Time Travel and Beyond

Bryan Walpert: Entanglement (2021)

Time Travel and Beyond

Is time travel possible? Why write another novel about it?

Jack Ross chats with Bryan Walpert, Devonport resident and author of the 2022 Ockham short-listed novel Entanglement, about time travel, the challenge of putting science into a novel, crossing the border from poetry to fiction, science fiction vs. science-in-fiction, and more.

Books will be available for purchase.

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As a researcher [at the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney] was settling me into my cubicle, he gave me some advice: Don’t think about it too hard and you’ll know what time it is; think about it too much and you’ll confuse yourself. As it turns out, this more or less describes our relationship with time as expressed by St Augustine some 1800 years ago. He wrote, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

Luckily for me, Bryan has already given us some pretty strong clues about how to interpret his novel Entanglement. In particular, the notion of whether or not the past and future are 'really' there is canvassed quite extensively:

Somewhat stranger than this, to me at least, is the question of how real the past and future are. Most of us have an intuitive sense that events in the past (e.g. the French Revolution) are no longer happening and that the future doesn’t exist until we, well, get there ... This corresponds with what has been called the “tensed” theory of time or “presentism.” But there are also proponents of what’s called the “block universe” or sometimes “eternalism.” By that way of thinking, the past, present and future all exist.

His Newsroom article on the subject even gives us the moment of inception of the book:

When I’m asked what led me to write Entanglement, I recall the moment some years ago that inspired it. It was a summer’s day. I was standing just outside my house, my family waiting for me inside, and felt, suddenly, as though I’d come back from the future, some darker time — though what the future was I didn’t know. My kids are so young again, I remember thinking. My wife and I are amazingly young, too.
I felt like I had been given another chance. I thought, There are so many mistakes I hadn’t yet made. It was a strange and powerful feeling, though it didn’t last — the moment passed. Or maybe the moment is still and eternally there in its little corner of the block universe ...

– Bryan Walpert, ‘Is time travel possible? Yes-ish’ Newsroom (3/3/22)

If you'd like to hear more about these weighty matters, please come along to the Devonport Library this coming Tuesday to listen to me and Bryan discussing his fascinating novel and the myriad questions it poses.

Once again, this event has been made possible by the Devonport Library Associates: chair Jan Mason, events organiser Paul Beachman, and publicity courtesy of Linda Hopkins.

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Bryan Walpert

Bryan Walpert is the author of four books of poems, most recently Brass Band to Follow (Otago UP), named among the top 10 poetry collections of 2021 by the NZ Listener. He is also the author of three books of fiction, including the novel Entanglement, short-listed for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. A Devonport resident, he is a Professor of Creative Writing at Massey University-Albany.

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Te Pātaka Kōrero o Te Hau Kapua / Devonport Library

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Breaking the Maya Code

William Carlsen: Jungle of Stone (2016)

William Carlsen. Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens & Frederick Catherwood, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilisation of the Maya. 2016. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2017.

The other day I was in a Hospice shop where I ran across a copy of the book above, priced at the princely sum of $4. I promptly bought it, of course, mainly because the blurb proclaimed it to be in the 'tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice'.

David Grann: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009)

The first of those two I'm only too familiar with, having both read the book and watched the weirdly entertaining movie, starring Charlie Hunnam as the intrepid (if somewhat misguided) Colonel Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon jungle in 1925 and has never been seen since.

James Gray, dir.: The Lost City of Z (2016)

I'd never heard of the second one, but it sounds very much like my kind of thing, and I'll certainly be on the lookout for a second-hand copy of it next time I'm out on the prowl:

Hampton Sides: In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (2014)

The superior attractions of Jungle of Stone, however, come both from its setting and its subject matter.

I'm rather a fan of books about the mysterious Mayan civilisation, as anyone motivated enough to have looked through my 2019 collection Ghost Stories will attest. The story 'Leaves from a Diary of the End of the World' begins with the following - lightly fictionalised - account of a not dissimilar windfall almost exactly ten years ago now:

Michael Coe: Breaking the Maya Code (1992)

Tuesday, 21 February, 2012:

Today I found an old book in the library, in the de-accessioned pile. It cost me two dollars to buy it (Hardback Non-fiction – if it had been Fiction, it would only have been a dollar). The title was Breaking the Maya Code, by Michael Coe.
But why on earth were they throwing it out?
It’s true that this was a copy of the first, 1992, edition, and since then – I checked – Coe has gone on to publish a number of revisions of his book (just as he did with his 1966 text The Maya, now in its eighth edition). So perhaps they thought it was too out of date to be useful.
What I suspect, though, is that they read those words ‘the Maya Code’ as something analogous to the Da Vinci Code – as a reference to the (alleged) Mayan Prediction of the end of days in December 2012.
If so, they were sorely mistaken. Far from an Occultist text full of babble about the Apocalypse, Coe’s is a profoundly scholarly work, which tells the tale of one of the greatest decipherments of all time.
The name of Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, the Russian genius whose phonological and comparative methodology finally led to success in this two-hundred-year-old quest, should undoubtedly go down in history along with Jean-François Champollion, Michael Ventris, and other heroes of the intellect.
The fact that we can now actually read these texts from a far-off civilisation, mute for centuries, thanks solely to such feats of ingenuity is one of the few proofs I know that the cosmos is not entirely arbitrary.
Just as the patterns of Nature become clear over time when examined by the dispassionate intellect, so advances can be made in our knowledge, the stones can be made to speak.

David Lebrun, dir.: Breaking the Maya Code (2008)

In fact, I subsequently went to the extra trouble of ordering a copy of a two-hour documentary on the subject, which I greatly recommend to anyone curious about just how precisely one goes about decoding an unknown script in an archaic version of an admittedly still living (though very complex) language.

C. W. Ceram: Gods, Graves and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology (1949 / 1951)

When it comes to Stephens and Catherwood, I did already know the rough outline of their story from early reading and rereading of the wonderfully exciting - to a nerdy teenager, at any rate - Gods, Graves and Scholars, by German journalist Kurt Wilhelm Marek (who published under the pseudonym 'C. W. Ceram').

John L. Stephens (1805–1852)

I've written elsewhere about my interest in 19th-century American Historians such as Washington Irving, Francis Parkman and William H. Prescott, who were among the very first authors from the Western hemisphere to attract a substantial Old World audience. John Lloyd Stephens certainly has to be counted among their number.

John L. Stephens: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, & Yucatán (1841 / 1949)

1. John L. Stephens. Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and The Holy Land. 1837. Ed. Victor Wolfgang von Hagen. Illustrated by Frederick Catherwood. 1970. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991.
2. John L. Stephens. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, & Yucatán. Illustrated by F. Catherwood. 1841. Ed. Richard L. Prodmore. 2 vols. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949.
3. John L. Stephens. Incidents of Travel in Yucatán. Illustrated by F. Catherwood. 2 vols. 1843. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1963.

John L. Stephens: Incidents of Travel in Yucatán (1843 / 1963)

It's fair to say, though, that Stephens' two classic books about his rediscovery of the lost Mayan cities - both of which I own (and, more to the point, have read from cover to cover) - would never have known such immediate success it weren't for the work of his collaborator and illustrator, itinerant Englishman Frederick Catherwood.

Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854)

It was Catherwood whose immensely detailed and accurate sketches of Mayan inscriptions, ruins, and sculptures established beyond dispute the artistic merits of this long-vanished civilisation. Even now it's hard to imagine how they could be surpassed:

Frederick Catherwood: Stela at Copan, from Views of Ancient Monuments (1844)

Stephens was an exceptionally able journalist, who told a rattling good yarn. When he wasn't being threatened with instant death by murderous soldiers, he was being laid low by tropical diseases. Somehow he managed to keep going, though, despite the lawlessness of much of Central America at the time.

Victor von Hagen: Search for the Maya: The Story of Stephens and Catherwood (1973)

It's really Catherwood one sympathises with most, however. He was often left behind at some inaccessible site to complete his sketches of the ruins while Stephens went off on some more glamorous (albeit even more dangerous) errand. Working, at times, up his ankles in mud, with jungle undergrowth obscuring his view, Catherwood used his camera lucida apparatus to trace each inscription and statue as carefully as he could.

Despite not knowing the meanings of any of the symbols he recorded, he drew them so carefully that many of his drawings are still used by Mayan scholars in preference to the original walls and statues, now further perished by time.

William Robertson (1721-1793)

Stephens and Catherwood were by no means the first to see these immense ruins, but they were certainly the most assiduous in recording and disseminating the wonders they'd found.

Thanks to the influence of sceptical British historians such as William Robertson, whose History of America (1777) threw considerable doubt on the existence of the architectural and artistic marvels described by the original Conquistadors, most people at the time still assumed that there had never been a civilisation in the Americas to rival those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The dogmatic Scots clergyman stated it baldly:

The inhabitants of the New World were in a state of society so extremely rude as to be unacquainted with those arts which are the first essays of human ingenuity on its advance toward improvement.

Their temples, he went on to stress, could have been little more than 'a mound of earth' and their houses 'mere huts, built with turf, or mud, or the branches of trees, like those of the rudest Indians.' 'There is not', he concluded:

in all the extent of that vast empire, a single monument or vestige of any building more ancient than the conquest.

Robertson based this blanket dismissal of all the innumerable detailed chronicles of the Spanish conquest - by Cortés, Pizarro, and their many contemporaries - on the account of one informant who had (allegedly) 'travelled in every part of New Spain.'

Both Stephens and Catherwood had, however, travelled widely in the Middle East as well as the Americas, and it was apparent to them that the creators of cities such as Copán, Tikal, and Chichen Itza, were in no way inferior to Ancient Greeks and Romans when it came to urban planning. They had been, in fact, in many ways more culturally advanced than their classical contemporaries.

As Stephens himself put it, in the conclusion to Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, & Yucatán, 'The monuments and pyramids of Central America and Mexico are':

different from the works of any other known people, of a new order, and entirely and absolutely anomalous: they stand alone. ...
Unless I am wrong, we have a conclusion far more interesting and wonderful than that of connecting the builders of these cities with the Egyptians or any other people. It is the spectacle of a people skilled in architecture, sculpture and drawing, and, beyond doubt, other more perishable arts, and possessing the culture and refinement attendant upon these, not derived from the Old World, but originating and growing up here, without models or masters, having a distinct, separate, independent existence; like the plants and fruits of the soil, indigenous.

What a resounding declaration of American intellectual independence! No wonder the book was an instant success. Even the notoriously picky Edgar Allan Poe hailed it as 'magnificent ... perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published'.

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A Book of the Book (2000)

Thanks to the work of contemporary scholars and translators such as Michael Coe, Sylvanus Morley, and Denis Tedlock, we can now read the creation epic of the Mayans, the Popol Vuh, in a variety of versions.

As well as the wonders of their advanced mathematical knowledge and wonderfully subtle script, Tedlock's essay 'Towards a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability' - from the anthology pictured above, A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing (2000) - demonstrates the complex nature of Mayan poetics, in particular the habit of Mayan writers of constantly rephrasing and paraphrasing their meanings, rather than treating poems "as if they were Scripture, composed of precisely the right words and no others':

In a poetics that always stands ready, once something has been said, to find other ways to say it, there can be no fetishization of verbatim quotation, which lies at the very heart of the Western commodification of words. In the Mayan case not even writing, whether in the Mayan script or the Roman alphabet, carries with it a need for exact quotation. When Mayan authors cite previous texts, and even when they cite earlier passages in the same text, they unfailingly construct paraphrases. [266-67]

The implications of this tendency are extremely far-reaching, particularly when it comes to translation:

Translation caused anxiety long before the current critique of representations, especially the translation of poetry. Roman Jakobson pointed the way to a new construction of this problem, suggesting that the process of rewording might be called intralingual translation ...
Here we have entered a realm in which the popular notion of an enmity between poetry and translation does not apply. To quote Robert Frost's famous phrasing of this notion ... 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation.' ... [Octavio] Paz countered by saying 'Poetry is what is translated.' ... To take this statement a step further and paraphrase it for the purposes of the present discussion, poetry is translation. [267-68]

The conclusion of Tedlock's essay refuses to draw the conventional distinctions between the poetics and politics of the word, just as the Mayan poets he cites see no need to differentiate between quotation and paraphrase:

we could try to see the complexity of Mayan poetry as the result of a conflict between centripetal forces in language, which are supposed to produce formal and authoritative discourse, and centrifugal forces, which are supposed to open language to its changing contexts and foment new kinds of discourse. But this is a profoundly Western way of stating the problem. Available to speakers of any language are multiple systems for phrasing utterances, including syntax, semantics, intonation, and pausing. Available to writers (even within the limits of a keyboard) is a variety of signs, of which some are highly individual and particulate while others are iconic and may stand for whole words. There is nothing intrinsic to any one of these various spoken and written codes, not even the alphabet itself, that demands the reduction of all or any of the others to its own terms. Bringing multiple codes into agreement with one another is not a matter of poetics as such, but of centralized authority [my emphasis]. It is no accident that Mayans, who never formed a conquest state and have kept their distance from European versions of the state right down to the current morning news, do not bend their poetic energies to making systems stack. [276]

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Dennis Tedlock (1939- )

Mayan Literature in Translation

1. Coe, Michael D. The Maya. 1966. Eighth edition, fully revised and expanded. Ancient People and Places: Founding Editor Glyn Daniel. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2011.


2. Coe, Michael D. Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs. 1962. Fourth edition, fully revised and expanded. 1994. Ancient People and Places: Founding Editor Glyn Daniel. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1997.


3. Recinos, Adrián, ed. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya. 1947. Trans. Delia Goetz & Sylvanus G. Morley. London: William Hodge & Company Limited, 1951.


4. Saravia E., Albertina, ed. Popol Wuj: Antiguas Historias de los Indios Quiches de Guatemala. Illustradas con dibujos de los Codices Mayas. 1965. “Sepan Cuantos …”, 36. Ciudad de México: Editorial Porrúa, S. A., 1986.


5. Sodi M., Demetrio. La literatura de los Mayas. 1964. El Legado de la América Indígena. México: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, S. A., 1974.


6. Tedlock, Dennis, trans. Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of The Mayan Book of The Dawn of Life and The Glories of Gods and Kings. With Commentary Based on the Ancient Knowledge of the Modern Quiché Maya. 1985. Rev. ed. A Touchstone Book. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996.


7. Tedlock, Dennis. 2000 Years of Mayan Literature: With New Translations and Interpretations by the Author. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010.

Sir John Lubbock's 100 Books

Sir John Lubbock: The Pleasures of Life (1887)

One fateful evening in 1886, the Principal of the London Working-Men’s College, Sir John Lubbock, gave a speech to that institution. In it he outlined a list of 100 vital books which, if read attentively, might in themselves constitute a liberal education.

The idea took off with a vengeance, and after the list was reprinted in his essay-collection The Pleasures of Life, earnest self-improvers everywhere started to collect the various volumes.

Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913)

Lubbock himself never attended university, though he came from a privileged background, and had been educated at Eton by his wealthy family. A banker by profession, his real passions were archaeology and evolutionary biology, and he wrote extensively on both subjects.

Amongst other achievements, he was the the first to coin the terms "Neolithic" and "Palaeolithic" in one of his books about early man.

Antoine Galland: The Arabian Nights' Entertainments (London: Routledge, 1865)

The very first copy of the Arabian Nights I ever owned (rather similar to the one pictured above, but more battered and dogeared) proudly proclaimed itself as one of these "hundred books" - which gives some clue to the bonanza this must have constituted for enterprising publishers in the late nineteenth century.

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure (1894-95)

It's easy to see how this idea of self-betterment through focussed reading informs Hardy's last prose masterpiece Jude the Obscure, with its almost unbearably poignant account of rural autodidact Jude's attempts to enter the sheltered cloisters of Christminster University through sheer effort and application. All in vain, of course (it is, after all, a Thomas Hardy novel).

There's a particularly poignant scene where Jude is sitting miserably by the side of the road realising the folly of his grand ambitions, and longing for someone to come by and comfort him:

But nobody did come, because nobody does: and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

- Jude the Obscure (1895)

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18 of the 100 Books (London: Routledge, 1890)
[The Shi King of Confucius; The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer; Darwin's Journal of Discoveries; The Origin of Species; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I and II; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; Captain Cook's Voyages; Humboldt's Travels I-III; Scott's Ivanhoe; La Morte D'Arthur; Spinoza; The Arabian Nights' Entertainments; Bacon's Novum Organum; The Nibelungenleid; Thackeray's Pendennis]

Here, in any case, is a slightly tidied-up list of the original 100 books. It's rather hard to make the numbers fit consistently, given Lubbock's habit of listing multiple works under one author or, alternatively, listing separate works by a writer under different categories. He also published different versions of it at different times.

Each entry has been linked to a free online text wherever possible.

LIST OF 100 BOOKS
[Works by Living Authors are omitted]

1. The Holy Bible
2. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
3. Epictetus
4. Aristotle’s Ethics
5. The Analects of Confucius
6. St Hilaire’s Le Bouddha et sa religion
7. Wake’s Apostolic Fathers
8. Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ
9. Confessions of St. Augustine
10. The Koran
11. Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
12. Comte’s Catechism of Positive Philosophy
13. Pascal’s Pensées
14. Butler’s Analogy of Religion
15. Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying
16. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
17. Keble’s Christian Year
18. Plato’s Apology, Phædo, & Republic
19. Xenophon’s Memorabilia
20. Aristotle’s Politics
21. The Public Orations of Demosthenes
22. Cicero’s Treatises on Friendship and Old Age
23. Plutarch’s Lives
24. Berkeley’s Human Knowledge
25. Descartes’ Discours sur la Méthode
26. Locke’s On the Conduct of the Understanding
27. Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey
28. Hesiod
29. Virgil
30. Lucretius [1]
31. The Mahabharata & The Ramayana [Epitomized in Talboy Wheeler’s History of India]
32. Firdausi’s Shahnameh [Included in Persian Literature]
33. The Nibelungenlied
34. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
35. The Shi King [or Book of Songs]
36. Kalidasa’s Sakuntala [or The Lost Ring]
37. Aeschylus’ Tragedies and Fragments & Trilogy
38. Sophocles’ Oedipus
39. Euripides’ Medea
40. Aristophanes’ The Knights & The Clouds [In Comedies]
41. Horace
42. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
43. Shakespeare
44. Milton’s Paradise Lost & minor poems
45. Dante’s Divina Commedia (Cary’s translation) (Longfellow’s translation)
46. Spenser’s Faerie Queene
47. Dryden’s Poems [vol 1 & vol 2]
48. Scott’s Poems [The Lady of the Lake & Marmion]
49. Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer & The Curse of Kehama [vol 1 & vol 2]
50. Selected Poems of William Wordsworth
51. Pope's Essay on Criticism; Essay on Man; Rape of the Lock and Other Poems
52. Burns
53. Byron’s Childe Harold
54. Gray [in The Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett]
55. Herodotus [vol 1 & vol 2]
56. Xenophon’s Anabasis
57. Thucydides
58. Tacitus’ Germania
59. Livy
60. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
61. Hume’s History of England
62. Grote’s History of Greece
63. Carlyle’s French Revolution
64. Green’s Short History of England
65. Lewes’ History of Philosophy [vol 1 & vol 2]
66. The Arabian Nights
67. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
68. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
69. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield
70. Cervantes’ Don Quixote
71. Boswell’s Life of Johnson
72. Molière
73. Schiller’s William Tell
74. Sheridan’s The Critic, School for Scandal, & The Rivals
75. Carlyle’s Past and Present
76. Bacon’s Novum Organum
77. Smith’s Wealth of Nations
78. Mill’s Political Economy
79. Cook’s Voyages
80. Humboldt’s Travels [vol 1, vol 2 & vol 3]
81. White’s Natural History of Selborne
82. Darwin's Origin of Species & Naturalist’s Voyage
83. Mill’s Logic
84. Bacon’s Essays
85. Montaigne’s Essays
86. Hume’s Essays
87. Macaulay’s Essays
88. Addison’s Essays
89. Emerson’s Essays
90. Burke’s Select Works
91. Smiles’ Self-Help
92. Voltaire's Zadig & Micromegas
93. Goethe’s Faust & Autobiography
94. Miss Austen’s Emma, or Pride and Prejudice [2]
95. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair & Pendennis
96. Dickens' Pickwick, David Copperfield
97. Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii
98. George Eliot’s Adam Bede
99. Kingsley’s Westward Ho!
100. Scott’s Waverley Novels

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Notes:

1. Lubbock notes that this is “less generally suitable than most of the others in the list.”

2. Lubbock chose later to omit this entry, commenting that English novelists were “somewhat over-represented.”

A revised version of the list was published in 1930, after Lubbock's death, with the following substituted entries:

• Comte’s Catechism [no. 12] was replaced by Seneca
• Dryden’s Poems [no. 47] was replaced by Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
• Hume’s Essays [no. 86] was replaced by Ruskin’s Modern Painters

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Mary Ann Evans ['George Eliot'] (1819-1880)

Even making due allowance for the era in which it was compiled, it remains a somewhat surprising selection. There are only two female authors - both English novelists - and Lubbock eventually chose to omit Jane Austen and retain only George Eliot. Even there, it's her first novel Adam Bede, rather than the more mature Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda, which makes the cut.

There's also what would now seem a disproportionate emphasis on Christian theology, ancient and modern. I count no fewer than ten such volumes, ranging from Saint Augustine to Keble's Christian Year. By contrast, there's one book on Buddhism, another on Confucianism, one on Hinduism, and another on Islam.

There are ten British novelists there, too. But who would now think to include Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Kingsley among their number? Cervantes, Goethe, and Voltaire are the only other fiction writers on the list. It's odd, moreover, to see the latter represented by Zadig and Micromegas rather than the more obvious Candide.

It's only to be expected, given Victorian ideas on education, that the Greek and Roman classics should make up a substantial part of the listings - Poets such as Homer, Hesiod, Horace, Lucretius & Virgil; Dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides & Aristophanes; Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius; Historians such as Herodotus, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Thucydides & Xenophon; Orators such as Demosthenes & Cicero ... In total, they make up almost a quarter of the readings.

To do him justice, Lubbock himself was the first to admit the limitations of his project:

It is one thing to own a library; it is quite another to use it wisely. I have often been astonished how little care people devote to the selection of what they read. Books, we know, are almost innumerable; our hours for reading are, alas! very few. And yet many people read almost by hazard. They will take any book they chance to find in a room at a friend's house; they will buy a novel at a railway-stall if it has an attractive title; indeed, I believe in some cases even the binding affects their choice.

The selection is, no doubt, far from easy. I have often wished some one would recommend a list of a hundred good books. If we had such lists drawn up by a few good guides they would be most useful. I have indeed sometimes heard it said that in reading every one must choose for himself, but this reminds me of the recommendation not to go into the water till you can swim.

In the absence of such lists I have picked out the books most frequently mentioned with approval by those who have referred directly or indirectly to the pleasure of reading, and have ventured to include some which, though less frequently mentioned, are especial favorites of my own. Every one who looks at the list will wish to suggest other books, as indeed I should myself, but in that case the number would soon run up.

- The Pleasures of Life (1887)

He goes on to specify:

I have abstained, for obvious reasons, from mentioning works by living authors, though from many of them — Tennyson, Ruskin, and others —I have myself derived the keenest enjoyment; and I have omitted works on science, with one or two exceptions, because the subject is so progressive.

I feel that the attempt is over bold, and I must beg for indulgence, while hoping for criticism; indeed one object which I have had in view is to stimulate others more competent far than I am to give us the advantage of their opinions.

There's a lot more detail about his specific choices in chapter 4 of The Pleasures of Life, which makes very interesting reading. His reservations about some of the inclusions are particularly revealing. For instance:

Nor must I omit to mention Sir T. Malory's Morte d'Arthur, though I confess I do so mainly in deference to the judgment of others.

Or, on the subject of which novelists to include:

Macaulay considered Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne the best novel in any language, but my number is so nearly complete that I must content myself with English: and will suggest Thackeray (Vanity Fair and Pendennis), Dickens (Pickwick and David Copperfield), G. Eliot (Adam Bede or The Mill on the Floss), Kingsley (Westward Ho!), Lytton (Last Days of Pompeii), and last, not least, those of Scott, which indeed constitute a library in themselves, but which I must ask, in return for my trouble, to be allowed, as a special favor, to count as one.

Pierre de Marivaux: La Vie de Marianne (1731-45)

Strangely enough, I've actually read La Vie de Marianne. It's a surprisingly entertaining novel, given that its principal subject is the endless rehearsal of the sufferings and woes of the title character - whom I'd always assumed to have been suggested by Samuel Richardson's Pamela in his 1740 novel of that name. Now, however, I see that the dates don't fit, and that if there was influence, it must have been in the opposite direction.

I'm not sure that I'd put it in any lists of must-reads, mind you, but then that just illustrates the invidiousness of such choices. The moment you start to legislate about such things, you end up putting in bizarre tomes such as Samuel Smiles' Self-Help rather than, say, Marx's Das Kapital.

Would it do a modern reader any harm to sit down and start reading their way through Sir John Lubbock's hundred books? No, I don't think so. At the very least it would give you quite a good idea of the classical idea of the canon - as it stood in the late nineteenth century.

I'm not sure that it would do you all that much good, though. You'd have to substitute more reliable texts on the world's great religions, more up-to-date histories than Carlyle's or Grote's, and a greatly increased number of books on economics and science. In fact, you might end up with something like this:

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Britannica: Great Books of the Western World (1990)

The Britannica Great Books of the Western World series was first published, as a set of 54 volumes, in 1952:

The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series drawn from Western Civilization: the book must have been relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read repeatedly with respect to liberal education; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 "Great Ideas" as identified by the editor of the series's comprehensive index, ... dubbed the "Syntopicon".

- Wikipedia

A second edition, enlarged to 60 volumes, was published in 1990. Among other revisions, "Four women authors were included, where previously there were none."

You can look at the original lists in the Wikipedia article above. I suspect that most of us probably have a few odd volumes of the series kicking around. The double-columns of print and large format make them difficult to read, but they are a useful source for otherwise difficult to locate texts. I see that I myself own ten of them - marked below in bold - though I've never consciously collected them:

1. The Great Conversation
2. Syntopicon I
3. Syntopicon II
4. Volume 4: Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)
   • The Iliad
   • The Odyssey

   Homer. The Iliad & The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. 1898. Great Books of the Western World, 4. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. 1952. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1989.

5. Aeschylus / Sophocles / Euripides / Aristophanes
6. Herodotus / Thucydides
7. Plato
8. Volume 8: Aristotle I
   • Categories
   • On Interpretation
   • Prior Analytics
   • Posterior Analytics
   • Topics
   • Sophistical Refutations
   • Physics
   • On the Heavens
   • On Generation and Corruption
   • Meteorology
   • Metaphysics
   • On the Soul
   • Minor biological works

   Aristotle. The Works, Volume 1. Ed. W. D. Ross. Great Books of the Western World, 8. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

9. Volume 9: Aristotle II
   • History of Animals
   • Parts of Animals
   • On the Motion of Animals
   • On the Gait of Animals
   • On the Generation of Animals
   • Nicomachean Ethics
   • Politics
   • The Athenian Constitution
   • Rhetoric
   • Poetics

   Aristotle. The Works, Volume 2. Ed. W. D. Ross. Great Books of the Western World, 9. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

10. Hippocrates / Galen
11. Volume 11:
    • Euclid
      • The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements
    • Archimedes
      • On the Sphere and Cylinder
      • Measurement of a Circle
      • On Conoids and Spheroids
      • On Spirals
      • On the Equilibrium of Planes
      • The Sand Reckoner
      • The Quadrature of the Parabola
      • On Floating Bodies
      • Book of Lemmas
      • The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems
    • Apollonius of Perga
      • On Conic Sections
    • Nicomachus of Gerasa
      • Introduction to Arithmetic

    Euclid. The Thirteen Books of the Elements / Archimedes. The Works, Including the Method / Apollonius of Perga. On Conic Sections / Nichomachus of Gerga. Introduction to Arithmetic. Trans. Thomas L. Heath, R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Martin L. D’Ooge. 1926 & 1939. Great Books of the Western World, 11. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

12. Lucretius / Epictetus / Marcus Aurelius
13. Virgil
14. Volume 14: Plutarch
    • The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by John Dryden)

    Plutarch. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (The Dryden Translation). Great Books of the Western World, 14. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

15. Tacitus
16. Volume 16:
    • Ptolemy
      • Almagest, (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)
    • Nicolaus Copernicus
      • On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
    • Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
      • Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V)
      • The Harmonies of the World (Book V)

    Ptolemy. The Almagest / Copernicus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres / Kepler. Epitome of Copernican Astronomy: IV & V; The Harmonies of the World: V. Trans. R. Catesby Taliaferro, & Charles Glenn Wallis. Great Books of the Western World, 16. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

17. Plotinus
18. St. Augustine
19. Volume 19: Thomas Aquinas
    • Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)

    Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica, 1. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1941. Rev. Daniel J. Sullivan. Great Books of the Western World, 19. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

20. Volume 20: Thomas Aquinas
    • Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)

    Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica, 2. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 1941. Rev. Daniel J. Sullivan. Great Books of the Western World, 20. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

21. Dante
22. Chaucer
23. Machiavelli / Hobbes
24. Rabelais
25. Montaigne
26. Shakespeare I
27. Shakespeare II
28. Gilbert / Galileo / Harvey
29. Cervantes: Don Quixote
30. Sir Francis Bacon
31. Descartes / Spinoza
32. Milton
33. Pascal
34. Newton / Huygens
35. Locke/ Berkeley / Hume
36. Swift: Gulliver's Travels / Sterne: Tristram Shandy
37. Fielding: Tom Jones
38. Montesquieu / Rousseau
39. Adam Smith
40. Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I
41. Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire II
42. Kant
43. American State Papers / Hamilton, Madison, Jay: The Federalist / John Stuart Mill
44. Boswell: Life of Johnson
45. Lavoisier / Fourier / Faraday
46. Hegel
47. Goethe: Faust
48. Melville: Moby Dick
49. Darwin
50. Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels
51. Tolstoy: War and Peace
52. Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
53. Volume 53: William James
    • The Principles of Psychology

    James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Great Books of the Western World, 53. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

54. Volume 54: Sigmund Freud
    • The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
    • Selected Papers on Hysteria
    • The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
    • The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
    • Observations on "Wild" Psycho-Analysis
    • The Interpretation of Dreams
    • On Narcissism
    • Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
    • Repression
    • The Unconscious
    • A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
    • Beyond the Pleasure Principle
    • Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
    • The Ego and the Id
    • Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
    • Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
    • Civilization and Its Discontents
    • New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

    Freud, Sigmund. The Major Works. Great Books of the Western World, 54. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

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Again it seems, in retrospect, 70 years on, quite an odd list. It's very anglocentric, for a start: Boswell's Life of Johnson, a whole slew of novels and other literary works easily available elsewhere ... but it does represent a certain advance on Lubbock, insofar (at least) that it admits upfront its 'Western' orientation - if you'll forgive the pun.

The editors were well aware of this, however, so when they revised it in 1990, they added six new volumes of more contemporary material: one on Philosophy, one on Science, one on Economics, one on Anthropology, and two on Modernist Literature (you can see further details here).

Like all such grand intellectual enterprises, however, it looks now more like an index of the blind-spots in the late twentieth-century mind than a truly satisfactory summary of the best of Western thought.

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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

So what's my conclusion? "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes," as Henry Thoreau put it so succinctly (or, as in this case, new book-bindings). But he went on to say: "and not rather a new wearer of clothes" - which is perhaps the nub of the matter.

No set list of readings will produce an original, free-thinking intellect, whether it be Sir John Lubbocks's 100 books, the Britannica Great Books, the Harvard Classics, or The Sacred Books of the East. That's not to say that such collections of books have no abiding usefulness, however - it's probably better to take them as a series of local guides than as a grand, overarching index to the nature of the universe, however.

And, in the meantime, it can be useful - and salutary - to skim through such lists and remind yourself of just how far you've fallen short of the minimum knowledge expected of either a nineteenth-century or a more contemporary 'common reader'!

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David Morrell & Hank Wagner: Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (2010)