Eight Books That Changed the World

face changed American psychology of religion. One Day University. The most acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn. I'm an advocate for literature. I think that it's important for political life. I think it helps us. My name is Joseph leu See, and I'm a professor of comparative literature at Bard College. The name of the lecture is eight Books that Change

the World. When you think of the experience of just scanning social media and that sense of exhaustion and wasted time you get right after an hour of it, you never feel that way after you read a book. I'm gonna start with one of the wonderful things you said in this lecture, which I just loved. Writing is an act of generosity towards the reader. Thank you for reminding me that, because in a way, I want to just build a little bit on this idea of generosity uh

for the reader by the writer. But I think it goes both ways. Um. I also tell my students, and I tell the participants at Wenday University that writing and reading are an act of collaboration. When we talk about literature, I think the thing that we want to think about it does the book doesn't. It's not like a painting, right. If you look at a painting, it has an inherent beauty in itself. Right. It's a physical object. You give it meaning, but it exists as an object in the world.

The book is brought to life by the reader, and that's why it's so different than watching television or you know, you can interpret movies as well, but the book, all the heavy lifting has to be done by the reader. I always tell my students you're writing a book along with the author, because if you don't actively engage with it, it doesn't exist. It's just code on a page it And this I think is a really amazing thing because it makes it puts so much burden and responsibility on you.

Your imagination, your rational intellect, your memory, your sense of history and culture, and you bring those all to bear in what one great scholar, Edward said, said, an act of erudition and sympathy. You know, when you are almost back in the shoes of the author who wrote it. Without the reader, the book is nothing. And that's why, in a way, reading is so demanding. And that's why, you know, uh, some of the recent statistics show that it may be on the wane. Is that it's something

that you can't do along with other things. As Jonathan friends and said the novelists, you can't read in multitask. It takes up all of your energies. And I actually think in this day and age, the skills that we get from literature will become even more important than ever before. The ability to focus and concentrate, the ability to read deeply, to bring the text to life without succumbing to distractions.

This is an incredible challenge today right Those who can do what I think are going to be you know, will have a skill that will be very important in this new information economy. Why because I think that books have shown themselves to be remarkably resilient. I always tell my students, think of a work like Augustine's Confessions. It was written in the late three hundreds, I think like three d. Some people call it like the first autobiograph, first memoir. I mean, imagine, what else do you know

from that era. I mean, it's incredibly remote that book, this memoir lives on. In the tell All memoir, the Augustine was addicted in his own way to sex into worldly glory. He had to overcome that. That's a story that's told over and over again in our books today. So the freshness in the modernity of Augustine's memoir, even though it was written over sixteen hundred years ago, as extraordinary. The fact that some of these books can stay alive,

it's really a miracle. Most books disappear very shortly after they're published, right. The scholar at Stanford, Franco Moretti, came up with the term the slaughterhouse of literature, you know, to show the and the statistics are staggering. I think it's something like only one out of every two hundred books lives past their immediate point of publication. Why do those few live on? And the fact that they do

is really remarkable. I use the word miracle because somehow they remain relevant and vital with the passing of time, and it's because of the reader. When they stop speaking

to the reader, they will disappear. Your lecture the eight books that change the world, one naturally is the Bible, which may have changed the world more than anything else, no matter what you believe, right I I'd say, think of the Bible as literature, as a collection of stories, independent of your your faith system, and just think of its revolutionary impact across the world. I urge you to

read the Bible. It's an incredible piece of literature. It is so unusually written, it was written by many hands. It's at once a collection, it's an anthology, it's a digest. It's about editing, it's about translation, it's about trying to blur the line between life and words. It's about the sacredness of the text. A lot of modern literary criticism what I do grew out of the tradition of biblical scholarship, the exegesis, making sense of the word. You've zero in

on Genesis as an extraordinary piece of storytelling. Storytelling, I mean, think about it. Genesis has a specific language, something along the lines. And God created the earth and the heavens and it was good, and you know, then he rested on the seventh day. This idea, the way the sentences cascade, the hands, you know, one following weather. We don't talk

like that. That's called in to put My professor had on for a moment para taxis where the the sentences don't really logically link the way we speak today with normal syntax, but in that incredible form you get a rhythm of flow and a kind of rhetoric of storytelling that's so memorable, so rich, so unbelievable. And also think of the characters that are created in Genesis. God is a character. Everything that God is making is sort of not turning out the way he planned, right. Genesis is origin.

Listen to this amazing passage. And the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth, and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil. And the Lord regretted having made the human on earth, and was grieved to the heart. And the Lord said I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to alt a crawling thing to the foul of heavens. For I regret that I have made them. What a passage.

The idea of God as a character who's upset over his creation. It's one of the most grounding images and descriptions of what supposedly an untouchable, a noble, surpassingly powerful deity, and the collection of people who wrote Genesis give us to him. It's a hate right in all his psychologic in this context, I don't know what it really is, in all the psychological complexity. This ish image of God grieving to the heart is to me a powerful example

of how we create character in the Bible. That's what literature does it get, whether it's you know, a realist novel from the eight hundreds or contemporary novel M Yesterday or the Genesis. You're talking about these unbelievably rich characters, like God, like Joseph, like Adam and Eve. I mean, think of Adam and Eve. You know, uh, they live in paradise, but they choose to violate the terms of

paradise to taste from the tree of knowledge. Why Do they prefer a life with hardship if it means getting to knowledge? Do they? Just? Is it just a human tendency to not be able to resist temptation? It raises all these incredible psychological issues and concerns that can speak

to you no matter what your faith is. We've been teasing our listeners a little, so let's taste from the tree of your lecture and mentioned that the eight books the other book from ancient times as the Odyssey, right I. I you know, of course, a list like this is highly selective, highly adios and cratic, and more of a gesture towards the books that have been incredibly meaningful to me and the books that I feel have had the lasting impact. The whole point is that I want my

eight to stimulate you. Our listeners are audience members to make their own list of eight books. Okay, so we got the Odyssey by Homer. Yeah, I'm not evading the questions. And then and I wasn't a literary version of a filibuster that I have the And then you jump your fast forward to the fourteenth century with I chose Dante. Dante is my my you know, my main man, the person I've studied and written about, probably more than anyone. Um. I chose Genesis because of its um incredible the impact

of the Bible and all cultures, all religions. I chose the Odyssey because it's the story of the hero's return that is as relevant today as it was when it was written centuries before the birth of Christ. I chose Dante because of its unbelievable tension between this spiritual world in the secular world. Dante was writing as a Christian, but it's about the way earthly history and the demands of the soul come into conflict those of my first three.

And this is right on the cusp of the Middle Ages, the Age of Belief, and then the Age of Reason, the Renaissance, and then the Renaissance. We naturally flow into the person I felt I had to choose one from because he shaped the English language, he shaped the language you and I are speaking. And now Shakespeare. Uh, Shakespeare

is the opposite in a way of Dante. If Dante is very scholarly, very steeped in doctrine, and and very difficult to just pick up and read Shakespeare once you learn the little verbal ticks, once you learn the expressions, is actually not that difficult. A lot of shakespeare stuff is refashioned, recycled stuff like Romeo and Juliet was an Italian Renaissance tale, a very boring one. Shakespeare made it magical. He was no scholar. He was just really an incredibly

gifted psychologist, the most extraordinary capacity to use language. But he was not someone who was buried his nose buried in books. He was a businessman trying to get people to his theater and make compelling works of art that were accessible. We have to remember that, right, Shakespeare was Shakespeare. I know you've seen, you've heard the rumors. The main argument against Shakespeare's being the author of his own plays was that how could someone with very little education right

as he did? But that's absurd. That's Michelangelo didn't go to you know, art school. He he apprenticed. We can't apply anachronistically our idea just because Shakespeare didn't go to Oxford and Cambridge that he couldn't have written, uh these plays is absolutely silly. If with my list gives the lie to anything, it's this the idea that you can't be read by many and a brilliant writer because Shakespeare could not have been more popular in his day. He's

still in college curricula all over the country. Uh, you know, and he was a very successful theater impresario, theater merchants, so you know, he was I think that's part of his appeal. He was what I call accessible genius. He wasn't trying to say things in a rarefied way. He was trying to get people into his theater and communicate with his audience, and he somehow did it in a way of you know, artistic brilliance. Okay, we got four books so far, So moving closer today. I thought the

whole point of my lectures to get people reading. So I didn't want to, you know, give them all. I could have chosen, you know, don Quixote, I could have chosen Montana, a lot of older text, but I wanted to come close to the present to find works in more relevant to today. So in that way, and especially

are the American question, American identity, United States writers. So I chose a British author, Virginia Wolf because, um, I believe that she wrote an extraordinary book about many things, but above all, I would say it gives us an incredibly complex model of female identity. That book is to the Lighthouse, our fifth book, our last, our six, seventh and eighth book, our last three, or all American books, and all in dialogue with one another in their own ways.

I chose Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Joseph Hellos Catched twenty two, and harp re Leased to Kill a Mockingbird, And they're all part of what I considered the quest for the Great American novel. A theorist in the late nineteenth century, John William DeForest came up with the term the great American novel. And I still think there is this desire um in writers to kind of capture the complexities of

American identity and get it on the printed page. And it's not just the three I mentioned, but we see this in Philip Roth, Tony Morrison, so many Mark Twain, so many writers who kind of embraced the riddle and enigma of American identity. Make the case for why reading literature matters so much, you know, Richard, the more I think about it, the more important than the choice of eight books, my version of eight books versus yours versus someone else's. Um, it's really what do they have in common?

What to all great books. What does all great literature have in common? And I would focus on four things. One great literature is a passport to alternate worlds. You know, I grew up in a working class Italian American family. My family immigrated. We didn't have a lot of money. My parents had a grade school education. There were no

books in our house. In fact, I'm kind of an unlikely person to be giving a lecture on eight books to read, because when I was growing up, my mom, whenever she saw me with a book, she'd say, in her dialect, you know, lass, you know, put that book down. It's going to give you a headache, as if reading would give me a headache, you know. Um. But even though we didn't have money, we didn't travel. We had a local library, and by going to the library, I

could read about Rob Lais and Renaissance France. I could read about f Scott Fitzgerald in the nineteen twenties during Prohibition, I could travel anywhere. Literature gave me alternate worlds. It gives every read or alternate world not just in the present, but you can go back in the past. Aristotle said brilliantly, history tells us what happened poetry gives us what could

have which should have happened, a universal history. It takes, it moves beyond the contingent into the universal, so that when you read Scott Fitzgerald's A Great Godsby, you can see what life was like in the nineteen twenties. You can see, you can the air of the parties that gets me through his rife with the sense and the music of that era. It brings it to life just as richly as any historian could. So the first facet of these great books is they're a passport to alternate

world absolutely the second. The second one is literature is the marriage of form and content. In other words, how you say something is just as important as what you say. That's really the biggest difference between literature and other forms of writing. You can read wonderful history, you can read wonderful philosophy. But literature is all about the surface texture of the words you do. It's almost like music. When you become a good reader, you start to hear the

notes of what's on the page. Form and content are one. You know. There's a little line from Hamlet. When we first meet Hamlet, Claudius introduces um and he's like my son, Hamlet. He's not really, you know, he's it's his nephew, but he's become his son because he's married Gertrude and Hamlet. In reply to this line, he says a little more than kin and less than kind. Too much family, too little good behavior. Right, it would lose an effect if he just said, you're not a very good uncle. You

shouldn't have married my mom. Right, you shouldn't have killed my dad either, while you're at it. It's about this kind of artful crafting of language thematically. You know, my students always say, gosh, this was an a paper, how could you have given it a C? And I say, you know, the idea may have been an A, but the writing was a D. So we split the difference. It's about the joy and beauty of hearing the words. You do podcasts, you know what that's about, right, The

joy of language. How language has a life of its own, And that's what literature gives us. Now that we've heard your first two qualities, let's go to the third. I think the third one is what I call human at He's diary. By that, I mean literature gives us insights into the way people lived. And I think in a way that no other form of expression can well because there's so much empathy. So much empathy puts you right alongside a character from a different time, a different place,

a different culture. Think of To the Lighthouse. It's about a woman basically, you know, she's she's a housewife, she doesn't work, she raises an enormous family, many children. That person's voice would be very hard to hear in the public back then, because her husband is a philosopher, is very famous. His words is out there everywhere. But she's at home. She's a domestic you know, creature. And yet Virginia Wolf takes us inside her head and she gives

these incredibly lush descriptions of her inner life. Where else can we get that but literature. I tell my students it's like a fossil, an imprint, but not in the physical world, but of the human spirit it and you have this lovely phrase, the literature is the texture of life beyond the facts. That's exactly what I think this idea of humanity's diary gives us. So we're up to the fourth The fourth one, uh is my most I would say, um coded one I call it finding a

fig tree of your own. By that, I mean going back to St. Augustine, who wrote the Confessions in the late three hundreds. Augustine has this life changing experience basically under a fig tree where he's having this breakdown, true like spiritual crisis, and he hears a voice saying totally leg which is Latin for a pick it up and read. So he reaches for a book happens to be a Bible, and he finds the passage that enables him to break his addiction with sex, with pleasures of the flesh, with

worldly ambition. Sometimes we need external help to break a habit, to break a pattern. For Augustine, came in the form of picking up a book and reading about a path in life that he needed to take. This is very dramatic, of course, but I think we all have those moments where we're reading something and it can really have an impact on who we are, our sense of the world, our sense of someone we know or someone we thought

we knew, our sense of our own past. I think it's something that makes it literature, as like a companion that you go through life with and that at certain times can change that life. We've all or many of us have had those moments as readers where we read something and we feel the book is speaking directly to us, our own private fig tree moment in a way. That's my most important gift of reading, that you can have that moment where reading changes your life. Now we're doing

this podcast and we're talking about your lecture. We've given people a taste of what you're talking about. Why should they go and see you? Because every talk has I suppose has its aim right, mine is very simple. It's not for them to leave and say, wow, Professor Liusey had some really I mean, I hope they think I have good insights on the books. But my aim is very simple. I want you to leave my talk and go read a book. If you do that, then the

talk succeeded. Why should we read? Why should we read the great books? Because of this power of storytelling to bring people separated by culture, politics, identity together into that universal space where they can recognize each other as human beings and feel each other's pain while enjoying the pleasure of great stories. That's great right here, that was really enjoyable.

I'm Richard Davis. Thanks for listening. Sign off on our website one day you dot com to become a member and access over six hundred full length video lectures for the world's finest professors