Anti-Climacus

SATURDAY EVENING POST:

"Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now, to question the justness of his previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might not strike him, that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have it's proportions and limits. She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel, that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favor of happiness, as a very resolute character."

-Jane Austen, Persuasion

I did almost read Persuasion four years ago. I checked it out from the library, settled into my usual reading place at the time (the front balcony of the apartment I was subletting), and made it all of a page and a half into the book before I decided this was emphatically not a literary style for me. The time being what it was, I most likely put it down in favor of Euripedes or Aeschylus (and man, if you were ever looking for a gender-oriented literary division, there you go). Anyhow, I'm now very glad that I put it off: I finished it this evening, and would go so far as to say it's my favorite Austen (take that, Mansfield Park!). It is also quite likely that had I read it even so little as six months ago (well, let's say eight, to be safe), it probably would have appeared to me to be abstract and literary (in a bad way) and contrived. I can now see that it gets the emotions almost exactly right, and in conditions where it oftens seems difficult to make sense of what is going on within oneself. I'll be returning to it again, quite certainly.

This makes me think of the suggestion given in the comments to my Conrad post from last week, about overrated works of literature. My list tends to be short here*: if I think something's not going to be worth reading, I generally don't read it (or finish it--which is why Swann's Way is unlikely to be read by me anytime soon). One of the few I'd be inclined to put on that list is Middlemarch. The novel's merits, so far as I can see, are to throw a number of balls up in the air over the course of 800+ pages, and to manage to catch them all at the end; the plots themselves are a bit too diffuse and mechanical in their execution to inspire emotion or sentiment. But I hesitate just a bit in calling it 'overrated,' because it seems just as likely that the problem is me, and not the book: 'youth is cruel, and has no remorse' and all. Perhaps in another 20 years I'll feel differently about it, perhaps not.

*Okay, I'll indulge just a little, in passing: Howard's End, Kim, and The Satanic Verses as a start; I actually sort of liked the Rushdie, but with all three I felt the payoff was not worth the time invested.