Tag: Classics

Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo

Placed slightly above the complete hardbound series of The Hardy Boys, Dumas used to sit on my older brother’s part of the shelf in the room we shared as children. (Why I turned out to be the more adventurous adult is the mystery.)

But now, Dumas has found me. And maybe it’s better this way. Rather than finding an impressionable child decades ago, who probably would have reenacted getting inside a sack pretending to be a corpse to escape Château d’If, he has found a more discerning adult who delights in its treasure trove of literary references.

Its initial chapters inspired a new reading project of tallying the books I’ll subsequently encounter that allude or refer to A Thousand and One Nights or The Odyssey (between Scheherazade, mother threader of stories in the East, and Penelope, mother un-threader of storytelling in the West).

This one is blatantly steeped in the influence of the former, but as I read on, I realized that the influence of the latter and the Greek tragedies is more subtle, but just as ubiquitous! (Spoiler: There is a Medea hiding in Heloise Villefort!)

This book, and reading classics in general, reminds me of a beautiful passage from a favorite Rushdie essay: “I go back to the old stories many times, I drink at those ancient unpolluted wells, in part because when one is deeply affected by the contemporary, when a good deal of one’s thinking has to do with puzzling out how to fashion into coherent work one’s vision of contemporary life… it helps to be reminded of what has endured, of what claims to being called eternal, to sit and learn at the feet of what persists.”

Dumas frequented those wells and gave us more than a thousand and one pages of pure entertainment. Sure, there were elements of the story that I did not readily accept, but to paraphrase Rushdie regarding these wonder tales: Their power endures because these stories are entirely truthful about human nature.

George Eliot: Middlemarch

A more mature reader will often return to the classics with a reformed insight that the classics are not necessarily meant to be venerated but to be re-examined. Such a reader would trudge through old-fashioned language and time-consuming lengths to defy modern man’s preference for instant gratification and to seek resonance in the historical, intellectual, and emotional bulk. More often than not, the willing seeker finds — and finds more than they set out to find.

To read Middlemarch in a 21st century small town in the Philippines, and be transported to an early 19th century English rural community and notice the same players in society, espy similar outlooks that should be outdated by now but which still exist, and observe national political ferment trickling into daily lives to color preconceptions about other people, makes one marvel at the timelessness of George Eliot’s, or Mary Ann Evans’s, masterpiece.

The cracked spine of an old paperback that I’ve given away testifies to the struggle I had with this classic over two decades ago. Virginia Woolf thankfully absolves the young reader by deeming the novel “magnificent… which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Indeed, a younger reader would, perhaps, only register who marries whom and mistake that for the plot and find it wanting. Middlemarch is, to this older reader, a rich study in, and of, character: “Character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.” 

It is also a look into the inherent goodness in people: “I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy…”

And while it is consistent about how character and goodness can be bettered, it serves as an admonition of how it can be lost.

Middlemarch, above all, exhibits that it is character and goodness that is at stake in daily living, and it is what should be constantly guarded and cultivated. Most of the characters in the novel fail miserably as humans, but as Lydgate says in earnest, “What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,” or in Ladislaw’s religion, “To love what is good and beautiful when I see it.”

Literature has been accused of being the most solitary of arts, and a thick tome like this can be rather demanding in 21st century fast-paced living. Grateful to my friend, Vera, for buddy-reading this with me and making 837 pages fun, enriching, less solitary, and totally worth it. As Dorothea puts it, “What do we live for if not to make life less difficult to each other?” True in reading, true in life.