The past, they say, is like an other country - they do things differently there.
One of the things that reading about and from the past brings you is a sense about the contingency of today's culture - it could be different, things we take for granted and eternal generally aren't, and different people think differently and care about different things. It doesn't have to particularly relate to your current situation to be useful.
Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, Ovid, Apuleius, Homer. Also just finished the Prelude by Wordsworth, who was wrestling with the horror unleashed by the French Revolution. Reading works like this really does give you ballast; my frame of reference is larger, so each dip and rise in contemporary events doesn't seem as all-encompassing.
Yes! You've put this well. I've always found it helpful to read stories from various time periods. It gives context and perspective when thinking about the challenges of today.
I love historical costuming (sewing, reenacting, English Country Dancing), and it makes me crazy when movies and shows use a historical setting and yet put into the mouths of the characters opinions and belief systems that could only have come from the current day of the show's release. (I'm looking at you, every movie with the "liberated woman character complaining about corset tight lacing" trope; at LARP (medieval fantasy setting), I've hiked for hours and fought with swords in corsets just fine! This is especially distressing when the trope is put in an era like the regency (Jane Austen) when they didn't wear corsets!!). The past is a foreign country and it should feel like it!
I also love stories that show a whole life or multiple generations. I used to think the sins of the father visited down three generations was awful, and then I got older and realized, that's life, that's just how God built the world. Your decisions affect your children, and your children -shaped by your decisions- raise your grandchildren. It's natural consequences. If your book or movie takes place over a few months, you can't see the impact of a bad decision by a character in the same way you can in Kristin Lavransdatter which covers her whole life or The Forsyte Saga which shows a story unfold through a free generations.
Stories that ground me in a timeline of history bigger than my lived experience include lives of the saints (Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset was great); biographies and histories (my favorites recently have been the Teddy Roosevelt three volume biography by Edmund Morris, Hamilton and Washington by Chernow, The Last Lion (three volume biography about Churchill) by William Manchester, Napoleon by Roberts and The Power Broker by Robert Caro) plus Albion's Seed by Fisher; personal recollections (Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter Ciszek, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt); and classics (in no order and off the top of my head: Middlemarch, Cranford, Kristin Lavransdatter, Martin Chuzzlewit, Northanger Abbey, The Power and the Glory, Master and Commander, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Moonstone, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind...)
You find so many human emotions and actions to connect with or that are always the same, and you get a peek into totally different worldviews and contexts and historical situations.
Last year when there was lawfare against a former president and a discussion about if a sitting president was too old to run again, I said, the party tried to get Taft to step down from running for reelection because he was too old and in too poor of health to run and many people wanted Teddy Roosevelt to run again, then lawfare was deployed against Teddy Roosevelt to try to make him unelectable. In that case, Taft ran anyway, Teddy Roosevelt ran third party and the other party (Wilson) won. And what a different timeline it would have been if Teddy Roosevelt had been president of the US during World War One! And, separately, imagine if you worked in Washington when there were three presidential assassinations in under 40 years!
"Our times are rarely unprecedented, but that doesn’t make our choices trivial. It’s by building up our examples of ways to live well in difficult times that it becomes easier to see what might be a way to live generously today."
I love that - yoy've put it so well.
I've read Kristin Lavransdatter and Brothers Karamazov. Dickens - especially The Tale of Two Cities - fits the bill, as well as certain Graham Greene novels. His works tend to be more micro-focused than expansive, but I've found that perspective to help recognize that the human condition remains consistent across decades and circumstances.
I love reading the Hebrew Scriptures—a few years ago our church read a book called “The Path” that re-arranged various chapters and books in the Old Testament to create a straightforward narrative arc leading from Genesis to the Resurrection. I compared it at the time to adapting an elaborate novel into a movie—the plot is more vivid and clearer, and the meaning is still there. I found it immensely comforting to know that humans have always been like this.
Reading history and fiction written in different eras is also really valuable…it makes me sad that schools are putting such a heavy emphasis on contemporary authors because either the classics are “boring” to modern readers (hey—some of the language IS really hard to navigate!) or even worse, they are afraid that students could be made “uncomfortable” by reading about how people talked, thought, and acted in prior centuries. The fainting spells over “Huckleberry Finn” come to mind—talk about mistaking the trees for the forest! Getting hung up on Huck’s use of the N word and completely ignoring Huck’s decision to defend Jim because Jim was his friend, and deciding that if opposing slavery would send him to Hell, well then, he’d just have to go to Hell. And the criticism of “To Kill a Mockingbird” being a story of a “White Savior” when the whole point of the novel is that there IS no savior in a system as perverted as Jim Crow.
I really wish people would read MORE about the past—I can’t see how you can look around today and think things are terrible. Even in my lifetime, things have never been better. We can save people from conditions and diseases like heart failure that when I was a kid had absolutely NO treatments other than a couple of medications! The vaccines we have are miracles. The comfort in which we live was unheard of in the 1960’s—air conditioning in CARS! ATMs…automatic garage door openers..dishwashers….microwaves….EV’s….cordless vacuum cleaners….accessible to the disabled buildings……man—I wish some billionaire would build an absolutely accurate replica of a house from each decade of the 20th century and get people to live in them for a week.
Currently reading A Tale of Two Cities and wow it packs a punch.And is more deeply Christian than I remembered. And I just re-read Kristin Lavransdatter and appreciated it even more the second time.
My list would include Eugene Vodolazkin's History of the Island and also The Aviator and Laurus. I love the way Vodolazkin ponders history and faith and art.
The Ibis Trilogy by Amitov Ghosh (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire) about the Opium War. So interesting to see history from the perspective of an Indian writer. The terrible hypocrisy of the people who fought a war to force the Chinese to allow them to continue to sell such a destructive drug.
Shusaku Endo's Silence.
The River and the Source by Margaret Ogola.
The African Trilogy by Chinua Achebe.
Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I've always loved Eduardo Galleano's "Book of Embraces," which is actually like little poetic hugs as only a Latin American story teller could deliver them, but with biting critique of corruption in his homeland. His works, overall, remind me that we have a long way to go into political dysfunction, while the day to day life for the elites of our country could remain relatively unchanged.
The Gilead books by Marilynne Robinson are some of mine. To me, they explore some really difficult questions about why bad things happen and what it means to live a meaningful life. I'm a big fan of the Anne of Green Gables books too.
Obviously Victorian novels are the thing, Trollope being my favorite. Other books I'd highly recommend are Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz and The Faerie Queene, which is super anti-Catholic but very interesting.
The past, they say, is like an other country - they do things differently there.
One of the things that reading about and from the past brings you is a sense about the contingency of today's culture - it could be different, things we take for granted and eternal generally aren't, and different people think differently and care about different things. It doesn't have to particularly relate to your current situation to be useful.
Mallory's Morte D'Arthur, Ovid, Apuleius, Homer. Also just finished the Prelude by Wordsworth, who was wrestling with the horror unleashed by the French Revolution. Reading works like this really does give you ballast; my frame of reference is larger, so each dip and rise in contemporary events doesn't seem as all-encompassing.
Yes! You've put this well. I've always found it helpful to read stories from various time periods. It gives context and perspective when thinking about the challenges of today.
I love historical costuming (sewing, reenacting, English Country Dancing), and it makes me crazy when movies and shows use a historical setting and yet put into the mouths of the characters opinions and belief systems that could only have come from the current day of the show's release. (I'm looking at you, every movie with the "liberated woman character complaining about corset tight lacing" trope; at LARP (medieval fantasy setting), I've hiked for hours and fought with swords in corsets just fine! This is especially distressing when the trope is put in an era like the regency (Jane Austen) when they didn't wear corsets!!). The past is a foreign country and it should feel like it!
I also love stories that show a whole life or multiple generations. I used to think the sins of the father visited down three generations was awful, and then I got older and realized, that's life, that's just how God built the world. Your decisions affect your children, and your children -shaped by your decisions- raise your grandchildren. It's natural consequences. If your book or movie takes place over a few months, you can't see the impact of a bad decision by a character in the same way you can in Kristin Lavransdatter which covers her whole life or The Forsyte Saga which shows a story unfold through a free generations.
Stories that ground me in a timeline of history bigger than my lived experience include lives of the saints (Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset was great); biographies and histories (my favorites recently have been the Teddy Roosevelt three volume biography by Edmund Morris, Hamilton and Washington by Chernow, The Last Lion (three volume biography about Churchill) by William Manchester, Napoleon by Roberts and The Power Broker by Robert Caro) plus Albion's Seed by Fisher; personal recollections (Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter Ciszek, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt); and classics (in no order and off the top of my head: Middlemarch, Cranford, Kristin Lavransdatter, Martin Chuzzlewit, Northanger Abbey, The Power and the Glory, Master and Commander, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Moonstone, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind...)
You find so many human emotions and actions to connect with or that are always the same, and you get a peek into totally different worldviews and contexts and historical situations.
Last year when there was lawfare against a former president and a discussion about if a sitting president was too old to run again, I said, the party tried to get Taft to step down from running for reelection because he was too old and in too poor of health to run and many people wanted Teddy Roosevelt to run again, then lawfare was deployed against Teddy Roosevelt to try to make him unelectable. In that case, Taft ran anyway, Teddy Roosevelt ran third party and the other party (Wilson) won. And what a different timeline it would have been if Teddy Roosevelt had been president of the US during World War One! And, separately, imagine if you worked in Washington when there were three presidential assassinations in under 40 years!
I live my life within the tapestry of history!
Gotta say, reading the Gospel of the day provides the best timeless-yet-ever-relevant perspective one could hope for. <3
"Our times are rarely unprecedented, but that doesn’t make our choices trivial. It’s by building up our examples of ways to live well in difficult times that it becomes easier to see what might be a way to live generously today."
I love that - yoy've put it so well.
I've read Kristin Lavransdatter and Brothers Karamazov. Dickens - especially The Tale of Two Cities - fits the bill, as well as certain Graham Greene novels. His works tend to be more micro-focused than expansive, but I've found that perspective to help recognize that the human condition remains consistent across decades and circumstances.
I love reading the Hebrew Scriptures—a few years ago our church read a book called “The Path” that re-arranged various chapters and books in the Old Testament to create a straightforward narrative arc leading from Genesis to the Resurrection. I compared it at the time to adapting an elaborate novel into a movie—the plot is more vivid and clearer, and the meaning is still there. I found it immensely comforting to know that humans have always been like this.
Reading history and fiction written in different eras is also really valuable…it makes me sad that schools are putting such a heavy emphasis on contemporary authors because either the classics are “boring” to modern readers (hey—some of the language IS really hard to navigate!) or even worse, they are afraid that students could be made “uncomfortable” by reading about how people talked, thought, and acted in prior centuries. The fainting spells over “Huckleberry Finn” come to mind—talk about mistaking the trees for the forest! Getting hung up on Huck’s use of the N word and completely ignoring Huck’s decision to defend Jim because Jim was his friend, and deciding that if opposing slavery would send him to Hell, well then, he’d just have to go to Hell. And the criticism of “To Kill a Mockingbird” being a story of a “White Savior” when the whole point of the novel is that there IS no savior in a system as perverted as Jim Crow.
I really wish people would read MORE about the past—I can’t see how you can look around today and think things are terrible. Even in my lifetime, things have never been better. We can save people from conditions and diseases like heart failure that when I was a kid had absolutely NO treatments other than a couple of medications! The vaccines we have are miracles. The comfort in which we live was unheard of in the 1960’s—air conditioning in CARS! ATMs…automatic garage door openers..dishwashers….microwaves….EV’s….cordless vacuum cleaners….accessible to the disabled buildings……man—I wish some billionaire would build an absolutely accurate replica of a house from each decade of the 20th century and get people to live in them for a week.
Currently reading A Tale of Two Cities and wow it packs a punch.And is more deeply Christian than I remembered. And I just re-read Kristin Lavransdatter and appreciated it even more the second time.
My list would include Eugene Vodolazkin's History of the Island and also The Aviator and Laurus. I love the way Vodolazkin ponders history and faith and art.
The Ibis Trilogy by Amitov Ghosh (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, Flood of Fire) about the Opium War. So interesting to see history from the perspective of an Indian writer. The terrible hypocrisy of the people who fought a war to force the Chinese to allow them to continue to sell such a destructive drug.
Shusaku Endo's Silence.
The River and the Source by Margaret Ogola.
The African Trilogy by Chinua Achebe.
Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I've always loved Eduardo Galleano's "Book of Embraces," which is actually like little poetic hugs as only a Latin American story teller could deliver them, but with biting critique of corruption in his homeland. His works, overall, remind me that we have a long way to go into political dysfunction, while the day to day life for the elites of our country could remain relatively unchanged.
The Gilead books by Marilynne Robinson are some of mine. To me, they explore some really difficult questions about why bad things happen and what it means to live a meaningful life. I'm a big fan of the Anne of Green Gables books too.
I opened this thinking you were going to synthesize Alan Jacobs’ “How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed” with his “Breaking Bread With the Dead”
It made me think of "Breaking Bread w/ the Dead" too!
Obviously Victorian novels are the thing, Trollope being my favorite. Other books I'd highly recommend are Crazy Horse: Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz and The Faerie Queene, which is super anti-Catholic but very interesting.