Auden’s syllabus

My Uncle John shared a syllabus for a course that W. H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. Auden assigned 6,000 pp. of reading, according to The Paris Review.

(I’m not sure if the estimate is for recommended and required reading, or just for the latter.)

The way to complete so much reading on time is to begin before the term. Like, in grammar school. I imagine Auden telling his students: “I’m sure you’ve already read two-thirds of this material.”

I try to read a lot, and not only fluff. But there are just three items on this syllabus that I’ve read from beginning to end. I’ll let you guess which they are. Two of them, I first read in grammar school.

What on earth have I been doing since then?

The Philadelphian writer Joe Queenan has a nice memoir of his reading life called One for the Books. He gets through plenty of books and speaks candidly of their lousiness. You can get an idea from this passage. (Read to the end for a tidbit about Winston Churchill.)

The font is Caslon no. 540, which I’ve discussed.

Later in the book, Queenan makes a disparaging remark about South Bend.

P.S. It seems that Alan Jacobs was the first person to blog about Auden’s syllabus. Today, Jacobs posted another good entry, about early cinema.

P.P.S. When I took A.P. English in high school, students were expected to read 700 pp. every 2 weeks to earn an “A”: not quite Auden’s pace, but not so, so far off it, either. I wouldn’t have come close if we hadn’t been allowed to accumulate pages during the summer and Christmas holidays. Even so, I resorted to dubious measures like counting blank pages and skipping ahead to pages with three or four lines of text – at the end of a chapter, for instance. (I found dozens of virtually text-free pages in my parents’ edition of Walden. I also used a very generously spaced edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that contained hundreds of pages. That book was a godsend because we were allowed to count each poetry page as three pages.)

Democracy

On this patriotic occasion, this fine NYT essay helps us to remember that the U.S. has not, historically, been very democratic.

This shouldn’t be controversial. We all know about the inequalities in political power that have been brought about through the Electoral College, voting restrictions against women and slaves, Jim Crow, etc. We all know about the undue influence of plutocrats and technocrats (though many of us would, perversely, embrace plutocratic or technocratic rule).

What is rightly controversial – what is philosophically very puzzling – is the more basic question of why democracy is desirable (if, indeed, it is desirable). Chesterton gives a famous (and, it must be said, highly contestable) answer: that what people have in common is much more important than what makes them different; and that aspiring to rule is something that people have in common. (Therefore – I am filling in the blanks for him – each person’s aspiration to rule is very important. Therefore: democracy.) So, contrary to Jason Brennan: governance should not be restricted to experts, for expertise is not what people have in common. And, contrary to Dan Moller (and Thoreau): “governing least” is not a worthwhile ideal; for what people typically aspire to is not to govern least but to govern substantially. The ideal that springs from our common humanity is that we should influence and be influenced by one another. “No man is an island.”

But the ideal in this country is that, inasmuch as we can, we should become self-sufficient, noninterfering islands.

But when we enforce this ideal upon one another, don’t we come perilously close to giving lie to it?