No, I didn’t forget about my goal of making a hundred friends by memorising their poems. I just took a break to reconsider the feasibility of this project, but have decided to go forward.
So, today we meet Edmund Spenser. You know Mr. Spenser, right? He was born in 1552 or 1553, the son of a journeyman clothmaker, went to Pembroke College but required financial assistance to do so (apparently, doing menial work for the college), and as an adult spent much of his career as a government official in Ireland.
If you’ve been on social media for any significant length of time, you’ve probably seen a meme purporting to show books typical for each of the three major branches of Christianity. For Catholicism, it has Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, for Eastern Orthodoxy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and for Protestantism, Joel Osteen’s Become a Better You. It’s funny, yes, but it also annoys me a little. For one thing, though I hate heresy and consider their revolt against the Church the greatest catastrophe of the past several centuries, I do have some sympathy for Protestants.
For the last few years, I’ve occasionally passed time by thinking of the shortest way to become literate in the Western literary tradition. In other words, what is the smallest number of books one can read, and which books, to say one is familiar with the general outline of Western literature?
I’ll begin by seting out some criteria. First, every era of Western civilisation should, of course, be represented, from the Classical world to modernity.
Though I haven’t mentioned it recently, I’ve long suffered from bibliophilia. I say ‘suffer’ because it is something of a disease. Though I do occasionally sell a handful of books, I buy far more than I sell, and significantly more than I can even read. I’ve got three completely full bookcases, have taken over a couple other shelves in other parts of the house, and also have a stack on my floor.