The New Lifetime Reading Plan

A device that has been retained from earlier editions is the practice of including in our discussions cross-references from one author to others. These take the form of numbers in brackets; for example, talking of Thucydides, Fadiman says, "He is the first historian to grasp the inner life of power poli- tics. Hobbes [43], Machiavelli [34], and Marx [82] are, each in a different way, his sons." These cross-references are not intended to make you turn immediately to the authors men- tioned, or to try to follow a zigzag path of reading as one cross- reference leads to another. Rather their purpose is to get your attention, to make you pause for a moment to consider that the authors of these original communications have, over years and centuries, carried on a Great Conversation with each other; we can listen in. And even in cases where no direct communica- tion could be expected, there is often resonance; like calls to like, which is why the essay on Confucius contains a cross-ref- erence to Plato.

Following the main entries for the Plan, I have added a new section called Going Further. This lists, with very brief comments, selected works of 100 additional authors from the twentieth century, writers that you are likely to find to your taste if the books recommended and discussed at greater length have pleased and interested you. The Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading of previous editions have now been combined into a single Bibliography, which I have revised and updated as necessary.

Most of the entries in this edition have been carried for- ward from the third edition, with revisions ranging from minor to extensive. Clifton Fadiman has written new essays for some of the new Western authors included in this edition. I have written ali of the essays describing the non-Western materiais, as well as those for a handful of the newly included Western authors. Mr. Fadiman and I are very closely in accord in our literary opinions and judgments; we would hardly have under- taken this joint project otherwise. Nevertheless we have decided to sign each essay with the initials of its author; part of the value of this book should derive from the freedom of its authors to be opinionated, and we did not want to strive for an artificial homogeneity either of style or of judgment.

Ali of these changes have but one purpose, which is to make the Plan available and useful to a new generation of readers.

J.S.M.

A PRELIMINARYTALK ^WITH THE READER

The books here discussed may take you fifty years to finish. They can of course be read in a much shorter time. The point is that they are intended to occupy an important part of a whole life. Many happen to be more entertaining than the lat- est bestseller, but it is not on the entertainment levei that they are most profitably read. What they offer is of larger dimen- sions. It is rather like what is offered by loving and marrying, rearing children, carving out a career, creating a home. They can be a major experience, a source of continuous internai growth. Hence lifetime. These books are life companions. Once part of you, they work in and on and with you until you die. They should not be read in a hurry, any more than friends are made in a hurry. This list is not something to be "got through.^,> It is a mine of such richness of assay as to last a life­time.

The aim is simple. The Plan is designed to fill our minds, slowly, gradually, under no compulsion, with what some of the greatest writers have thought, felt, and imagined. Even after we have shared these thoughts, feelings, and images, we will still have much to learn: We ali die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disen-

A PRELIMINARY TALK WITH THE READER

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.