwell wrote that the real test of an artwork is its survival (Inside the Whale). A century earlier, long before AI slop, Schopenhauer wondered:
What can be more miserable than the fate of the reading public of this kind, that feels always impelled to read the latest writings of extremely commonplace authors, who write for money only and therefore only exist in numbers?
Schopenhauer - Meditations on Reading
A dynamic that remains the same but has potentially accelerated with the accessibility of generating a buzz and publishing tools.
The emptiness of literature written for the Market... as a recent Noema article called it.
It's unsurprising then that Schopenhauer and Orwell concluded that some of the best writings were created when someone did not write for money but for writing's sake, for they had something to share.
The books that continue being read and published, outliving their authors, there must be something to them. They probably don't make the publishers a whole lot of money, not like the latest series trending on TikTok that you can sell alongside plenty of merch.
A personal anecdote on that note: while in London, I had lost my reading habit. To get back in, I decided to do one book a week to have some sort of goal. I'd pick up plenty of business books and non-fiction, all in the realm of strategy, culture, management, and some psychology.
In my defense, I felt like an imposter working in Marketing without a business degree or any relevant experience.
I barely remember anything from those books.
Eventually, I came to feel, to say it in the words of Humbert Humbert: "I'd read everything, but I'd really not read anything at all."
There were a few notable exceptions, such as the Psychology of Money, Thinking Fast and Slow, and Erin Myers' Culture Map. All of them, I could relate to and draw concepts from for my own life.
At the same time, as a writer, I felt if I just read these commonplace books recommended by the Amazon algo (it was pandemic, so no big bookstore visits were possible), I'd not get anywhere. I recalled Murakami's rhetorical question: How can you think differently if you read all the same books?
That was it.
I thought back to books I read that left a deep impression.
Even though back in the day, I wasn't too thrilled reading Kafka's trial, I vividly remember the dreadful sense of frustration reading the end, despite never having been in the cogs of bureaucracy. I was in 10th grade.
We also read Goethe's Werther. To this day, pathetic is the best way I can describe how I felt about this guy. Shooting himself just because his crush was close to another man. And even then, he failed at killing himself in a romantic manner (quick & without suffering) — a pattern later repeated by Flaubert, who also thought overindulging in your feelings ain't as romantic.
With that on my mind and a party rising here that, despite their supposed nationalist agenda and interest in culture, can't recite a single German poem, I decided to go the opposite way and embrace the old.
No one ever made as good an argument for reading the old books as C.S Lewis in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.
"[There is the] strange idea that ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and amateurs should read modern books."
It's natural to feel intimidated by the classics. They are often long, and the language is not one you're used to.
How many people will read Ryan Holiday and never touch Marc Aurelius?
How many bros will take everything Jordan Peterson teaches in his Nietzsche Course at face value and never advance to reading as little as one of Nietzsche's essays?
The irony... when Nietzsche would call such people sheep to shake them out of their lethargy.
It might be convenient.
It might also go a bit like during this game where you start with one word, whisper it to the next person, and so on until it's a completely different word.
Why settle for second-hand knowledge when you can go straight to the source?
Lewis concedes further that as a writer, he doesn't wish for people to stop reading modern books altogether, but still, if one must choose between modern and old, he recommends reading the old.
The amateur is much less protected than experts against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.
-C.S Lewis
Each age has its own bias. How many times do we look back wonder: How could they possibly have believed that?!
Chances are, 100 years from now, they'll look at us the same way. We can't read books from the future, the best we can do is read those that stood the test of time.
For those into rules, Lewis offers one:
Don't read another new book before reading an old one in between.
Naturally, people will ask what old books are to me.
I can't pinpoint a certain year. By and large, it's books written before the internet existed, the author long passed away, and the ones you get easily in antiquity shops and libraries.
They also don't tend to be advertised.
To give you an idea, here are a few I read recently and would recommend:
Kästner: Fabian, Diary of a Moralist
Mann: Mephisto
Goethe: Faust
Shakespeare: Othello
Nietzsche: Thus spoke Zarathustra
Hesse: Steppenwolf
Camus: The Plague
Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Shelley: Frankenstein
Especially the first two are probably not on non-German speakers' radar but highly worth checking out.
In Fabian, Kästner follows a protagonist who tries to live up to his moral standard when everyone around him is rather loose in the moral department. And also increasingly in bed with the NSDAP. Satiric, entertaining, and depressing because it's tough doing the right thing when there's so little reward for it. No wonder the Nazis burned Kästners' books.
Mephisto was a lucky discovery and completely hooked me within reading the first 20 pages. It follows the rise of an actor ditching all his ideals to further his career under the NS regime. Even though the author noted that personalities in the book were types not based on real people, the ancestors of the guy he clearly based it on managed to force publication to halt.
Is it a coincidence that they both were written by critics of a fascist regime? I reckon not. It's probably why I read them. They felt relevant. They made me feel things, yes fear and uncertainty, but also hope.
No matter how bad the times are, there are courageous few using wit and pen to stand up against it, documenting for those who come after them.
That's not to say you should only read old books about standing up to power.
Read whatever old books interest you. There's plenty to pick from, and they are readily available - often even as free downloads or in local libraries.
There's anything from life advice to beautiful prose, stuff that'll make you laugh and cry.
After all, literature is about breaking the ice of the frozen sea inside us (Kafka).
Isn't it deeply satisfying to feel compassion with someone who lived centuries before us? It might be our antidote to not going crazy, not repeating mistakes made, not assuming that we know it all...
"....keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing throug our minds and this can be done only by reading old books."
Thanks for reading 💚
If you have any old book recommendations (anything from Ancient Greece to the 20th century is game), hit me with them!
