On Friday,
I offered some of my favorite books,
as possibilities for summer reading. The books of Part Two come in two
baskets, which we’ll call Athens and Jerusalem. The Athens books fire
external ambition; the Jerusalem books focus on the inner spirit.
We’ll
start the Athens basket with “The Peloponnesian War,” by Thucydides. In
Homer, we see characters who are driven by a competitive desire to be
excellent at something, to display their prowess and win eternal fame.
This ambition drives Homeric heroes to excellence, but it also makes
them narcissistic, touchy and prone to cycles of anger and revenge.
Through
the figure of Pericles, Thucydides shows us how to live a life of
civilized ambition, in which individual achievement is fused with
patriotic service. He also reminds us that in politics the lows are
lower than the highs are high. That is, when politicians mess up, the
size of the damage they cause is larger than the size of the benefit
they create when they do well.
Some
of my favorite biographies are about people who followed the Periclean
mold and dedicated themselves to public service: Ron Chernow’s biography
of Alexander Hamilton; Edmund Morris’s series on Theodore Roosevelt;
Winston Churchill’s endearing “My Early Life.”
These
books arouse energy and aspiration. They have the risk-embracing spirit
found in W.H. Auden’s famous poem, “Leap Before You Look,” which opens:
“The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.”
And ends this way:
“A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.”
The
books in the Jerusalem basket interrogate worldly ambition and
encourage righteousness. Of all the authors I’ve read, the one with the
most capacious mind is Augustine — for his understanding of human
psychology, his sonorous emotions and his intellectual rigor.
“The
Confessions” is a religious book, but it can also be read as a memoir
of an ambitious young man who came to realize how perverse life can be
when it is dedicated to fulfilling the self’s own desires. “I came to
Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me,”
Augustine wrote. “I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love,
and from the very depth of my need hated myself.” Gradually, he orders
his love, putting the higher loves above lower ones, and surrendering to
God’s ultimate love. He also reconciles with his mother, Monica, the
ultimate helicopter mom.
Toward
the end of Monica’s life, mother and son sit sweetly in a garden, their
conversation rising to higher things. There is a long beautiful
sentence, which is hard to parse, but which conveys the spirit of
elevation. It repeats the word “hushed.” The tumult of the flesh is
hushed. The waters and the air are hushed, and “by not thinking on self
surmount self.” Even Augustine’s voracious ambition is hushed in this
surrender.
For
Jewish takes on inner elevation, I’d recommend “The Lonely Man of
Faith” by Joseph Soloveitchik and “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor
Frankl. For Christians, you can’t go wrong with Dorothy Day’s “The Long
Loneliness,” or Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy,” which you should
not read on airplanes, because you will cry.
Let’s
end the inner-life basket with two books on love. Scott Spencer’s
“Endless Love” is about youthful passion. It opens this way: “When I was
17 and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped
far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined
everything I loved. ...”
For
mature love, we have to turn to George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.” It took
me six runs to get into this book, because I was unready for it, but, in
middle age, it is hard not to be awed by her characterizations. Some
samples:
“She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.”
“We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.”
“His
soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to
thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on
fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its
wings and never flying.”
I
suppose at the end of these bookish columns, I should tell you what I
think books can’t do. They can’t carve your convictions about the world.
Only life can do that — only relationships, struggle, love, play and
work. Books can give you vocabularies and frameworks to help you
understand and decide, but life provides exactly the education you need.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 27, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Really Good Books, Part II.
