Travel and the Anxiety of What Remains Unread

Links and three takes on the canon.

I love to read, but recently it has been making me anxious. For many years, most of my reading was related to work. After the office, I wanted to shut off my brain and turned to TV, movies, podcasts, and social media. Today, I want to nourish my soul, expand my mind, and become a better writer. But the more attention I paid to what seemed worth reading, the more anxious I became.

After learning about Ted Gioia’s Lifetime Reading Plan, I started tracking books and writers I was curious about. At first, I felt like a kid in a candy store and carried home stacks of books from the library. But slowly, book by book, I realized how much I had been shivering in the shadow of my own ignorance. I saw the outline of a mountain range of great works, so vast and tall I could never climb them all.

“The Canon's true question remains,” literary critic Howard Bloom wrote in The Western Canon, “What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read, this late in history?” Life is not long enough “to read more than a selection of the great writers” and he concludes that “who reads must choose.” I love to read, but having to choose is depressing.

Gioia recently discussed his daily commitment to reading (and listening) to great books and music. Over the decades, he mastered the canon and developed a unique voice as a writer and cultural commentator. I now appreciate how important it is to have the right “fuel” for writing, as Gioia put it. At the same time, I had to be reminded that reading FOMO is a trap.

Earlier this week, I sat at JFK waiting for my flight to visit friends on Martha's Vineyard. My backpack was stuffed with two paper books, my Kindle, a journal, two notebooks, and a laptop bursting with PDFs. By the evening, after a day of hiking and walking the beach, we were sitting around the fire, talking, laughing, and watching the embers glow in the darkness. The books were a distant memory. And that’s okay.

Books that have stood the test of time are an antidote to the noisy and fleeting present. They can serve as guides through life and become rich soil for the seeds of our creativity. But a frantic attempt to catch up would lead away from life’s other sparks — conversation, travel, and direct experiences. Sitting with the canon is a solitary journey and it should not turn into an escape from direct engagement with life.

Among all the excitement about Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare, I forgot my north star: read to nourish your soul. Read to be curious, read for the splendor of great prose, read to challenge yourself, but, above all, read for joy.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people -whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations. They are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. — Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

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Five things I enjoyed recently that felt worth sharing.

Three perspectives on the canon:

Podcast: Ted Gioia with David Perell

A thought-provoking conversation about writing, creativity, culture, and a commitment to deep reading in the age of infinite distraction (Highlights via David Perell). Ted immersed himself in the ‘canon’ of writing and music and built a unique lattice of cultural knowledge. Ted also explains how he uses models across domains (biology to business to music!) and dreams as the last refuge of out-of-body experience (aka the night shift). Dig deeper: Ted’s Lifetime Reading Plan on his substack.

Ted’s writing prompt: (1) buy a blank journal that you keep private, and (2) write about something that happened at the end of every day with complete honesty. Do this for thirty days then revisit what you’ve observed.

Substack: Harold Bloom in Silicon Valley

An exploration of literature, the desire to be original, and the weight of the past in the world of tech.¹

The strongest minds in modern technology might best be understood, surprisingly, by reading literary criticism.

The piece is a follow-up to Luke Burgis’s excellent essay The Three City Problem which contrasts Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley as incarnations of three cultural camps: faith, reason, and techno-materialism.

The extent to which people begin clustering in one of the three cities—the extent to which they isolate, fortify the walls, and close the gates—is the extent to which our culture suffers.

Substack: Don’t read the canon

A different perspective offered by River Kenna which speaks to the seasonality of life. After a phase of obsession, healthy distance and discernment emerge.

Reading ‘The Canon’ is a lot like traveling to see ‘The Wonders of the World.’ A couple of them will undoubtedly impress you, but on the whole, you’re going to spend a lot of time either a) disappointed in yet another overcrowded overpriced tourist trap … or b) so caught up in your knowledge about this Wonder … that you barely even see the thing itself; you spend the whole time in your head.

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Book: William Zinsser: On Writing Well

My new favorite book on how to write nonfiction. If you’re drawn to write more, get this one. Read for clear advice, crisp prose, and countless recommendations of who to read next.

Quote: The product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. … What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field.

This is the personal transaction that’s at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks to “personalize” the author. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.

Substack: Why Everything is Becoming a Game

A deep investigation of the gamification of our culture, which Gurwinder believes is “no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society.”

Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were trapped in a cage — they had nothing else to do. But you are still free. Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide open world to create your own.

1. Check it out if you’re interested in what the Silicon Valley elite is reading: “Zuckerberg is obsessed with Marcus Aurelius. Paul Graham is a formally trained painter who loves the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Patrick Collison has quoted J.S. Mill’s essays Bentham and Coleridge in interviews. He is currently reading Bleak House (in my view, perhaps the great English novel) and recently enjoyed Middlemarch. Sam Altman’s bookshelf includes Plato, Huxley, and Tolstoy. Beyond this, there is a widespread interest in the work of Rene Girard, thanks to Thiel’s endorsement, which I’m told has led a few people into reading Shakespeare.”