thralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something—not much, but something—of our position in space and time. We will know how we have emerged from our long human history. We will know how we got the ideas by which, unconsciously, we live. Just as impor- tant, we will have acquired models of high thought and feeling.
I do not wish to claim too much for The New Lifetime Reading Plan. It is not magic. It does not automatically make you or me an educated man or woman. It offers no solution to life's ultimate mysteries. It will not make you happy—such claims are advanced by the manufacturers of toothpastes, motorcars, and deodorants, not by Plato, Dickens, and Hemingway. It will merely help to change your interior life into something a little more interesting, as a love affair does, or some task calling upon your deepest energies.
Like many others, I have been reading these books, off and on, for most of my long life. One thing Fve found out is that it's easy enough to say they enlarge you, but rather difficult to prove it to younger readers. Perhaps it's better to say that they act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into con- sciousness what you didn't know you knew. Even more than tools of self-enhancement, they are tools of self-discovery. This notion is not mine. You will find it in Plato, who, as with many other matters, thought of it first. Sуcrates called himself a mid- wife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to the light what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark depths of the brain.
For whom is this Reading Plan meant? Not for the highly educated or even (not always the same thing) the very well read. They would find nothing new in what we have to say. The titles here listed would be perfectly familiar to them. Indeed, they could add many more, and legitimately quarrel with some of our choices.
In general the Plan is meant for readers from eighteen to eighty plus, who are curious to see what their minds can mas- ter in the course of their remaining lifetime, but who have not
A PRELIMINARY TALK WITH THE READER
met more than ten percent, let us say, of the writers listed. It is meant for college graduates who were exposed to many of these books during the undergraduate years but who success- fully resisted their influence. It is meant for the college gradu- ate—his or her name is legion—to whom most of these writers are hardly even names. It is meant for the high school graduate who might well have profited from a college education but did not have the chance to do so. It is intended for that great and growing army of intelligent men and women who in their mid- dle years are penetrated by a vague, uncomfortable sense that the mere solution of the daily problems of living is not enough, that somewhere, some other worlds of thought and feeling are calling out for exploration. It is intended for the eager young man or woman of modest means (many of these books can be bought for little money) for whom the thrills of business com- petition or homemaking, while valid, are inadequate. It is intended for the retired elderly who have found that growing roses or looking at television does not leave them mentally exhausted. It is intended for teachers (college teachers, too, in some cases) who would like to deepen and extend their knowl- edge and sensitivity, and so deepen and extend the nonmater- ial rewards of their noble vocation.
C.F.
(The above is an edited and shortened version of the original A Preliminary Talk . . . , which appeared in earlier editions. My work on this new edition has been greatly facilitated by the help of my invaluable assistant, Anne Marcus.)
PARTONE
ANONYMOUS
ca. 2000 B.C.E. (Scribe Sin-Leqi-Unninni, ca. 700 B.C.E.) The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Epic of Gilgamesh is without doubt the world's oldest sur- viving narrative poem, and one of the founding works of Western literature. It has not yet become widely known among general readers because the poem had been lost for many cen- turies prior to its rediscovery in the nineteenth century (and so played no role in Western literature from the Greeks to the Victorians), and because until recently its translators have tended not to work with the general reader in mind. With sev- eral excellent and accessible translations now available, there is no longer any reason to remain unacquainted with this remark- able glimpse into the mind of highest antiquity.
The epic relates a number of myths that attached them- selves to the reputation of Gilgamesh, who seems to have been an actual king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk around 2700 b.c.e. Scattered passages of the earliest version of the epic, in Sumerian, have been dated to around 2000 b.c.e.; the fullest known text, in Babylonian, was written by a scribe named Sin- Leqi-Unninni on tablets deposited in the library of King Ashurbanipal around 700 b.c.e. These and other tablets con- taining parts of various versions of the epic began turning up in archaeological excavations in Iraq and nearby countries in the nineteenth century; the scholarly work of assembling and col- lating the texts took many years, with some loose ends still stir- ring controversy in academic circles. The epic was evidently once much longer than the version that now exists. Its poetic style shows strong traces of oral origins; it is sometimes laconic, often formulaic, even incantatory, and with a strong narrative pulse.
The epic as we now have it opens with a description of the physical strength and beauty, and the political power, of King Gilgamesh, but then quickly shifts perspective to tell how the people of Uruk feared and resented his arrogance and arbi- trary exercise of power. To teach Gilgamesh humility, the gods created Enkidu, a hairy, wild man of the desert, to be Gilgamesh^ rival and alter-ego. Gilgamesh sends a temple girl, Shamhat, into the wilderness to seduce Enkidu and so tame him. She does so, and brings him back to Uruk. When he arrives, he and Gilgamesh wrestle each other fiercely but soon realize that neither can overcome the other. Thereafter they become sworn brothers, and decide to embark on an adven- ture: to find and slay the terrible monster Humbaba. After they do so, the jealous goddess Inanna sends down the Buli of Heaven to destroy Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu succeed in killing the buli also, but at the cost of Enkidus life. Gilgamesh, disconsolate, goes on a journey to visit the keeper of the Underworld, Utnapishtim; the latter tells him the story of the great world-engulfing Flood, teaches him to accept the lesson of mortality, and allows him to return to Uruk.
It will be obvious to anyone raised in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam that the Epic of Gilgamesh con- tains many parallels with the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible: The urbane, handsome Gilgamesh and the wild, hairy Enkidu recall Jacob and Esau, as Enkidu and Shamhat resem- ble Sampson and Delilah; the havoc wrought by the Buli of Heaven brings to mind the discord created by the casting of the Golden Calf during the years in the Wilderness (and Moses destroys the calf just as Gilgamesh kills the buli). The flood described by Utnapishtim sounds just like the flood of Noah. And so on. One might think at first that these themes in Gilgamesh are echoes of the Bible, but in fact the situation is just the reverse: one of the things that is most fascinating about the Epic of Gilgamesh is that it is a precursor of the Bible (though with no hint of Biblical monotheism). However one feels about the divine inspiration of the Bible itself, it is appar- ent from Gilgamesh that several key themes of the Hebrew Bible were couched in terms of symbols that had already been current in Mesopotamia for over a thousand years before the Bible began to be written.
Such weighty considerations aside, the Epic of Gilgamesh is well worth reading as a story of love and friendship, of adven- ture and danger and grief, and of a proud man^ humbling encounter with mortality. The epic is now available in several fine English versions; I particularly like the verse translations by Danny P. Jackson and by David Ferry.