a.k.a. V.J.

I am not one to wallow in regret. There aren’t many things that I’ve done or failed to do over the years that cause me to look back and want to kick myself. That said, there is one category of experience that does cause me to get annoyed with my past self: whenever, in retrospect, I realize that I took something for granted or failed to properly value something.

That type of regret can range from the profound (not fully appreciating how much my parents selflessly did for me when I was growing up) to the borderline silly (wishing I had taken better care of and kept that really nice pair of brown Mason wingtips I had back in my twenties, that would probably cost around $400 if I tried to buy the equivalent new today). Somewhere, in between those two extremes, is my cringing over the apathy and occasional disdain with which I approached the great literature I was exposed to in high school.

During my time as a work-in-progress of the American educational system, works broadly classified as “classics” were thrust upon me as part of the curriculum: Sophocles, Beowulf, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Poe, Twain, Whitman, Steinbeck, Salinger…the usual suspects. Like so many other teenagers, I read them grudgingly, half-heartedly, or sometimes not at all.

I blame my shortcomings as a high-school English student on any number of factors. I was lazy. I was rebellious…in a passive-aggressive sort of way. I didn’t always like the teacher and wasn’t inclined to separate the instructor from the material. I was occasionally too distracted by cute girls in the classroom, that day’s MLB box scores, or drawing the Van Halen logo on my notebook to focus on dusty works from long-dead authors. Those were my failings and I own them. But arguably the biggest single factor in my failure to embrace the classics could not be helped. I simply didn’t have the life experience to comprehend their depths. My teachers were casting pearls before swine (me being the swine). For my teenage crime of neglect against great literature, I plead not guilty by reason of stupidity.

Of course, that excuse doesn’t cover me for the almost-forty years since I graduated. I did occasionally dabble in some great works over the years, but not to any significant or sustained extent. I sometimes had a vague sense that I should be better read, but Twain’s old chestnut about a classic being a book everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to actually read definitely applied to me. I’m in the process of trying to change that.

I mentioned in a previous post that I am reading Moby-Dick. At this writing, I am about 40-percent through the novel and am enjoying it immensely. Inspired by that experience, I’ve decided to tackle some other classics when I’m done with the voyage of the Pequod. I’ve dug out some old books that have been sitting unread on my shelves for years, I’ve purchased a few paperbacks, and I’ve located free online audio versions of a few works. Some of them are books I actually read in high school, some were titles that I was supposed to read back then but didn’t, others I was never assigned and know only by reputation. I won’t reveal the titles now but look for future posts about them in the coming months.

In the meantime, I can only say that I have some misgivings about this Ahab fellow’s leadership style. I’m curious to see how his white whale strategy pans out.