Understanding Isn’t the Same to Everyone

The above is a quotation from Steven Brust’s book, Brokedown Palace, which is a wonderful fantasy novel about a young prince and his older brothers, a talking horse (sometimes bull), a palace that is slowly crumbling, and a land near a Faerie realm.

The horse speaks to the young prince, trying to explain to him the differences between him and his eldest brother, the king. The passage continues. “You are a scholar by nature. You see a thing, and you think of the general thing; the group of things to which it belongs. You see a swallow, and think bird, flying animal, then animal. You try to understand it and the rules by which it functions. Others don’t. Others see a thing and act upon it instinctively. In you this is a weakness and a strength. In others, the same. But you must try to understand that merely pointing something out to someone such as your brother will not move him. He will not take it as you intend – he is too firmly committed.”

It seems to me that if we take the above to heart we might be more charitable when others act in ways we don’t, can’t or won’t understand. It’s not always easy to hold back hurtful or critical words or actions, but worth striving for. Being able to recognize and appreciate differences, it seems to me, is a strength.

Also, it’s an important attribute of a writer to be able to create characters who are different from us, different from each other, perhaps lack understanding of each other, and thus conflicted. Conflict is a necessary element of certain kinds of writing.

I’m almost half way through the book, and loving it.

The discovery in reading and writing can be magical. In the best of a writer’s work, we may see ourselves and find illumination.

Reading the Classics

Somewhere around my early teens I decided to read all of the “classic” books. I knew at the time that people were still writing books, but had it in my mind that it would be possible to read all those considered really good. Now, I know that I’m not even aware of some of the great books being written, much less have the time to read them all in one lifetime. Still, I thought it might be interesting to review what I read and see if others have suggestions for their “classic” or favourite books.

Among the “children’s” (I don’t really like classifying books by age) books I would include Black Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, Huckleberry Finn, Heidi, Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Water Babies, A Girl of the Limberlost, and I could go on. Often when I found a book I liked, I’d read others by the same author: Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. M. Montgomery and so on. I didn’t read books intended “just for girls” but anything that was called a “classic” such as Two Years before the Mast, and Gulliver’s Travels. If in a book I was reading, another book was mentioned, I often sought out the latter. For example, I read Pilgrim’s Progress as a result of reading Little Women.

One year in elementary school (in those days there wasn’t a main school library, but each classroom had a few shelves of books in the back) I decided to start with the first book on the classroom library shelves and read all the way through to the end. A few, such as some of Shakespeare’s stories, gave me a rather hard time, but I persisted. Also, in those years our “readers” often contained excerpts of books or a short story by an author I liked. I’d try to search those out and read more by that writer (Albert Payson Terhune, The Heart of a Dog).

In a few years I realized there was no way I’d be able to read all the “classics” but I kept searching them out. And I know now that not everyone likes the same books. A few more of my favourites are A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, To Kill a Mockingbird, Buddenbrooks, a lot of Herman Hesse, much of Colette. I read and tried to read others that were considered good literature – The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren because Simone de Beauvoir had an affair with him (I still have the book but haven’t managed to finish it), Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos because of the name of the band. At university I took a “European Novels in Translation” class and read Stendhal, Balzac, and Goethe. My father brought a complete set of Goethe from Germany, which I now have, but I don’t think my German is good enough to read all of them.

Goodreads lists some of the popular 20^th century books. From their list I’ve read: The Great Gatsby (never one of my favourites), Lord of the Flies (searing; I thought Ender’s Game was a kind of modern LOTF), The Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye (also not a favourite), Silent Spring, The Sun Also Rises, Of Mice and Men, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mrs. Dalloway (worth seeing the movie before reading the book), The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (just read it recently; interesting to compare with To Kill a Mockingbird), The Good Earth, The Secret Garden, Brave New World, Tortilla Flat and so on.

So much reading to do, not enough time!