More is packed into this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book - Dante's miracle and its consequences

An “earnest and likeable” student has asked Professor Joseph Epstein for a post-graduation reading list.  He fears his Northwestern University education was inadequate.

An obvious answer would have been to tell him to read the Bible straight through – something I myself have never done – and then proceed to read the Iliad and the Odyssey back to back.  Yet this advice, I felt, would only have depressed him; and contemplating it briefly, sound though it was as advice, I had to admit that it depressed me a little too.  (“p. 34, “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan,” in Once More Around the Block, 1987)

Epstein’s actual advice can be found in this oldie.  Still, the Bible, the Odyssey – I mean, they are going to come up again.  For example, in Mimesis:

8. “Farinata and Cavalcante,” Dante

Auerbach is a real Dante specialist, so he does not need to wander too far from the exemplary passage he chooses.  It does everything.  “More is packed into this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book…” (178).

Some praise: “But if we start from his predecessors, Dante’s language is a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle” (182).  The divergent Classical and Christian tracks suddenly converge in Hell, in Dante’s rhetoric and language as much as in his big, wild theological system.  The mixing of styles is going to be a running theme for the rest of Mimesis.  In Dante, “nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style” (185).

I am pulling out phrases that have some punch, but they are almost always supported by a paragraph or more of evidence.  As evidence of the Dantean linguistic miracle, Auerbach spends a page working on the Dante’s use of the word da, a preposition.

If it is funny that a book on the “representation of reality” hinges on a poet wandering around Hell with a ghost, first, Auerbach finds it funny too, and second, reality has many sides.  “More accurately than antique literature was ever able to present it, we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding” (202).

9. “Frate Alberto”, Boccaccio and some earlier tales for the purpose of contrast

The idea here is that there is a medieval genre of short, funny, pathetic, improving, or obscene tales.  Why are the ones in Decameron any better?  The mixing of styles, especially rhetorical levels, allowing a greater emphasis on sensory detail and characters who are ordinary people.  “Boccaccio’s characters live on earth and only on earth” (224).  But it is his rhetorical skill that allows them to live at all.

It sometimes seems like Auerbach’s is steering the book towards the modern novel, towards Proust.

10.  “Madame du Chastel,” Antoine de la Sale and a bit of Fifteen Joys of Marriage

Narrative passages that are “literary representations of a night conversation between a married couple” (250), one of which is about a wife wanting a new dress. The texts are from the 15th century, but they still feel medieval.  French has not caught up with Boccaccio’s Italian.  But the next chapter is about Rabelais.  Oh yeah!

Do you have a magazine?

No need to actually answer the question.  It is just something I have been wondering about.  I assume that anyone interested in culture – anyone writing a book blog, for example – has a magazine or two, a literary magazine, in the background, but in fact almost no one writes about what they are reading or have read in magazines, suggesting that my assumption is wrong.

By “has a magazine” I mean “regularly reads a magazine,” one that or some ill-defined reason feels like home.  I have read The New Republic, basically cover to cover, for almost twenty-five years (ack, cough – is that true?  Yes, it seems to be true), and The Hudson Review for fifteen, and I poke around in lots of others.

Joseph Epstein, in “New & Previously Owned Books & Other Cream Puffs,” found in Once More Around the Block (1987):

Around the age of twenty I discovered the intellectual and literary magazines – Partisan Review, Commentary, Encounter, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the British weeklies – and I have read them ever since.  They were especially helpful to me as a young man who himself one day wanted to write.  This was during a time when second-rate books were not taught at universities.  Reading great authors is the best method of education; but for someone who wishes to write, they can be discouraging.

The essay is actually a fine ode to the intellectual value of bookstores, used and new, the top-ranked of “the four main agencies of education in my life” – but magazines come in at #2 (“3. libraries, 4. schools”).

If I had more time or energy to read I would read not more books but more magazines.  For anyone not blessed with a rare and particular upbringing, it is magazines that make a person “cultured” – a word that should really be pronounced as if by Jean Hagen in Singin’ in the Rain: KUL-chud.  Anxiety about being unkulchud is a fine motivator, and I have no argument against it.

Magazines are the quickest path to kulcha, although they are not all that fast.  The stuff of culture accumulates with time and repetition.  My new Hudson Review (Spring 2012) has, besides the Ambrose Bierce article I used last week, pieces on Eugenio Montale, Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch, the Neue Gallerie, Philip Glass, Gregor von Rezzori, William Carlos Williams, acting Hamlet, topped by a typically expert and thoughtful William Pritchard essay on Ben Jonson’s poetry.  What a hodgepodge, with no organizing principle except that a writer thought the subject would be interesting.  But now I know, at least temporarily, more about all of those things than I did.

I read an enormous amount of literary biography, but almost exclusively in magazines.  Mark Ford’s review , in the May 10 New York Review of Books, of a recent biography of Alfred Jarry is itself a fine piece of biographical writing and a useful overview of Jarry’s work.  The chance that I am going to read the 405 page Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life by Alistair Brotchie is zero, are you kidding?  Or a 528 page Freudian biography of William Carlos Williams?  Or a 700 page account of the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War?  But reading about them in considered, edited pieces is enormously valuable.

As a writer of hasty, unedited essays, I have come to put more value on literary magazines, not less.  It is the magazine writers who have taught me how to write about books, how to make arguments and use evidence, how to try to do something complex while paying attention to style.  

Please see Michael Dirda’s piece on Ambrose Bierce in the new NYRB, which arrived at my house too late for me to use it, and which is thorough, knowledgeable and friendly (when bloggers complain about the formal or “academic” writing of professional reviewers I always wonder what on earth they have been reading).  Dirda’s review is a lot better than mine!  Skip mine and read his, if it is not too late.  But: his review is an example of the target I am aiming at.

I wish book bloggers wrote more about their magazines.  Maybe I should, too.

Joseph Epstein teaches Henry James - I did at least grasp that Henry James was serious stuff

Joseph Epstein wrote an account of teaching a class on Henry James in 1990.*  Epstein was at Northwestern University, so his students were ace.  His reading list, in order:

1.  “The Art of Fiction”
2. “The Figure in the Carpet”
3. “The Aspern Papers”
4. Washington Square
5. “Daisy Miller”
6. “The Pupil”
7. The Europeans
8. “The Turn of the Screw”
9. The Princess Casamassima
10. The Ambassadors (to be read for the final exam)

I would like to pause for a moment to savor that parenthetical description.  The Ambassadors is in James’s thick late style, and is over 500 pages long in the Penguin Classics edition.  Now that, I say, that is a university education – “for the final exam!”

This would be as good a way to get to know James as any, except that most of us would want to take more than ten weeks to get through the list, and I also, for health reasons, will have to reschedule the final.  I claim, accurately, to not know James well, but I have read 40% of that list.  I was at 30% twenty years ago.

Epstein titled his essay “Selling Henry James,” and he meant it: “I wanted converts.”  Converts not to any particular view of James, but to the idea that reading James was still worth the time of a 20 year-old.  He thinks he succeeded by the way; the article is an account of a class that went well.

Epstein’s introduction to James was in a class at the University of Chicago, where he was assigned a “novel about furniture,” as the protagonist of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty calls it, The Spoils of Poynton:

How much of the novel I could be said to have comprehended I cannot say.  Yet I came away with respect for it, which was in part owing to the respect I had for the respect in which my teacher [Morton Dauwen Zabel] held it.  I did at least grasp that Henry James was serious stuff…

I read “Daisy Miller” in American Lit II – I think that was my first James – but did not learn the same lesson, not too strongly.  “Daisy Miller” is stiff but light and elegant.  I hate to press the word “serious” against it too forcefully.  I learned to respect James later by reading good readers of James, readers like Edmund Wilson and Joseph Epstein.

A few other lessons.  Be alert for James’s comedy.  Easy enough for me, since I think Dostoevsky and Wuthering Heights are hilarious, but valuable advice for others.  No, for me, too, since much of the comedy is created by minute shades of phrasing: “for Henry James not entirely but in good part life was a matter of phrasing.”  Actively look for the meaning in James.  He will not do the work for the reader: “He had a positive horror of generalization.”  Read James not in one particular way but in many ways.

I think I knew all of that.   Still, how pleasant to eavesdrop on Epstein’s class without having to take the final.

* Epstein’s article originally appeared in The New Criterion, 1990 (here 'tis).  I found it in the Epstein’s essay collection Pertinent Players (1993).

The Wuthering Expectations Lifetime Reading Plan

Wuthering Expectations will be on Christmas vacation for a while.  All of next week, and then a little more.  Before I forget, Merry Christmas!

A vacation shoulld allow me to salt away some reading for the long winter, to store some books for future blogging.  I’m not sure it ever works that way.  Last Christmas, and on the plane to and from Morocco, I checked off some solid Humiliations – The Mayor of Casterbridge, a handful of Ibsen plays, The Saga of the Volsungs – and revisited The Warden.  I never wrote about any of them.  So why did I bother?  No, no - thank goodness – I’m not always reading for the dang blog.

I recently started in on Les Misérables, not, with its ludicrous bulk, the most bloggable of books, although please see how C. B. James wisely breaks it into pieces, which is presumably also how one reads it, a word or line at a time, not all at once.  I’m less than a tenth of the way in, and there’s this scene – no, never mind.  Into the freezer.  It’ll still be good when I thaw it out in May.

Joseph Epstein, in “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan” (from Once around the Block, 1987), advises a worried student to “have some time-tested and officially great book going at all times – Gibbon, perhaps, or Cervantes – alongside which you can read less thumpingly significant books.”  Victor Hugo will fill that slot for the next four or six or eight months, unless I put it aside at some point, which would be wise, if unlikely.  It’s amazing how the Big Books fall into place over time.  Read one or two or three a year, and eventually one feels almost educated, or would, if it were not for all of the other books one has learned about along the way.

Here is Epstein's actual advice to the anxious young reader, nervous about the holes in his education: “to read no junky books, to haunt used-book stores, and to let one book lead him to another… there is no systematic way to go about it, no list, key to the kingdom of the educated.”  The reader will have to decide for herself what “junky” means.  I would add, whatever one is reading, try to read it well.

I read more systematically than Epstein.  I have my lists, list after list, and sometimes follow them.  The Scottish Reading Challenge was meant, in part, to free me from the lists – you decide what I’m reading – although it began with three lists!  Try this, try that.  Read widely, even when reading narrowly.

I’m reading a book right now that was suggested to me a day or two ago by someone about to launch her own Lifetime Reading Plan.  Best of luck!  The book, by the way, is Dear Darkness (2008) by youthful poet Kevin Young, and is sprinkled with poems about food – “Ode to Pork,” “Ode to Grits,” “Ode to Boudin”:

You are the chewing gum
of God. You are the reason
I know that skin
is only that, holds
more than it meets.

Is that “meat” pun excellent or execrable?  A thing I like about this guy is he, like Joseph Epstein, is not afraid to go for the joke.  Private to Lifetime Reader: why did you single out two poets who teach at Emory?

I am not reading Kevin Young to be well read, or to check him off of a list.  Nor – what else am I reading – Willa Cather’s The Troll Garden (more fiction about artists) or John Crowley’s The Translator (fiction about Why Translation Matters).  Hugo, yes, and Dickens’ puzzling Christmas Stories, yes, although they are fascinating in their oddity.  Main entries or supplements to my ongoing Lifetime Reading Plan.  Epstein again:

There is also a danger: once begun, there is no end.  I myself would rather be well-read than dead, but I have a strong hunch about which will come first.

Dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing

“So from the study of literature we learn that life is sad, comic, heroic, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing – sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once – but never more grotesquely amusing than when a supposedly great thinker comes along to insist that he has discovered and nattily formulated the single key to its understanding.”

So says Joseph Epstein in the article I mentioned yesterday. This statement is obviously wrong, in the sense that by “we” he just means “I, and people like me.” Kazuko Okakura and I suspect William Deresiewicz have learned rather different lessons. But I’m in Epstein’s camp. Careful with those Big Ideas – you might hurt somebody.

Epstein points to Theodore Dreiser as a great writer who was a sponge for bad ideas. Balzac is an example from my own recent reading. These were writers of high intelligence who were suckers for nonsense (“a man who fell for Stalin and Hitler both,” as Epstein describes Dreiser), yet they both wrote novels as great as anyone’s, and the best parts of their books are full of well-observed details about human nature, characters worth knowing, themes that are banal on the surface but rather more meaningful deep down. They are not sugar-coated philosophy or symbolical representations of Big Ideas.

To use Epstein’s examples, who wants to read Proust as a study of Bergson’s ideas about the nature of time, or Thomas Mann as a study of the rise of fascism? If you’re so interested, why not go straight to the source? And in fact almost no one, no non-professional, gives much of this sort of thing a second thought. But Proust’s ideas about how people have different identities in different circumstances, or about snobbery, or jealousy – this is the good stuff, right? To the extent that there is wisdom here, though, one doesn’t simply grasp the principle, incorporate it into one’s life, and move on to the next idea. Or if that is what you do, let me know how that works.

I know that I am often too reluctant to pursue meaning, that I am too quick to turn an author’s ideas into The Author’s Ideas, allowing me to dismiss them. This, by the way, is one of my answers to the test question about my intellectual flaws. Fear of meaning. Let’s drop the subject.

The positive side of all this is that I expect the process by which literature turns facts into ideas to work slowly. That's how it works for me, at least. This is part of my sanguinity about conditions at elite schools. Patience, Professor, patience. You’ve pointed the youngsters in the right direction. Check back in twenty years, or thirty.* Even if they are as resistant as I am, that may be long enough for some ideas to slip through.

* Epstein informs me that Willa Cather refused to allow school editions of her novels. She thought that high school students, at least, were too young for her books. Was she wrong?

Badly conceived, ill-taught, under-confident

Let’s take one more dig at William Deresiewicz, using a couple of lines of his mentioned by nicole of My Life in Books in a comment:

“I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.”

I had omitted this quote because I thought it was encrusting the gilded lily with rubies. The Jane Austen specialist “never learned” that there are smart people who never go to college. I know that formal literary study often de-emphasizes biography, but this is ridiculous. Think of how much he would have learned from a Jane Austen biography, or even an encyclopedia article.*

No college for George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, or Ernest Hemingway. That’s off the top of my head. Isaac Bashevis Singer got as far as dropping out of the Tachkemani Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw. Then there are the bad students – Theodore Dreiser, Henry James. James did give Harvard Law School a try. A lot of writers fall into this category.

Joseph Epstein, for one. He’s the product of an elite education, with an English degree from the University of Chicago. But in a talk published in the latest issue of The New Criterion (“A Literary Education”), he describes himself as the sort of student that teachers don’t remember. No, not the sort of student – teachers he met later in life never remembered him. He was neither the “good student” who figures out what the teacher wants and gives it to him (that was me), nor was he the passionate student, excited to plunge into the subject, the sort of student he would later, when he was an English professor, especially value (also me, I hope).

Deresiewicz says that the greatest disadvantage of elite education is that it is “profoundly unintellectual,” incapable of inspiring passion for ideas or helping students “ask the big questions.” Let’s see what happened to Joseph Epstein:

“I would say that the most significant course I took at the University of Chicago was a badly conceived one that was, in effect, a history of the development of the novel. This course was ill-taught by an under-confident instructor not yet thirty. The reading equivalent of a marathon, in ten weeks the course went – at the rate of a novel per week – from The Princess of Cleves through Ulysses, with stops along the way for Jane Austen, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Mann, and Proust. What do you suppose a boy of twenty gets out of reading Swann’s Way? My best guess is somewhere between 15 to 20 percent of what Proust put into it.”

This is the class that did it for Epstein, that got him moving. He realized that:

“The endless details set out in novels, the thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works – these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.”

I was the good student, but I had almost exactly the same experience in a freshman English seminar, “Innovative Fiction,” taught by an excellent but decidedly non-innovative novelist at Big State U.** We read Madame Bovary, and nothing penetrated, although I could give the teacher what he wanted. Next was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and something began to rattle around in an empty part of my head. The Sound and the Fury finally did the trick. Borges, Nabokov, and Calvino came next, and I read them with growing enthusiasm. The mental category where I had put fiction was now much too small. Literature, it turned out, contained the world. The more I read then, the more I read now, the bigger that world seems to get.

Joseph Epstein is a superb essayist, first-rate short story writer, elegant raconteur, and fine critic. In his case (elite), and in mine (much less so), the university did what it was supposed to, but not in a way that was specifically predictable.

I don’t want to hang too much on the Deresiewicz piece, which is obviously based on an idiosyncratic reaction to his students and his employer. I am more interested in his reaction to literature and what he thinks it can do, in the classroom or outside of it. His privileged students may not be getting everything out of Emerson that he demands from them. But I don’t see how he is so sure that some version of Joseph Epstein is not sitting in his class, never raising her hand, but slowly realizing that there are some surprising things going on in these books. How else is a liberal education supposed to work?

More on Epstein tomorrow. His talk is available at the website of The New Criterion, but I believe it costs $3 or some such nonsense to read. I understand that libraries often subscribe to magazines.

* I’ve lapsed into open mockery, but I don’t see how “he doesn’t really mean what he’s writing” is a good defense here. Or, here's another try, he learned that there "were" smart people who didn't go to college, but not that there "are" such people.

** If I ever relax my anonymity, I should write an appreciation of this teacher, and a couple of others.

Why haven't I heard of Elizabeth Spencer before? Or have I? - That was long ago when he was proud of her.

I could, and perhaps should, spend a week at Wuthering Expectations plundering The Hudson Review whenever a new issue arrives. There’s hardly a shortage of good writing in good literary journals, so I’m not sure my advocacy is especially useful, but The Hudson Review is the one I read all the way through, every time.

The last issue has (most links are PDFs), besides the Heaney essay, three (or possibly two) unpublished stories by Penelope Fitzgerald, fine poems by B. H. Fairchild and many others, and a long excerpt from Joseph Epstein’s forthcoming biography of Fred Astaire, a breezy and elegant piece. The short story by Elizabeth Spencer (“Sightings”) is unlikely to win an award for originality – it’s what one might call standard New Yorker stuff – but it ought to win one for excellence. It’s not innovative in any way, but merely has characters who seem like real people, insights into human nature, artful uses of symbolism. Ho hum.

I’m embarrassed that I had never heard of her, or had forgotten her. Look at this lovely website; look at all those books. She seems to be pegged as a Mississippi writer, and good for her.
Here’s a bit of the story. A teenage girl’s mother is going to marry an idiot; the teenager has fled to her father; the mother and new man have pursued her. The point of view is the father’s; Celie is his ex-wife, Guy is the idiot:

“Guy Bowden was a beefy fellow, large arms, thick legs, heavy feet. But wearing a nicely pressed grey suit, a satin tie. Celie was trim, she was a word he used to think about her: petite. It rhymed with neat. That was long ago when he was proud of her.”

The description is nothing special – a lot of writers can do that, or better – but that last line gets us somewhere.

Anybody else have warm feelings about Elizabeth Spencer, or particular books of hers? I’ll read more, I hope.

The Appreciationist

I spent all last week admiring Edgar Allan Poe's hatchet jobs. Lovely, blood-soaked things. Joseph Epstein's latest collection, In a Cardboard Belt!, has a section forthrightly labeled "Attacks". He takes pokes at George Steiner, Harold Bloom, Mortimer Adler, Edmund Wilson, and the position of American Poet Laureate. They're great fun, and very instructive (although the piece on Wilson is a lot more complicated than a mere attack). Here's Epstein on Bloom:

“Bloom has no problem mastering the tone of authoritativeness. If he came off any more ex cathedra in his judgments, he’d be pope.” (264)

“Apart from Shakespeare, Bloom’s great culture heroes are Emerson and Freud, who, in combination, yield a gasbag with a dirty mind.” (266)

“In a profile of Bloom in the New Yorker, he is quoted as remarking, apropos of lecturing at Oxford, 'I watched the faces of my audience... and I saw blank incomprehension. I had a vision of an airplane flying over cows in a meadow.' A vision of reading Harold Bloom – my own – is of standing in an airfield and watching a cow fly over.” (270)

Epstein, unlike Harold Bloom, always goes for the joke. The piece on Steiner is just as good, but let's instead try James Wood on Steiner (from The Broken Estate):

“The less precise his prose is, the more it speaks of the importance of precision.” (145)

“George Steiner offers a parody of Europeanness while fighting a parody of Americanness.” (158)

Vladimir Nabokov called his book of interviews Strong Opinions. Here's why (quote actually from his letters to Edmund Wilson, collected in Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya):

“What are you writing now? I have read (or rather re-read) What Maisie Knew. It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting on the wrong one?” (209)

Or this, from somewhere in Pnin:

“Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers."

Great stuff. You can hear the whish of the rapier. One thing I would like to do on Wuthering Expectations is join in with this, deflating overinflated reputations, knocking the pretentious off their pillars, returning received ideas to their senders. Slash, slash. What fun.

It will never happen. Almost never. "Know thyself," Socrates, or Heraclitus, or some be-togaed fellow, tells me. An ongoing process, but I know one thing. I'm not a Hatchet Man. I just don't have it in me. Constitutionally, intellectually, I am a softer, more pacific, creature, a respecter of authority, a reasonable re-rater of the overrated. I am: The Appreciationist.

Tomorrow, an attack on, and defense of, Appreciationism.

By quoting Epstein, Wood, and Nabokov, I am not endorsing their positions. I can appreciate both sides!

Your bloody Hamlet

“At a party of English department academics, for example, someone might begin by confessing that he has never read a novel by Norman Douglas. The next person might claim never to have read, say, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Someone then chimes in with the admission that she has never read the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘Hopkins hell,’ someone else says, ‘I’ve never read a poem by Yeats.’ Everyone agrees that is fairly impressive, until a full professor says ‘Yeats, Schmeats, I’ve never read The Faerie Queene.’ A sucking in of the breath is heard around the room. Then a woman off in the corner, the department’s resident Marxist, admits that not only has she never read Chaucer, but she isn’t even certain of the century in which he lived. Suddenly a quiet man, the head of the school’s American studies program, strides forth, obvious pride in his posture, to announce , 'I hate to break up these festivities, but I’m afraid that’s just what I’m about to do. You ready for this? I have never read a play by Shakespeare – and that includes your bloody Hamlet.'"

From “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan”, collected in Once More Around the Block, by Joseph Epstein.

There are many interesting things in this passage, not the least of which is that Epstein stole the whole thing from the David Lodge novel Changing Places (unread by me). The Lodge scene is the most famous thing he has written – can it now have been retold so many times that people present it as fact? Or is Epstein having a little joke with us, or is he retelling it so he can write “Yeats, Schmeats”, an obvious improvement. Anyway, the story always ends with the confession by some Professional Reader of not having read “your bloody Hamlet.” In Lodge, the confession comes from a poor sap up for tenure the next day, who should, it turns out, have kept his mouth shut.

Some of my bloody Hamlets: In English lit, Middlemarch and Jane Eyre. In American, The Scarlet Letter. In French, with The Red and the Black recently checked off, probably Les Miserables. My judgment here is based on reputation, not a strong sense of missing something. In Russian, the biggest holes are the third and fourth (most famous) big Dostoevsky novels The Devils and The Idiot, or whatever they’re calling them these days. I think I’d be happier spending more time with Turgenev, but Dostoevsky is the bigger name now. Which would be more valuable, a new read of The Scarlet Letter, or a reread of Moby Dick, last seen at age 15, with minimal comprehension? But regardless of the quality of the reading, Moby Dick has a checkmark by it.

Then there’s the whole Henry James issue. And Zola, who I suspect I will hate. And 8 or 9,000 pages of unread Dickens. And I haven’t mentioned a single poet. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, just as examples, a sort of terrifying list.

I'm still young and foolish enough to assume I will fit this all in someday. If the Neurotic Reader keeps on with the 19th Century business at his current pace, he will think himself well read (in the century) in 7 to 10 years. Then he can either move on to something else or will have discovered that his standard was wrong.