4.
The Past Without Difference
Who would be the opposite of these presentist people I have been decrying, these people whose temporal bandwidth has narrowed to the instant? Who is matter to their antimatter? I might nominate Heinrich Schliemann, the nineteenth-century German businessman who transformed himself into an archaeologist and is often described as “the discoverer of Troy.”
Schliemann was obsessed with everything Greek. He divorced his wife in order to marry a Greek woman, and “baptized” his children—whom he named Andromache, Troy, and Agamemnon—by holding a copy of the Iliad over their heads and reciting lines from it. At one point in his excavations he discovered a great golden mask and declared, “I have looked into the face of Agamemnon.” As it turned out, the mask didn’t belong to Agamemnon, but Schliemann really did believe that he had gazed upon the king after whom he named his own son. He believed that he had erased the distance between his world and the world of archaic Greece that he so profoundly loved.
But as much as sheer presentism, an outlook like Schliemann’s is also a diminishment of temporal bandwidth. The way that you expand your Now is not by treating the distant past as though it were present; rather, your task is to see it in its difference as well as in its likeness to your own moment. You can’t close that distance by naming your son after an ancient king.
Schliemann’s fascination with and love of all things Greek sometimes led him astray, disabling rather than enabling his understanding. For no one who had read the Iliad with any real care would name his son Agamemnon. Agamemnon was a terrible king who made one catastrophic error after another, who survived the war largely by accident—in part by claiming the prerogative of kings to stay out of the line of fire—and stumbled his long way home only to be murdered by his wife, apparently not having anticipated that she would be unhappy with him for having sacrificed their daughter to the gods. This is someone whose name you’d want to give to your child? Schliemann’s idea of “ancient Greekness” made him blind to some vital considerations.
Schliemann may be an extreme case, though what makes him extreme is his use in what most of us would call a “secular” context of an approach to the past that we typically associate with religions—bookish religions, anyway. A common assumption made by Jews and Christians and Muslims is that their sacred texts can speak to them more or less directly across the centuries. (The situation is rather different for Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, where sacred texts don’t play the same governing role.) Indeed, the ability to transcend temporal and cultural distance is one of the primary traits that makes a sacred text sacred.
In 1942, when W. H. Auden was writing his “Christmas Oratorio,” For the Time Being, he sent a copy to his father, and was rather surprised to discover that his father was puzzled and frustrated by the poem. The problem for Dr. Auden—a retired physician and a widely read man—was the way the poem blurred the lines between the ancient world and our own. For instance, in a section of the poem narrated by Herod the Great, the Judaean king makes reference to bookshops and trapeze artists.
The younger Auden replied that this approach is not new with him: “until the 18th Cent. it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings.” And this is correct. In the mystery plays of medieval England—which reenacted stories from the Bible—the biblical characters talked, acted, and dressed like ordinary Englishmen. In many Renaissance paintings, biblical figures are dressed like people of the painter’s time and are placed in obviously European, rather than Palestinian, landscapes. Auden agrees that taking up the same method in the twentieth century is risky: “If a return to the older method now seems startling it is partly because of the acceleration in the rate of historical change due to industrialization—there is a far greater difference between the accidents of life in 1600 AD and in 1942 than between those of 30 AD and 1600.” At any time and place, a biblical character dressed like a Renaissance courtier is significantly less jarring than one wearing a business suit and lace-up oxfords.
For the poet, his apparently unhistorical approach arises from the fact that he’s writing about the biblical story: “the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental—the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures.” For Auden, if Christianity is always and everywhere true, then you have to find a way to translate the Bible’s concerns into the experience of your own day. At all costs Auden wants to avoid costume drama, the kind of thing that the historian C. V. Wedgwood is talking about when she comments that “it was a common romantic vice to encourage a purely theatrical view of the past, as though history were an opera house inhabited by puppets striking noble attitudes preferable in picturesque settings, and quite removed from the ordinary embarrassments and distresses of mortal life.” Better an anachronistic business suit than that.
The kind of reading, that kind of encounter with the words of the past, which religions based on historical texts demand is a special case, and one that I won’t be dealing with in the rest of this book. I pause to describe it because it has long been important to many of the world’s cultures, and also because it calls our attention to one of the things that makes Schliemann so unusual: he reads secular history as a sacred text. Which, I think it’s fair to say, is not a great idea.
But you don’t have to be a Schliemann in order to believe that the past contains treasures that we can unearth—and unearth in the cause of increasing our own personal density. One of the things you learn from studying the past is how our ancestors conceived of their own past. For the most part they did not have the same kind of historical consciousness that we have—the kind in which calling something “medieval” is meant to be, and is often received as, a one-word refutation. People who do not carry around that particular sense of difference and distance from the past do not have the same reactions, the same concerns, that Dr. Auden had.
Throughout most of the past two thousand years or so in the West, a common belief held that a person could best navigate the challenges of life by taking his or her bearings from famous figures from the past. Again, I do not speak here of the religious sensibility that looks back to Jesus or Abraham or Lao-tzu or the Buddha, but rather of the more secular sensibility that sees major actors on the world’s stage as exemplary for us. This was true whether those figures were virtuous or vicious, because one could learn what not to do from studying the past as well as one could learn what courses were rightly pursued.
When Niccolò Machiavelli was exiled from his native Florence and forced to live in the countryside among rubes and rednecks, he admitted that he was prone to get into pointless arguments with said rubes and rednecks, but at the end of the day he could do this:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.
Machiavelli experienced his study as a kind of time machine—recall here Brian Morton’s idea that in reading books we travel to the past—but when he receives the company of the Greats he feels no temporal distinction from them. They speak to him “in their humanity,” a humanity that cheerfully disregards boundaries of time and space.
Machiavelli here engages chiefly with the thinkers of the past—but what about history’s actors, the great political and military figures who bestrode their own times like giants? Certainly as he wrote The Prince, the manual of political action he offered to Lorenzo de’ Medici in hopes of being restored to influence in Florence, he saw princes and kings and warriors of the past as offering examples for modern rulers to learn from—but, and this has always been the most controversial element of The Prince, they are merely examples of success and failure, not virtue and vice. In offering his advice to Lorenzo, Machiavelli was consciously setting himself apart from a long-standing tradition, one that made the leaders of the past somehow contemporary with later readers, and object lessons for them. The person who did more than any other to create this tradition was the Greek-speaking Roman historian Plutarch, who lived from around 46 CE to around 120 CE, and who wrote his series of lives of Greek and Roman statesmen and other notables explicitly in order to provide examples, mirrors in which people could perceive their own virtues and vices.
Plutarch was born in the village of Chaeronea, in Boeotia, and though he spent some time in Athens, he lived in Chaeronea for most of his life. (He once commented that he stayed there in order to prevent the small town from becoming even smaller.) Plutarch thought that one could live a wise and fulfilling life anywhere, and that was possible in part because of books—books that connect us to the Great. He wrote a number of Moralia—moral essays, essays that offered sage advice for good living—but he came to feel that mere precepts were inadequate for communicating to people the best way to live. We need examples of virtue and vice in action in order to see their outlines clearly, and the lives of the Great wrote their examples of virtue and vice in very large letters that all could clearly read. Thus he emphasized that his lives were biographies, not histories, which did not mean that they were inaccurate but rather than he sought primarily to include evidence of character, which might come from trivial events in a person’s life. So he warned his readers that if they wanted detailed accounts of Alexander the Great’s military conquests they should look elsewhere; but if they wanted to understand the unique combination of personal traits that made Alexander who he so memorably was, for good and for ill, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander is just the thing.
In an introduction to one of his Lives he wrote,
Although I originally took up the writing of Lives for others, I find that the task has grown on me and I continue with it for my own sake too, in the sense that I treat the narrative as a kind of mirror and try to find a way to arrange my life and assimilate it to the virtues of my subjects. The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them: I receive and welcome each of them in turn as my guest, so to speak, observe “his stature and his qualities,” and choose from his achievements those which it is particularly important and valuable for me to know. “And oh, what greater delight could one find than this?” And could one find a more effective means of moral improvement either?
Notice how closely this resembles Machiavelli, but not the author of The Prince; rather, the man who lived in the country and spoke with the ancients in his library. (Surely that Machiavelli was taking his bearings from Horace, with whom we began this book, as he sought to “interrogate the writings of the wise.”) Machievelli: “There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me.” Plutarch: “I receive and welcome each of them in turn as my guest, so to speak, observe ‘his stature and his qualities,’ and choose from his achievements those which it is particularly important and valuable for me to know.” It’s the same approach, but Machiavelli sought communion with philosophers and poets, Plutarch with warriors and emperors. The great figures of the past, then, provide sustenance for those who seek the contemplative life and the active.
Plutarch’s way of appropriating and drawing on the experiences of the great political and military figures of Greece and Rome proved to be profoundly influential for many centuries. It was intrinsically comparative—each life of a Greek figure was paired with the closest Roman counterpart, for instance Alexander with Julius Caesar—and therefore encouraged further comparison with the lives of the political figures of one’s own era. His model was one that the whole educational system of western Europe embraced for a very long time. Thanks to Plutarch it not only seemed natural to George Washington to perceive himself as a modern analogue of Cincinnatus—the great general who saved the Roman Republic and then retired to his farm—but it was equally natural to everyone else who knew Washington or merely observed him to assess him in comparison to the character of Cincinnatus. (As it happens, Plutarch did not write a life of Cincinnatus—a major oversight, if you ask me—but he established the pattern by which Washington and his contemporaries thought about the relationship between the present and the past.)
In a wonderfully illuminating book, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment, Garry Wills tells the story of a conversation that took place during the Revolutionary War between England’s King George III and his court painter, the Pennsylvania-born Benjamin West. The king asked West what he thought General Washington would do if he happened to defeat the British, and West replied that he would simply return to his plantation at Mount Vernon. George replied that if Washington did that he would be the greatest man who ever lived. Cincinnatus is never mentioned in the conversation; he did not have to be mentioned. Both men knew that the Roman’s example provided the context for the whole affair.
And by accepting the association Washington bound himself to certain standards, invited others to judge him by them, and made the same judgments upon himself. On the Lawn of the University of Virginia there is a statue of George Washington. He stands next to the fasces—the bundle of rods that in Republican Rome represented the authority given to what they called the dictator, and from which we take our word “fascist”—and his farmer’s plow lies behind him. Directly across the Lawn there is another statue, of Thomas Jefferson sitting and looking intently at Washington. He is waiting to see if the general will, like Cincinnatus, set aside the fasces and once more take up his innocent plow.
This attitude—in which figures from the past stand forth clearly and vividly in the present, almost as though they are our contemporaries—lasted into the twentieth century. The Plutarchian frame of mind was essential to the thinking of Winston Churchill, for instance, who as a writer as well as a statesman perceived the past with an immediacy that seems strange to most of us today. In a speech Churchill gave in 1909, when he was still known primarily as a journalist, he said:
Someone—I forget who—has said: “Words are the only things which last forever.” That is, to my mind, always a wonderful thought. The most durable structures raised in stone by the strength of man, the mightiest monuments of his power, crumble into dust, while the words spoken with fleeting breath, the passing expression of the unstable fancies of his mind, endure not as echoes of the past, not as mere archaeological curiosities or venerable relics, but with a force and life as new and strong, and sometimes far stronger than when they were first spoken, and leaping across the gulf of three thousand years, they light the world for us to-day.
From the context you can tell that Churchill was referring less to the philosophers and poets with whom Machiavelli communed in his library than to public figures or writers concerned with politics: historians like Thucydides and Livy, orators like Cicero, historians of their own deeds like Caesar.
A very similar attitude may be found in Churchill’s contemporary G. K. Chesterton, who in an essay titled “On Man: Heir of All the Ages” argued that we have the whole of history available to us as our rightful inheritance, and that “the mind of man is at its largest, and especially at its broadest, when it feels the brotherhood of humanity linking it up with remote and primitive and even barbaric things.” Alas, says Chesterton, “If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs.”
The reader who has come with me this far will not be surprised to learn that I nod smilingly when I read this passage, and nod more soberly and firmly when I arrive here: “Any man who is cut off from the past, and content with the future, is a man most unjustly disinherited; and all the more unjustly if he is happy in his lot, and is not permitted even to know what he has lost.” I find it especially interesting that Chesterton believes that the archaic, the primitive, is still an element of our psychological and moral constitution, though it has been obscured by the addition of more recent layers. So one reason to read old books is to get in touch with those elements of our constitution that we’re least likely to notice otherwise.
So yes, I find much to admire in the arguments of Churchill and Chesterton, and in the way they boldly carry the Plutarchian model of the relevance of past people and ideas into the twentieth century . . . but I am also made uneasy by these arguments. They don’t go as far as Schliemann in erasing the distance between us and the people of the past, writers and actors alike, but they certainly underplay that distance. And I think this can lead first to misunderstanding the past and second to devaluing the best gifts that encounters with the past can actually bring to us.
I have argued that we can sometimes be deterred from what an old book offers by noticing where it falls short—our inclination to negative selection can blind us to the virtues of positive selection. But we can also get ourselves into something like the opposite problem—a determination to read in a sanitizing way—when faced with a text that we know is in some sense a “classic” but which offends, or seems to offend. Take, for instance, a work I mentioned earlier, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which Katharine, that rebellious and insubordinate woman, is “tamed” by Petruchio. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Shakespeare’s view of their conflict differs in any way from Petruchio’s. When Petruchio says of Katherine’s prospective obedience to him that “peace it bodes, and love and quiet life, / An awful [that is, awe-inspiring] rule and right supremacy, / And, to be short, what’s not that’s sweet and happy?” he makes an argument very similar to ones made by some quite admirable characters in Shakespeare’s other plays. (See, for instance, the famous speech in praise of “degree”—social hierarchy—made by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida.)
And yet it has been a very long time, I wager, since any reputable theater company put on the play in this spirit. Every director who wants to keep his or her job finds a way to undermine Petruchio’s patriarchal assurance, most often by making sure that Katherine follows up her late subservient speech—“Such duty as the subject owes the prince, / Even such a woman oweth to her husband”—with broad winks to the audience or to the other women onstage. Long ago C. S. Lewis wrote that Petruchio’s words “are very startling to a modern audience; but those who cannot face such startling should not read old books.” This is harsh, I think—there are good reasons why women who know that the patriarchal order has scarcely been demolished might prefer not to sit and watch a celebration of it—but there is something a little odd, and not satisfactory, about trying to combine a disinclination to be “startled,” at least in that way, with an appreciation for “the classics.” Maybe there’s something to be said for those who just refuse to read or watch such stuff: at least that refusal acknowledges that you can’t simply reshape “startling” texts in your own image. Surely we have lost something vital when we have lost the power to be startled, even offended, by the voices from the past. To say “This text offends me, I will read no further” may be shortsighted; but to read a “great book” from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.
Not all works from the past are classics, and there are often good reasons to read old books that don’t merit that designation, but there’s an essay on the classics by the Italian novelist Italo Calvino that I think helps to clarify the tension between likeness and difference that I have been trying to call attention to. Calvino begins by emphasizing the “affinities” we can experience with old books: “In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity.”
But Calvino also talks about “your classics,” books that take on classic status for a particular reader: “Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him” (that second emphasis mine). That is, a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to believe. In this sense a book can become very much like a friend: When we enter into a conversation with a friend, do we want that person merely to nod approvingly at everything we say? Of course not: in many cases we want sympathy and agreement, to be sure, but a friend who offered only that would be no friend at all. When we speak our thought, we want more than agreement, we want addition: we want our friend to develop that thought, or to push back at it, if ever so gently. We want to get further along in our understanding of ourselves and our world than we were when we first spoke, and that cannot happen through mere affirmation. Perhaps the poet William Blake had something like this in mind when he wrote “Opposition is true friendship.” The work that is classic for me is the one that can give me, among other things, that kind of opposition.
And when that happens, the conversation I am having with that book comes to the forefront of my consciousness. Calvino says something very shrewd and very subtle about this: “A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.” Both halves of this sentence are essential. The reader who instantly translates the subject or story of a book into present-day terms often is not having a genuine encounter with the book at all. (In Dickens’s David Copperfield Mister Dick keeps trying to write a book only to find that King Charles’s head—the debodied head of the executed English King Charles I—keeps inexplicably making its way into the narrative. A certain president’s head keeps doing that in the thoughts of many of my fellow Americans.) But that the book I am reading is somehow connected to my life is an essential ambience to reading, “something we cannot do without.”
A few years ago the critic Daniel Mendelsohn wrote a beautiful essay on reading and teaching Virgil’s Aeneid, which most college students, if my thirty years of experience are anything to go by, find far less compelling than the earlier epics of Homer. Mendelsohn describes both the centrality of the Aeneid to the Western imagination and the various impediments to getting excited about it. There are several, but Mendelsohn thinks that at our moment the “the biggest problem by far for modern audiences” is what the poem is fundamentally about. “Today, the themes that made the epic required reading for generations of emperors and generals, and for the clerics and teachers who groomed them—the inevitability of imperial dominance, the responsibilities of authoritarian rule, the importance of duty and self-abnegation in the service of the state—are proving to be an embarrassment.”
It’s fascinating to read how Mendelsohn—who is one of the shrewdest literary critics now writing—navigates these difficulties. Does Virgil support empire, or critique it? And if the former, can we modern democrats still like him? Or must we be alienated from this work that many of our ancestors felt so immediately the power of? Without offering a definitive answer to these questions, Mendelsohn describes the time in his life “when, I like to think, I finally began to understand the Aeneid.” And he does this by taking Calvino’s “background noise” of our own moment and bringing it to the foreground:
Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.
I think this is a connection to the present that’s earned—which is not always the case in essays of this type. For instance, the English writer Philip Hoare recently commended Moby-Dick in an essay for The Guardian of London in which he praises the book for being “relevant” to our climate crisis, for being a “very queer book,” for being “genuinely subversive”—for, in general, being all the things that Guardian readers already approve of. Hoare clearly thinks that this approach is the only way to generate interest in an old book. But if Moby-Dick simply reaffirms our current state of opinion, why bother to read it at all?
Daniel Mendelsohn, by contrast, didn’t immediately leap to a modern “application” of the Aeneid—like the person (we all know the type) whose response to everyone else’s pain is to be reminded of his own, which he then wants to narrate at length—but rather wrestled with the poem on its own terms for years before finally realizing that the experiences of our time actually bring to light something real and true about this great poem that would have been invisible to those among our ancestors who most warmly venerated it.
One more illustration may serve to clarify and intensify the point that I have been making. Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love (1997) begins with the English poet and classical scholar A. E. Housman, “aged seventy-seven and getting no older” because he’s dead, being transported across the Styx by Charon, the boatman of the land of Hades. And then when he reaches the other side of the river he finds . . . himself, a fresh-faced Oxford undergraduate. And the two Housmans talk, mainly about Roman writers.
At one point the elder Housman (here called AEH) fires off an impromptu lecture on the dangers of simply assuming that we understand the writers of the distant past:
There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours.
At this moment the young Houseman, unable to bear this discourse an instant longer, bursts out: “But it is, isn’t it? We catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught.” In his enthusiasm, he starts to quote examples from love poems and letters of phrases that have caught his breath, and then, equally suddenly, is seized by embarrassment and self-consciousness and stops: “Oh, forgive me, I . . .”
To which the elderly, or rather the dead, AEH quietly replies: “No need, we’re never too old to learn.” Young Housman starts up again instantly, but we should pause here for one of the loveliest moments in modern drama. AEH, long accustomed to his own authority—he was the greatest classical scholar of his time, and devastatingly fierce in his denunciations of what he believed to be the shortcomings of almost all his peers—realizes that for all his massive learning he has forgotten something of great import: That even granted the differences in belief and habit that separate us from the Romans, we can and do read their poems and find that “we catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught.” He had once known it, but then he forgot.
What makes this moment so beautiful, I think, is that both AEH and Housman are right. AEH rightly understands the dangers of assuming an easy and immediate kinship with the past—he knows better than to become Schliemann, or even the young Churchill—and that any genuine kinship with our ancestors must be earned through hard mental work. But if what the young Housman says were not true, there would scarcely be any reason to read these works at all.
I think this necessary tension is lost both by those who once saw education as the inculcation of reverence for the past and their successors who have redefined education so that it’s wholly presentist or forward-looking. The person who did more than anyone else to shift the energies of educators from the model that Churchill and Chesterton loved to the one most of us today have experienced is the American philosopher John Dewey, but if you look at Dewey’s understanding of what education is, you can see the possibility for a sensitive encounter with the past. In a book of a hundred years ago, Dewey wrote, “We thus reach a technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” Properly understood, Dewey’s formulation suggests continuity as well as innovation: taking what we have inherited and, rather than discarding it, reorganizing and reconstructing it—a task that can be performed intelligently only if we sift the past for its wisdom and its wickedness, its perception and its foolishness. And this is a task not merely for scholars but for us all.
When I was in high school, we didn’t read any ancient writers in my classes. We read some Hawthorne and Melville and Washington Irving, and George Eliot’s Silas Marner, and A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, and then, reaching into “the dark backward and abysm of time,” a Shakespeare play each year, though not the one that phrase comes from (The Tempest). I don’t recall anyone ever explaining to me why we were reading these things; certainly there was no reflection on the relative ages of the works, or whether it might matter that George Eliot was separated from her contemporaries Hawthorne and Melville by an ocean. If my memory doesn’t deceive me, the first time a figure from the past spoke to me directly and gave me a sense of instant kinship across the centuries was when I discovered this line by Chaucer: “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.” Why that should have been so moving to me when I was so young and had as yet no “craft” at all, I cannot tell.
When I got to university I learned much more about literature and history, but the kind of sifting of the words of the past I’ve described here was something I learned not from my professors, who never recommended as personal an appropriation as I have been advocating throughout this book, but in my private reading. In an earlier book I recommended reading “upstream” from our favorite novels, and that’s just what I did. I took a couple of classes in medieval literature but I came to adore that anonymous masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because I knew Tolkien had loved it. “What we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how,” wrote Wordsworth, and the ones who taught me how were primarily writers. I loved their stories, so I was prepared to love the stories they loved. From my teachers I learned to be like AEH, measured, distanced, analytical; from my favorite writers I learned to be like young Housman, full of enthusiasm and striving for connection. Both lessons were lastingly valuable, but my writer-teachers have made a greater difference to my life, and it is what I have learned from them that I have poured into this book.
Breaking bread with the dead is not a scholarly task to be completed but a permanent banquet, to which all who hunger are invited.