Speaker 1: I always tell my students, don't think of literature. I
Speaker 1: call it the broccoli argument. Don't think of it as
Speaker 1: something that's good for you that you should do. Just
Speaker 1: get it down, you know. It should really be something
Speaker 1: that is. It's not easy. It takes hard work and
Speaker 1: the barriers to entry to high the Science of Happiness,
Speaker 1: Appreciating conderning dilemmas of modern medicine, Abraham Lincoln at the
Speaker 1: Civil War, of the artistic genius Nichel Angeli, when intuition
Speaker 1: face changed American psychology of religion. One Day University. The
Speaker 1: most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures,
Speaker 1: fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn. I'm an
Speaker 1: advocate for literature. I think that it's important for political life.
Speaker 1: I think it helps us. My name is Joseph leu See,
Speaker 1: and I'm a professor of comparative literature at Bard College.
Speaker 1: The name of the lecture is eight Books that Change
Speaker 1: the World. When you think of the experience of just
Speaker 1: scanning social media and that sense of exhaustion and wasted
Speaker 1: time you get right after an hour of it, you
Speaker 1: never feel that way after you read a book. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna start with one of the wonderful things you said
Speaker 1: in this lecture, which I just loved. Writing is an
Speaker 1: act of generosity towards the reader. Thank you for reminding
Speaker 1: me that, because in a way, I want to just
Speaker 1: build a little bit on this idea of generosity uh
Speaker 1: for the reader by the writer. But I think it
Speaker 1: goes both ways. Um. I also tell my students, and
Speaker 1: I tell the participants at Wenday University that writing and
Speaker 1: reading are an act of collaboration. When we talk about literature,
Speaker 1: I think the thing that we want to think about
Speaker 1: it does the book doesn't. It's not like a painting, right.
Speaker 1: If you look at a painting, it has an inherent
Speaker 1: beauty in itself. Right. It's a physical object. You give
Speaker 1: it meaning, but it exists as an object in the world.
Speaker 1: The book is brought to life by the reader, and
Speaker 1: that's why it's so different than watching television or you know,
Speaker 1: you can interpret movies as well, but the book, all
Speaker 1: the heavy lifting has to be done by the reader.
Speaker 1: I always tell my students you're writing a book along
Speaker 1: with the author, because if you don't actively engage with it,
Speaker 1: it doesn't exist. It's just code on a page it
Speaker 1: And this I think is a really amazing thing because
Speaker 1: it makes it puts so much burden and responsibility on you.
Speaker 1: Your imagination, your rational intellect, your memory, your sense of
Speaker 1: history and culture, and you bring those all to bear
Speaker 1: in what one great scholar, Edward said, said, an act
Speaker 1: of erudition and sympathy. You know, when you are almost
Speaker 1: back in the shoes of the author who wrote it.
Speaker 1: Without the reader, the book is nothing. And that's why,
Speaker 1: in a way, reading is so demanding. And that's why,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, some of the recent statistics show that
Speaker 1: it may be on the wane. Is that it's something
Speaker 1: that you can't do along with other things. As Jonathan
Speaker 1: friends and said the novelists, you can't read in multitask.
Speaker 1: It takes up all of your energies. And I actually
Speaker 1: think in this day and age, the skills that we
Speaker 1: get from literature will become even more important than ever before.
Speaker 1: The ability to focus and concentrate, the ability to read deeply,
Speaker 1: to bring the text to life without succumbing to distractions.
Speaker 1: This is an incredible challenge today right Those who can
Speaker 1: do what I think are going to be you know,
Speaker 1: will have a skill that will be very important in
Speaker 1: this new information economy. Why because I think that books
Speaker 1: have shown themselves to be remarkably resilient. I always tell
Speaker 1: my students, think of a work like Augustine's Confessions. It
Speaker 1: was written in the late three hundreds, I think like
Speaker 1: three d. Some people call it like the first autobiograph,
Speaker 1: first memoir. I mean, imagine, what else do you know
Speaker 1: from that era. I mean, it's incredibly remote that book,
Speaker 1: this memoir lives on. In the tell All memoir, the
Speaker 1: Augustine was addicted in his own way to sex into
Speaker 1: worldly glory. He had to overcome that. That's a story
Speaker 1: that's told over and over again in our books today.
Speaker 1: So the freshness in the modernity of Augustine's memoir, even
Speaker 1: though it was written over sixteen hundred years ago, as extraordinary.
Speaker 1: The fact that some of these books can stay alive,
Speaker 1: it's really a miracle. Most books disappear very shortly after
Speaker 1: they're published, right. The scholar at Stanford, Franco Moretti, came
Speaker 1: up with the term the slaughterhouse of literature, you know,
Speaker 1: to show the and the statistics are staggering. I think
Speaker 1: it's something like only one out of every two hundred
Speaker 1: books lives past their immediate point of publication. Why do
Speaker 1: those few live on? And the fact that they do
Speaker 1: is really remarkable. I use the word miracle because somehow
Speaker 1: they remain relevant and vital with the passing of time,
Speaker 1: and it's because of the reader. When they stop speaking
Speaker 1: to the reader, they will disappear. Your lecture the eight
Speaker 1: books that change the world, one naturally is the Bible,
Speaker 1: which may have changed the world more than anything else,
Speaker 1: no matter what you believe, right I I'd say, think
Speaker 1: of the Bible as literature, as a collection of stories,
Speaker 1: independent of your your faith system, and just think of
Speaker 1: its revolutionary impact across the world. I urge you to
Speaker 1: read the Bible. It's an incredible piece of literature. It
Speaker 1: is so unusually written, it was written by many hands.
Speaker 1: It's at once a collection, it's an anthology, it's a digest.
Speaker 1: It's about editing, it's about translation, it's about trying to
Speaker 1: blur the line between life and words. It's about the
Speaker 1: sacredness of the text. A lot of modern literary criticism
Speaker 1: what I do grew out of the tradition of biblical scholarship,
Speaker 1: the exegesis, making sense of the word. You've zero in
Speaker 1: on Genesis as an extraordinary piece of storytelling. Storytelling, I mean,
Speaker 1: think about it. Genesis has a specific language, something along
Speaker 1: the lines. And God created the earth and the heavens
Speaker 1: and it was good, and you know, then he rested
Speaker 1: on the seventh day. This idea, the way the sentences cascade,
Speaker 1: the hands, you know, one following weather. We don't talk
Speaker 1: like that. That's called in to put My professor had
Speaker 1: on for a moment para taxis where the the sentences
Speaker 1: don't really logically link the way we speak today with
Speaker 1: normal syntax, but in that incredible form you get a
Speaker 1: rhythm of flow and a kind of rhetoric of storytelling
Speaker 1: that's so memorable, so rich, so unbelievable. And also think
Speaker 1: of the characters that are created in Genesis. God is
Speaker 1: a character. Everything that God is making is sort of
Speaker 1: not turning out the way he planned, right. Genesis is origin.
Speaker 1: Listen to this amazing passage. And the Lord saw that
Speaker 1: the evil of the human creature was great on the earth,
Speaker 1: and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only
Speaker 1: perpetually evil. And the Lord regretted having made the human
Speaker 1: on earth, and was grieved to the heart. And the
Speaker 1: Lord said I will wipe out the human race I
Speaker 1: created from the face of the earth, from human to
Speaker 1: alt a crawling thing to the foul of heavens. For
Speaker 1: I regret that I have made them. What a passage.
Speaker 1: The idea of God as a character who's upset over
Speaker 1: his creation. It's one of the most grounding images and
Speaker 1: descriptions of what supposedly an untouchable, a noble, surpassingly powerful deity,
Speaker 1: and the collection of people who wrote Genesis give us
Speaker 1: to him. It's a hate right in all his psychologic
Speaker 1: in this context, I don't know what it really is,
Speaker 1: in all the psychological complexity. This ish image of God
Speaker 1: grieving to the heart is to me a powerful example
Speaker 1: of how we create character in the Bible. That's what
Speaker 1: literature does it get, whether it's you know, a realist
Speaker 1: novel from the eight hundreds or contemporary novel M Yesterday
Speaker 1: or the Genesis. You're talking about these unbelievably rich characters,
Speaker 1: like God, like Joseph, like Adam and Eve. I mean,
Speaker 1: think of Adam and Eve. You know, uh, they live
Speaker 1: in paradise, but they choose to violate the terms of
Speaker 1: paradise to taste from the tree of knowledge. Why Do
Speaker 1: they prefer a life with hardship if it means getting
Speaker 1: to knowledge? Do they? Just? Is it just a human
Speaker 1: tendency to not be able to resist temptation? It raises
Speaker 1: all these incredible psychological issues and concerns that can speak
Speaker 1: to you no matter what your faith is. We've been
Speaker 1: teasing our listeners a little, so let's taste from the
Speaker 1: tree of your lecture and mentioned that the eight books
Speaker 1: the other book from ancient times as the Odyssey, right I.
Speaker 1: I you know, of course, a list like this is
Speaker 1: highly selective, highly adios and cratic, and more of a
Speaker 1: gesture towards the books that have been incredibly meaningful to
Speaker 1: me and the books that I feel have had the
Speaker 1: lasting impact. The whole point is that I want my
Speaker 1: eight to stimulate you. Our listeners are audience members to
Speaker 1: make their own list of eight books. Okay, so we
Speaker 1: got the Odyssey by Homer. Yeah, I'm not evading the questions.
Speaker 1: And then and I wasn't a literary version of a
Speaker 1: filibuster that I have the And then you jump your
Speaker 1: fast forward to the fourteenth century with I chose Dante.
Speaker 1: Dante is my my you know, my main man, the
Speaker 1: person I've studied and written about, probably more than anyone. Um.
Speaker 1: I chose Genesis because of its um incredible the impact
Speaker 1: of the Bible and all cultures, all religions. I chose
Speaker 1: the Odyssey because it's the story of the hero's return
Speaker 1: that is as relevant today as it was when it
Speaker 1: was written centuries before the birth of Christ. I chose
Speaker 1: Dante because of its unbelievable tension between this spiritual world
Speaker 1: in the secular world. Dante was writing as a Christian,
Speaker 1: but it's about the way earthly history and the demands
Speaker 1: of the soul come into conflict those of my first three.
Speaker 1: And this is right on the cusp of the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: the Age of Belief, and then the Age of Reason,
Speaker 1: the Renaissance, and then the Renaissance. We naturally flow into
Speaker 1: the person I felt I had to choose one from
Speaker 1: because he shaped the English language, he shaped the language
Speaker 1: you and I are speaking. And now Shakespeare. Uh, Shakespeare
Speaker 1: is the opposite in a way of Dante. If Dante
Speaker 1: is very scholarly, very steeped in doctrine, and and very
Speaker 1: difficult to just pick up and read Shakespeare once you
Speaker 1: learn the little verbal ticks, once you learn the expressions,
Speaker 1: is actually not that difficult. A lot of shakespeare stuff
Speaker 1: is refashioned, recycled stuff like Romeo and Juliet was an
Speaker 1: Italian Renaissance tale, a very boring one. Shakespeare made it magical.
Speaker 1: He was no scholar. He was just really an incredibly
Speaker 1: gifted psychologist, the most extraordinary capacity to use language. But
Speaker 1: he was not someone who was buried his nose buried
Speaker 1: in books. He was a businessman trying to get people
Speaker 1: to his theater and make compelling works of art that
Speaker 1: were accessible. We have to remember that, right, Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: I know you've seen, you've heard the rumors. The main
Speaker 1: argument against Shakespeare's being the author of his own plays
Speaker 1: was that how could someone with very little education right
Speaker 1: as he did? But that's absurd. That's Michelangelo didn't go
Speaker 1: to you know, art school. He he apprenticed. We can't
Speaker 1: apply anachronistically our idea just because Shakespeare didn't go to
Speaker 1: Oxford and Cambridge that he couldn't have written, uh these
Speaker 1: plays is absolutely silly. If with my list gives the
Speaker 1: lie to anything, it's this the idea that you can't
Speaker 1: be read by many and a brilliant writer because Shakespeare
Speaker 1: could not have been more popular in his day. He's
Speaker 1: still in college curricula all over the country. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and he was a very successful theater impresario, theater merchants,
Speaker 1: so you know, he was I think that's part of
Speaker 1: his appeal. He was what I call accessible genius. He
Speaker 1: wasn't trying to say things in a rarefied way. He
Speaker 1: was trying to get people into his theater and communicate
Speaker 1: with his audience, and he somehow did it in a
Speaker 1: way of you know, artistic brilliance. Okay, we got four
Speaker 1: books so far, So moving closer today. I thought the
Speaker 1: whole point of my lectures to get people reading. So
Speaker 1: I didn't want to, you know, give them all. I
Speaker 1: could have chosen, you know, don Quixote, I could have
Speaker 1: chosen Montana, a lot of older text, but I wanted
Speaker 1: to come close to the present to find works in
Speaker 1: more relevant to today. So in that way, and especially
Speaker 1: are the American question, American identity, United States writers. So
Speaker 1: I chose a British author, Virginia Wolf because, um, I
Speaker 1: believe that she wrote an extraordinary book about many things,
Speaker 1: but above all, I would say it gives us an
Speaker 1: incredibly complex model of female identity. That book is to
Speaker 1: the Lighthouse, our fifth book, our last, our six, seventh
Speaker 1: and eighth book, our last three, or all American books,
Speaker 1: and all in dialogue with one another in their own ways.
Speaker 1: I chose Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Joseph Hellos Catched twenty two,
Speaker 1: and harp re Leased to Kill a Mockingbird, And they're
Speaker 1: all part of what I considered the quest for the
Speaker 1: Great American novel. A theorist in the late nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: John William DeForest came up with the term the great
Speaker 1: American novel. And I still think there is this desire
Speaker 1: um in writers to kind of capture the complexities of
Speaker 1: American identity and get it on the printed page. And
Speaker 1: it's not just the three I mentioned, but we see
Speaker 1: this in Philip Roth, Tony Morrison, so many Mark Twain,
Speaker 1: so many writers who kind of embraced the riddle and
Speaker 1: enigma of American identity. Make the case for why reading
Speaker 1: literature matters so much, you know, Richard, the more I
Speaker 1: think about it, the more important than the choice of
Speaker 1: eight books, my version of eight books versus yours versus
Speaker 1: someone else's. Um, it's really what do they have in common?
Speaker 1: What to all great books. What does all great literature
Speaker 1: have in common? And I would focus on four things.
Speaker 1: One great literature is a passport to alternate worlds. You know,
Speaker 1: I grew up in a working class Italian American family.
Speaker 1: My family immigrated. We didn't have a lot of money.
Speaker 1: My parents had a grade school education. There were no
Speaker 1: books in our house. In fact, I'm kind of an
Speaker 1: unlikely person to be giving a lecture on eight books
Speaker 1: to read, because when I was growing up, my mom,
Speaker 1: whenever she saw me with a book, she'd say, in
Speaker 1: her dialect, you know, lass, you know, put that book down.
Speaker 1: It's going to give you a headache, as if reading
Speaker 1: would give me a headache, you know. Um. But even
Speaker 1: though we didn't have money, we didn't travel. We had
Speaker 1: a local library, and by going to the library, I
Speaker 1: could read about Rob Lais and Renaissance France. I could
Speaker 1: read about f Scott Fitzgerald in the nineteen twenties during Prohibition,
Speaker 1: I could travel anywhere. Literature gave me alternate worlds. It
Speaker 1: gives every read or alternate world not just in the present,
Speaker 1: but you can go back in the past. Aristotle said brilliantly,
Speaker 1: history tells us what happened poetry gives us what could
Speaker 1: have which should have happened, a universal history. It takes,
Speaker 1: it moves beyond the contingent into the universal, so that
Speaker 1: when you read Scott Fitzgerald's A Great Godsby, you can
Speaker 1: see what life was like in the nineteen twenties. You
Speaker 1: can see, you can the air of the parties that
Speaker 1: gets me through his rife with the sense and the
Speaker 1: music of that era. It brings it to life just
Speaker 1: as richly as any historian could. So the first facet
Speaker 1: of these great books is they're a passport to alternate
Speaker 1: world absolutely the second. The second one is literature is
Speaker 1: the marriage of form and content. In other words, how
Speaker 1: you say something is just as important as what you say.
Speaker 1: That's really the biggest difference between literature and other forms
Speaker 1: of writing. You can read wonderful history, you can read
Speaker 1: wonderful philosophy. But literature is all about the surface texture
Speaker 1: of the words you do. It's almost like music. When
Speaker 1: you become a good reader, you start to hear the
Speaker 1: notes of what's on the page. Form and content are one.
Speaker 1: You know. There's a little line from Hamlet. When we
Speaker 1: first meet Hamlet, Claudius introduces um and he's like my son, Hamlet.
Speaker 1: He's not really, you know, he's it's his nephew, but
Speaker 1: he's become his son because he's married Gertrude and Hamlet.
Speaker 1: In reply to this line, he says a little more
Speaker 1: than kin and less than kind. Too much family, too
Speaker 1: little good behavior. Right, it would lose an effect if
Speaker 1: he just said, you're not a very good uncle. You
Speaker 1: shouldn't have married my mom. Right, you shouldn't have killed
Speaker 1: my dad either, while you're at it. It's about this
Speaker 1: kind of artful crafting of language thematically. You know, my
Speaker 1: students always say, gosh, this was an a paper, how
Speaker 1: could you have given it a C? And I say,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea may have been an A, but
Speaker 1: the writing was a D. So we split the difference.
Speaker 1: It's about the joy and beauty of hearing the words.
Speaker 1: You do podcasts, you know what that's about, right, The
Speaker 1: joy of language. How language has a life of its own,
Speaker 1: And that's what literature gives us. Now that we've heard
Speaker 1: your first two qualities, let's go to the third. I
Speaker 1: think the third one is what I call human at
Speaker 1: He's diary. By that, I mean literature gives us insights
Speaker 1: into the way people lived. And I think in a
Speaker 1: way that no other form of expression can well because
Speaker 1: there's so much empathy. So much empathy puts you right
Speaker 1: alongside a character from a different time, a different place,
Speaker 1: a different culture. Think of To the Lighthouse. It's about
Speaker 1: a woman basically, you know, she's she's a housewife, she
Speaker 1: doesn't work, she raises an enormous family, many children. That
Speaker 1: person's voice would be very hard to hear in the
Speaker 1: public back then, because her husband is a philosopher, is
Speaker 1: very famous. His words is out there everywhere. But she's
Speaker 1: at home. She's a domestic you know, creature. And yet
Speaker 1: Virginia Wolf takes us inside her head and she gives
Speaker 1: these incredibly lush descriptions of her inner life. Where else
Speaker 1: can we get that but literature. I tell my students
Speaker 1: it's like a fossil, an imprint, but not in the
Speaker 1: physical world, but of the human spirit it and you
Speaker 1: have this lovely phrase, the literature is the texture of
Speaker 1: life beyond the facts. That's exactly what I think this
Speaker 1: idea of humanity's diary gives us. So we're up to
Speaker 1: the fourth The fourth one, uh is my most I
Speaker 1: would say, um coded one I call it finding a
Speaker 1: fig tree of your own. By that, I mean going
Speaker 1: back to St. Augustine, who wrote the Confessions in the
Speaker 1: late three hundreds. Augustine has this life changing experience basically
Speaker 1: under a fig tree where he's having this breakdown, true
Speaker 1: like spiritual crisis, and he hears a voice saying totally
Speaker 1: leg which is Latin for a pick it up and read.
Speaker 1: So he reaches for a book happens to be a Bible,
Speaker 1: and he finds the passage that enables him to break
Speaker 1: his addiction with sex, with pleasures of the flesh, with
Speaker 1: worldly ambition. Sometimes we need external help to break a habit,
Speaker 1: to break a pattern. For Augustine, came in the form
Speaker 1: of picking up a book and reading about a path
Speaker 1: in life that he needed to take. This is very dramatic,
Speaker 1: of course, but I think we all have those moments
Speaker 1: where we're reading something and it can really have an
Speaker 1: impact on who we are, our sense of the world,
Speaker 1: our sense of someone we know or someone we thought
Speaker 1: we knew, our sense of our own past. I think
Speaker 1: it's something that makes it literature, as like a companion
Speaker 1: that you go through life with and that at certain
Speaker 1: times can change that life. We've all or many of
Speaker 1: us have had those moments as readers where we read
Speaker 1: something and we feel the book is speaking directly to us,
Speaker 1: our own private fig tree moment in a way. That's
Speaker 1: my most important gift of reading, that you can have
Speaker 1: that moment where reading changes your life. Now we're doing
Speaker 1: this podcast and we're talking about your lecture. We've given
Speaker 1: people a taste of what you're talking about. Why should
Speaker 1: they go and see you? Because every talk has I
Speaker 1: suppose has its aim right, mine is very simple. It's
Speaker 1: not for them to leave and say, wow, Professor Liusey
Speaker 1: had some really I mean, I hope they think I
Speaker 1: have good insights on the books. But my aim is
Speaker 1: very simple. I want you to leave my talk and
Speaker 1: go read a book. If you do that, then the
Speaker 1: talk succeeded. Why should we read? Why should we read
Speaker 1: the great books? Because of this power of storytelling to
Speaker 1: bring people separated by culture, politics, identity together into that
Speaker 1: universal space where they can recognize each other as human
Speaker 1: beings and feel each other's pain while enjoying the pleasure
Speaker 1: of great stories. That's great right here, that was really enjoyable.
Speaker 1: I'm Richard Davis. Thanks for listening. Sign off on our
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