(no subject)

[proximoception]

Dumbest of my dumb lists are the ones where I try to whittle down the authors who matter. As if that didn't just mean the ones who matter to me - among those I've even read and was able to properly appreciate. But I come up with something like this a lot:

Shakespeare
Wordsworth
Shelley
Whitman
Dickinson
Emerson
Stevens

Somehow as a core Seven, with Shakespeare being perhaps as important as those others combined. He famously does all those things no one else had done, but somehow also incorporates most of the best things literature had done up to him, from the Bible and Greek drama down to Montaigne and Marlowe. And in addition to that starts to do the thing that those next six each took up in their different ways. He both inaugurates the kind of literature I find most important and somehow summarizes all the other, scarcely less important kinds.

But as soon as I write those names I write down in a list beside them, not below:

Tolstoy
Proust

And then hesitate a little, leave a space, and write just under them:

Goethe
Ibsen
Joyce

And then go back to the first column, leave another space, write:

Melville
Thoreau
Frost

And make a third column after even more hesitation, far, far from the others but starting a bit lower:

Dante
Spenser
Milton

And then add a fourth column, nearer the first two - here my indecision's about how high up to start it:

Kafka
Borges
Calvino
Abe

And then fill in others around. McCarthy sometimes comes in under Frost, Crowley sometimes under Stevens as an uncertain Eighth. Hazlitt and Bishop get put in the margin with a question mark, Mann near the Goethe-Ibsen-Joyce column, Roth and Carson together not far from him...

(And now I feel maybe I should add Chekhov somewhere. And Carpentier.)

And around then Literature starts to feel like a large block of plastic cheese, as they call it here, and even as an idle thing to do the list feels wrong.

Comments

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm just not sure how important the Kafka set is compared to the seven poets and two novelists I don't hesitate at all about. I love those four, and I think Borges in particular created some of Earth's most astonishingly original and perfect art. But what, say, Dickinson and Proust do is better than astonishment and perfection. Borges et al. leave the world some to see it better, and it usually entails dimming some of the more human intensities.

I love them as much (selectively, as with all these authors) but the idea with this list is what one should recommend to people as essential, as what they should zero in for the reading part of life. I always come up with those first seven and first two, then get a bit confused about the cosmological fantasist and (for lack of a better term) narcissistic self-dissection traditions. And quite conflicted about those three Christians.

But nine people we should all read. That's the part of the list that heartens me each time, that I am absolutely sure about them. Then the rest becomes impossible pretty shortly.