Why Read the Classics?

Summary

Why Read the Classics? is an essay by Italo Calvino, first published in Italian in 1981 and later chosen as the title piece of Perché leggere i classici (1991), a posthumous collection of his essays on books and authors. Rather than giving a single definition of a classic, Calvino proposes fourteen numbered definitions, each growing out of the reflections that precede it, so that the essay reads as a chain of attempts that circle the subject from different sides. He begins with a social observation: people tend to say they are rereading a famous book rather than reading it. Calvino treats this as a small, forgivable pretense, noting that even the best-read person has missed many fundamental works, and that meeting a great book for the first time in maturity is a pleasure of its own. Books read in youth may be half forgotten, yet they leave models, comparisons and scales of value that keep working on the reader; returning to them in adult life is therefore a new encounter, because the reader has changed. From there the definitions develop. A classic offers as much discovery on rereading as on first reading; it never exhausts what it has to say; it reaches us bearing the interpretations of earlier readers and the traces it has left on languages and customs, as the Odyssey carries all that Ulysses has come to mean. Calvino urges readers to go to the text itself before the commentary, observing that no book about a book says more than the book in question. He adds that classics are read for love rather than duty, except at school, whose task is to give students enough acquaintance with them to choose their own. A personal classic, he suggests, is one the reader cannot be indifferent to and against which the reader defines himself, even in disagreement, as Calvino says of his own quarrel with Rousseau. The final definitions take up the relation between the classics and the news of the day. Calvino doubts the value of reading only old books in isolation, since a reader needs to know from where he is reading; ideally the present becomes background noise while the voice of the classics is heard clearly, and a classic persists even when the present seems wholly opposed to it. He recommends that each reader assemble an ideal library, half of books that have mattered and half of books expected to matter, with empty shelves left for surprises. The essay ends with an anecdote borrowed from E. M. Cioran about Socrates learning a tune on the flute while the hemlock was prepared. Brief, witty and widely anthologized, the essay is often cited in discussions of the canon, rereading and the purpose of literary education.

Top Lessons

• Reading and rereading

  Calvino argues that a great book changes as the reader changes. Students can reflect on books they have returned to.

• The text before the commentary

  Calvino recommends reading the work itself before introductions and criticism. This invites discussion of how secondary sources help or hinder.

• Choosing your own classics

  School supplies acquaintance with some classics, Calvino says, but readers choose their own. Students can consider what makes a book theirs.

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