New You? Or Old Books?

Here’s a resolution: Craft a personal canon

Crafting a personal canon is more than ranking favorite books. Although the idea of “the canon” is often contested in education, a personal canon is no invitation to controversy because it is your own list, an opportunity to consciously consider your philosophy of life and identify your biggest literary influences.

In “On the Shortness of Life,” Seneca suggested that through books we can choose our own intellectual grandparents. We select the voices we will listen to most closely and the words that we want to shape us. Anyone who loves books can think of an author who, once discovered, seemed to open a new form of understanding—about the self, the world, or both. The same can be said of film and art. Why not compile a canon of those works that have helped to form us and which we most appreciate?

Crafting a personal canon can be just a little intellectual exercise, but it can also be a provision for the future. Books have been a balm and a refuge to many people, past and present. One remarkable thing about some of the people in some of the toughest times is the way they leaned on literature for support. In Scott’s failed arctic expedition, men recited poetry to themselves and each other. Books were endlessly passed around cold huts. Books helped Malcolm X build a new identity while he was in prison. In the trenches of World War I, men of all armies read furiously, and often wrote furiously, too.

A perfect example of the power of a personal canon in more ordinary times can be found in the extraordinary life of Patrick Leigh Fermor. An incredible person and author, he, as a young man in the mid-1930s, walked from the Low Countries to Constantinople. He began his trip as an eighteen-year-old who had failed to find success in school, but he had a passion for literature and an incredible memory. 

In A Time of Gifts, the first book in a trilogy about his journey, Fermor referenced “a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems conspicuously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.” What did he have memorized? Speeches from Shakespeare, “several Marlowe speeches followed and stretches of Spencer’s Pro- and Epithalamion; most of Keats’s Odes; the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge; very little Shelley, no Byron.” But there was more: a little bit of Alexander Pope, Blake, Scott, Swinburne, Rosetti, Wordsworth, Hopkins, “a great deal of Kipling,” and more. Then there were a few pieces in French. He also had a large store of Latin, including familiar passages of Virgil: 

The other chief Romans were Catullus and Horace: Catullus—a dozen short poems and stretches of Attis—because the young are prone (at least I was) to identify themselves with him when feeling angry, lonely, misunderstood, besotted, ill-starred or crossed in love. I probably adored Horace for the opposite reason; and taught myself a number of the Odes and translated a few of them into awkward English sapphics and alcaics. Apart from their other charms, they were infallible mood-changers.

This was not even everything that Fermor could recite, but he very much did recite to himself while walking. These words, stored in his mind, were a comfort to him when he was alone or isolated. He did not sing for his supper on his travels, but he sang to himself and he often sang with others.

We might marvel at what mattered to this young man who had been kicked out of school. In the second book of the trilogy, Between the Woods and the Water, Fermor describes what he was carrying in his rucksack:

Apart from sketch-book, pencils and disintegrating maps, there was my notebook-journal and my passport . . . There was Hungarian and Rumanian Self-Taught . . . I was re-reading Antic Hay; and there was Schlegel & Tieck’s Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark, bought in Cologne; also, given by the same kind hand as the rucksack, and carefully wrapped up, the beautiful little seventeenth-century duodecimo Horace from Amsterdam. It was bound in stiff, grass-green leather; the text had long s’s, mezzotint vignettes of Tibur, Lucretius and the Bandusian spring, a scarlet silk marker, the giver’s bookplate and a skeleton-leaf from his Estonian woods.

Often when Fermor found himself alone in the evening he would read and smoke a cigarette contemplatively before sleeping out under the sky.

In the third book of the trilogy, Fermor shares again about the importance of books and of art, alongside the importance of people. In The Broken Road, he writes about the sharpness of a memory of reading Fleurs du mal under a tree. He reflects that “one is only sometimes warned, when these processes begin, of their crucial importance; that certain poems, paintings, kinds of music, books, or ideas are going to change everything, or that one is going to fall in love or become friends for life.” There are books and works of art that present us with a before and after of ourselves.

The books Fermor read and the poems he recited offered him a great deal. They fueled his imagination and gave him flights of fancy. They were familiar comfort on cold days and nights. They were reference points to help him understand the lands he entered and the relationships between the people he met. They were a source of pleasure and a means of relaxation. Books continue to offer those things to readers today.

Constructing a personal canon is more of an opportunity for reflection than it is a resolution. What are the books that have given you the most worthwhile advice? Which books have expanded your perspective or philosophy in helpful ways? What are the books that you return to, time and again? What are the poems and songs you wish you had memorized? What could you recite to yourself when you need courage, or when you need to calm down, or when it is just too cold outside and you want some warmth? What books would you recommend to a younger person or to a friend? Constructing a personal canon will not only make you more interesting than most of your resolution-oriented peers, it will also build tools for resiliency and growth in your future.

Elizabeth Stice is a Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Her essays have appeared at Front Porch Republic, History News Network, and Mere Orthodoxy. She is the editor-in-chief of Orange Blossom Ordinary.