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Italo calvino why read the classics how to#
This, then, is the reason why the greatest “yield” from reading the classics will be obtained by someone who knows how to alternate them with the proper dose of current affairs. To be able to read the classics you have to know “from where” you are reading them otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud. The latest news may well be banal or mortifying, but it nonetheless remains a point at which to stand and look both backward and forward. But we have to see how far such rigor would be either justified or profitable. To keep up such a diet without any contamination, this blessed soul would have to abstain from reading the newspapers, and never be tempted by the latest novel or sociological investigation. And all this without having to write reviews of the latest publications, or papers to compete for a university chair, or articles for magazines on tight deadlines.
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We can, of course, imagine some blessed soul who devotes his reading time exclusively to Lucretius, Lucian, Montaigne, Erasmus, Quevedo, Marlowe, the Discourse on Method, Wilhelm Meister, Coleridge, Ruskin, Proust, and Valéry, with a few forays in the direction of Murasaki or the Icelandic sagas. Why read the classics rather than concentrate on books that enable us to understand our own times more deeply? The definition we can give is therefore this: A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us. If we reread the book at a mature age we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty-all things that continue to operate even if the book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, owing to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s “instructions for use,” and inexperience in life itself.
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Italo Calvino argues that we should dedicate part of our adult life to re-reading the classics that shaped us as children.