Reading: The Longue Durée

 Admittedly, I am not using the term "long durée" as Fernand Braudel did. I'm coopting the term and twisting it to my own ends (as any good author and historian will do), redefining and, more importantly for the present post, re-scaling it to reflect my love of reading and the puissance of certain texts in my mind (and sometimes my life, truth be told, as I have taken life lessons from some of these works). 

In a previous post, I had mentioned my goal of reading what is on my shelves currently, then re-reading some works alongside one another for the purposes of cranial cross-pollination, if you will. I think that many synergies lurk within certain pairings of books (or even triads) that multiply and expand single ideas with one another to create thought structures that are more than the sum of their parts. This is one thing I miss about graduate school (probably the thing I miss about graduate school): being able to devote time to a syllabus of study that allows me, in a concentrated amount of time, to bash ideas up against each other to see what sticks and what structures emerge from the "chaos". This might explain why I like some of the music I like.

But I'm not here to write about music. I want to write about reading, if only briefly. 

I read extensively, in a fairly broad range of styles, genres, and topics. I love reading. But, to be honest, I love reading writing that makes me have to meditate, to contemplate. If I'm not reaching for a dictionary, at least occasionally, I am usually dis-satisfied. I read to both be entertained and to learn. I read to stoke the fires of my own imagination and creativity. I read for the magic of it all. 

Currently, on Goodreads (still my favorite social media and maybe, someday, my only social media), I show 1035 books read. This is probably a hundred or more too short, as I can't remember or record all the books I enjoyed as a young person. These are books I've read through in all but a handful of cases (where my loathing for the work in question was so strong that I had to record that I hated it). I supposed that the works I did hate served some sort of utilitarian purpose, even if it was simply to hone my disdain for certain styles of writing or, more properly, to sharpen my sense of righteous indignation towards writers who "cheated" me with a dis-satisfactory bait-and-switch or Deus ex Machina. 

Other works, however, stuck with me. Even if they didn't strike me as I finished them, they haunted me, over time. I could not get them out of my head. When I have an idle moment and can think upon things, these books come back into my mind, unbidden. They are alive in my mind, as it were. They have an enduring presence that I cannot shake. They may not be my favorite works - indeed some of them I found excruciating to read (I'm looking at you, Joyce) - but they have stuck with me and they just won't get out of my head. This is what I mean by The Longue Durée. These works have impressed me in the long term enough that they crowd the literary memory spaces of my brain. For whatever reason, to me, they are important and lasting. When my thoughts fall slack to their lowest ebb, these are the books that seem to almost accidentally slip into my head. They form the base of my intellect; they are the undergirding to how I think. 

This list could be very, very long, but I'm trying to keep it very short for the sake of brevity and concision. I am inevitably excluding a lot of important books and I will, no doubt, regret the inevitable omissions. In passing, I note how few of these books are actually fiction (which I write). In all honesty, there is little fiction that sticks in my mind enough to be considered Longue Durée, so if you see a fictional work below, do note that it must have made a huge impression on me. Again, I cannot necessarily pinpoint exactly why that is. But here is my very short list, which I will amend after my grand experiment of re-reading concludes (hopefully in early to mid-2023) - in no particular order:

Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio de Santillana

Enchanted Night, Steven Millhauser

Searching for Memory Daniel L. Schacter

The Roots of Civilization: the Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation, Alexander Marshack

Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett

The Voice of the Air, John Howard

Ulysses, James Joyce

Hierarchy Theory: A Vision, Vocabulary, and Epistemology, Valerie Ahl

Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino

Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, William Barrett

Stealing Cthulhu, Graham Walmsley

Sub Rosa, Robert Aickman

The White Goddess, Robert Graves

The Academy Outside of Ingolstadt, Damian Murphy

What are your Longue Durée books? Post them in the comments!

If you'd like to lend a hand to my creative endeavors, here's your chance! 

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