2020 was my deepest reading year to date. The year I got the most out of the great books, considered the most, and felt the most connected to the wellspring of humanity.
Here are 15 lessons I’ve learnt:
Most people want to have read something, rather than actually read it.
I noticed this in myself when I tried to speed-read Proust.
You do not speed-read Proust.
The value of Proust – indeed, any great literature – is barred to all who try to inhale or glide over it.
This is the same with travel.
I paraphrase Pascal when I ask: Would anybody brave the seas and skies and visit foreign climes if they weren’t allowed to talk about their trip?
Slow > speed.
Speed-reading has its time and place.
You speed-read a textbook in order to zero in on the information you need.
But you don’t speed-read literature.
Everybody wants everything now. But you can’t mainline inspiration or insight into your veins. You can’t “binge” the great ideas. You must let all the colours of human experience unfold before you.
You must bring your experience to bear upon your books.
This is called synoptic reading, and it’s the only way to unlock the hidden powers of great art.
If you don’t “get” Tolstoy, Hugo, Proust, Shakespeare – perhaps you need to live, and come close to death, then try again.
Vibes transfer across time.
Tolstoy was an unbearable asshole. So was Hugo (though decidedly more idealistic than Tolstoy).
Shakespeare wasn’t. Nor Austen. Nor Chekhov. And Dickens never deluded himself into thinking he was God.
You can tell who was genuinely virtuous and who simply wished to appear so by reading between the lines of these great works.
Dostoyevsky is entrance level pub food.
I love Dostoyevsky, but Crime and Punishment is not the tome readers want it to be.
Nabokov didn’t even rank him in the top five Russian writers of all time. Turgenev is in there though.
Those who scorn Shakespeare lack maturity.
Shakespeare is the greatest imaginative writer who has ever lived. Period.
Any attempts to discredit him, resist him, take him out of his context, read him through wonky ideologically-driven prisms, or tear him down a peg are all futile as you use the language and models of thought he has bestowed on you with which to do so.
Shakespeare is the ultimate mirror and all art since him is always a response to him.
Remember when your parents told you to eat your vegetables? I’m telling you to read your sonnets.
Reading “over your head” is best.
If you understand everything you are reading, the material is beneath you.
My aim with my lectures and podcasts was always to provide educational material that required pausing and repeating as those are the materials that gave me the most growth.
Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale Humanities courses are not my competition because we will transcend them.
We’re experiencing a shift away from the university “educated” and towards the self-educated. They will find the way by following their hearts and guts.
Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are “slop”.
I’m sorry to say it. And when I first heard Harold Bloom call these writers of my childhood “slop”, I became angry. How dare he?
But I tried rereading The Green Mile after a year that included many classic works and I was astounded at just how badly written it was.
King, like Rowling, has a wonderful imagination – but neither are Dickens, as many critics would have them be. Although how many writers are?
Read with your three brains.
Head, heart, and gut.
There’s a secret fourth brain, but that’s a topic for another day.
We’ve reached the year of strategic detachment.
For years we’ve deluded ourselves that hyper-connectivity actually means improved human communication and robust experience.
The sensitive and intelligent have shed that delusion and are now embracing solitude, quiet, stillness, retreating into nature and contemplation, focused on relationships with leverage, dispensing with the frivolous.
In short: you should be reading more this year. A lot more. And that means something’s gotta give.
Not reading = not living.
I will repeat: bring your experience to bear upon your books, but choose the books that add colour to your experience.
You cannot have fulfilment in one if you neglect the other. Reading and living are intertwined, just like the body and mind, and there is no retreat from reality.
Escapism is a lie peddled to thoughtless consumers. Imaginative literature is reality.
Make your reading a great easter egg hunt.
Proust mentions many different artists and writers. The astute reader tries to unravel the threads. Find those paintings. Read those books.
Commune with the living dead.
The leaders of tomorrow are being born today.
We have no leaders right now because a generation or two has refused to ingratiate themselves with the greatest company of the ages.
Montaigne may be deceased, but he’s still waiting at the table for you to join.
This is changing out of necessity. Leaders were gestating last year, and will be born this year.
History repeats itself because human nature does not change.
The trimming is different, ornamental, but the essence remains.
We’re only mutable within a set of confines.
And reading reveals human parameters.