Lizzie is a writer and Paris Salonista– she perfectly sums up the expereince of being in the belly of the Whale in last weekend’s lively study…check out her blog on writing, living and life’s interruptions: http://lizzieharwood.com/2013/03/29/readthewhale/
10 reasons to read Herman Melville’s The Whale (or M.D.)
March 29, 2013
Last Saturday, I jumped onboard of another of Toby Brother’s awe-inspiring Literary Salons – (here in Paris) this time on Moby Dick or The Whale, by Herman Melville (published in 1851). It was 427 pages long. But in teeny-tiny font with itty-bitty footnotes. It was a book that required halogen reading light – so I dunno how the 19th Century folks read it. I only received the book on Tuesday – four days before the Salon, so I can’t say I read all of it because that would have been insane, but I read 3/4th of it, which was still fairly insane. Boy, the book blows your mind.
Here are my 10 Reasons Why We Should All Read Melville’s The Whale.
1) The cannibal is a really lovely guy. Who knew?
2) Captain Ahab is the possibly the loneliest character in literature. He’s also a jerk. It’s pretty compelling.
3) The Whales ROCK. They are described in detail, including their willies, which takes up Chapter 95, where we see a mincer wearing the skin of the Whale’s six-foot-long, one-foot diameter member. Way out there.
4) The language is totally sagacious!
5) Melville plays around with so many narrative forms, and gets so darned allegorical, that you don’t know what’s what anymore but you are on the boat with those guys and you totally understand why they regularly spend three years at a time at sea eating salted meat and ship’s biscuit. And blubber steaks.
6) Starbuck’s, the coffee empire, was named after the First Mate character, Starbuck. So now I can’t see Starbuck’s without thinking of this novel.
7) It’ll make you want to make and eat Clam Chowder. And possibly watered down Rum.
8) If you don’t take the side of Moby against Ahab then you know you are a jerk. The detail of how they strip a dead whale for its oil will make you cry.
9) It’s basically an adventure story. And a bit of a love story between Ishmael and Queequeg.
10) It explains why we are currently in a mess with the ecology, capitalism, the treatment of other cultures in a post-colonial world, and why man is basically a self-centered destroyer of our planet. Yet it was written over 150 years ago. Way before Greenpeace.
Thank you Toby and fellow Salonistas for taking on such a leviathan of a book.
By far the most thrilling reading experiences of my life have centred in Kentish Town, in a cosy sitting room in the home of Toby Brothers, the gifted director of the London Literary Salons. Each of the books we read was rich and challenging, but the thrill came from the distinctive style that Toby has evolved for guiding readers through a given text.
Deeply engaged with and knowledgable about literature, Toby is highly developed as an agile guide, a careful instructor, and perhaps most important, a sensitive and infinitely patient facilitator to the small group of ‘students’ in her charge. She can unite participants of wildly varying levels of education, experience and interests, and help each to bring him or herself to bear upon the study of great works of literature. The thrill comes from the sense of discovery, adventure, and sheer good fun we get from our mutual exploration of a given writer.
A lifelong bookworm, I knew there were some works I just wouldn’t get the full meat of on my own – ranging from a slim and perhaps deceptively straightforward-seeming book like ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ to novels like ‘Invisible Man’ with its deep racial themes, to Shakespeare’s plays, up the granddaddy of all English-major holy grails, Ulysses, by James Joyce. Toby and the London Literary Salon have been invaluable to fully tucking into these and many more. For each, I came away with meat andpotatoes — a careful read bolstered by a side plate of critical insight and nuance unobtrusively provided by Toby.
But even better was the unexpected and satisfying savour of the personal and often marvellous insights that Toby draws out of fellow salon participants.
Incidentally, many friendships have bloomed during salon studies and their associated adventures, such as travelling to Dublin for the annual, often raucous celebration of Ulysses and its creator.
The American novelist John Williams, author deplored the notion that literature is something to be picked apart, as if it were a puzzle – to be studied rather than experienced. ‘My God, to read without joy is stupid,’ he said. The London Literary Salon will help readers to experience great books with joy.
The meetings are immensely productive – thanks as ever for steering them so deftly and for drawing the best out of everyone.
London Ulysses, Sound & the Fury, The Magic Mountain
The Salon is distinctive in that it truly engages with literature in a way which is sympathetic to both the texts and their readers. It offers a heady mix of discovery in the company of new friends, creative re-engagement with loved (or hated) past reading, and a fulfilling level of intellectual challenge between sensitive and consenting adults.
London Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom, Passion of New Eve…
Stimulating. Supportive. Sociable. Multiply those three terms by at least a million and what do you get? Toby Brothers’ Literary Salon, that’s what. A galvanising gateway to some of the most challenging – but rewarding – works in the modernist canon (and before and beyond); a much-needed meeting point for quick, quirky minds of all ages, shapes and backgrounds. In short, Ms Brothers is gifted with a strange and lovely alchemy that transforms the torpor of a typical Tuesday evening into something intriguingly torrid and tantalising… London Ulysses, Sound and The Fury, To the Lighthouse
I’ve really enjoyed it. particularly the fact thats its enabled me to access a book i wouldnt otherwise get to penetrate. and its made so much easier and enjoyabel abd informative to do so with other people. some of whom i have to say formidably smart. thats the other side iver enjoyed is the group. v generous warm group. occassional spikiness which is always welcome for the added frisson. not sure that i see it as educational forum. although that is what it is i gguess. look forward to joining other salons at some point. I also love how its spun me out in totally different directions and looking into other books etc that i wouldnt otherwise have got it.
London Ulysses 2013, Dante’s Divine Commedia 2011
Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. A book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skilfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvellous work was immense.
London Ulysses
I just discovered William Faulkner through the London Literary Salon. His writing is exhilarating, brilliant, challenging and many-layered. Reading and thinking in preparation for the study session as well as joining in meant I got so much more out of the stories than if I had been reading purely for leisure. Toby Brothers’ opening notes help alert you to hidden themes and her orchestration of the Salon discussion ensures that everybody has a chance to say and hear the insights of themselves and others, exposing and questioning the deeper layers of meaning. A nice touch: we take it in turns to read aloud. Such a pleasant change.
“The Bear”, The Sound and The Fury London 2012-13
As with other salons I have not necessarily liked the book, but I have liked both the quality of the writing and primarily the quality of the conversation.When I have mentioned the salon, I have been challenged as to why I would pay to attend a book club, when surely these are free. I guess for me the key differences are:
The books have been selected for reasons, other than 1 book club members personal choice.
The sessions are guided, rather than everyone just saying what they liked and did not like.
The sessions are more like seminars, than a book club session and I have always learned a great deal from your and others perspectives.
It trains your mind to read in a different way.
I like the chance to eat and chat too.
Wide Sargasso Sea, The Wasteland, Richard III London 2013
I loved the one evening on TS Eliot ( we did meet a 2nd time) but it seemed perfect match of time, atmos and material.
Similarly, the Angela Carter, The New Eve, worked really well in the 3 meetings you scheduled. Really managed to get the work done and feel stretched but not hurried.
ILLIAD was brave but I think it worked in the time we had. I enjoyed it.
I’d love to do more poetry, especially Elliot. I learn so much from the others and from you and there was time.
Wasteland, Passion of New Eve, Iliad London 2012-13
I love the salon for providing an opportunity to read and discuss works of fiction in a warm and welcoming environment. I can thoroughly recommend the salon as a life-affirming and mind-expanding experience. Toby is an experienced facilitator who manages to elicit the best of all participants, welcoming debate and even disagreement, but always in a civilised and thoughtfully mature manner.
The experience of the Salon resists easy definition–but to help those new to the studies, here are some words from recent Salons:
Thank god! This chapter really did not give me a steady place to hold on, but rereading (again, again, again!) on the train on the way back tonight, I can get the vibe coming through. Strange how a reading group unlocks that extra energies (something which the scientific mind cannot explain!)
I can now see the battle with the mother too, which shouldn’t be a surprise, as it is Stephen after all. (The battle with the father was more obvious, to me. ) It’s all there right at the beginning: A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.
Thank you again for this journey, it has made my year. –Ulysses participant, 2013
Thanks for being such a calming but persevering Captain Rehab–ever ready to straighten somewhat tossed limbs of thought and help us stand firm but open in our reflections. Moby Dick participant, Paris 2013
thanks infinitely for the salon. Not only was it fun, interesting, revealing, enlightening etc, but you have such a gift for
leading the group gracefully & intelligently. It’s not an easy or obvious thing to be able to do, & I for one really appreciated it.
A great evening. Moby Dick participant, Paris 2013
It was a most enjoyable session and thank you for making us love such intimidating classics as Moby Dick, which we look at on our bookshelves, feigning to have read them … and for making those sessions so rich, so lively, so entertaining in spite of the themes.
Thank you, B. for welcoming the whole crew of whalers with a wonderful dinner in your beautiful place.
Thank you, companions in whaling for your bright and enriching insights.
Looking to the next session, whatever may be the topic. Moby Dick participant, Paris 2013
This is why I read too or engage with the “objects” people make… I believe it is a duty and a privilege to witness and share in the lives of others, the people one loves or hates we are all on the same path, life itself is the great equaliser. There is no question that each text changes as one lives life, meaning is not fixed.
I ask this question all the time yet, with Ulysses I feel/see that there is a higher power which must have moved Joyce along for all the reasons you state below… xenophobia, hatred, alienation, all traits humans find so easy to conceive…. being “good” or “self aware” is the challenge. Clearly Joyce’s compulsion to bring the ancients to us, to see if we will learn from history and allow the “strangers” to dwell in our hearts with the hope that some of us will have the courage to change. –Ulysses participant, 2013
The Kentishtowner is North London’s NESTA award-winning daily online magazine(est.2010): Editors describe the magazine as ‘dedicated to cultural affairs – art, food, pubs, culture, community, history, architecture, music. Kentish Town and Camden as a borough may be at the heart of what we do, but we love the capital as a whole. We’re not bound too rigidly by geography: to prove it, we have a thriving travel section. We believe a mix of features makes for a balanced read.’
They have great reviews as well…and a yearly award scheme based on readers’ votes–Thank you to the Salonistas who made the Salon a winner!
Drawing by far the most votes for a single ‘random thing’ was this rather special book club. To quote one reader in their entirety: ‘Sounds posh (and it is academic) but actually it’s a fabulous friendly forum for real discussion about serious literature. You pay about a fiver per evening and spend an hour or two, over drinks, discussing a good book, play or poem. It’s like a structured book club with interested strangers. I haven’t come across anything like this before – like going back to a university tutorial in a very enjoyable way.’ Said another; ‘A wonderful way to study books one would normally not read by oneself; or if one did, one would most likely not understand!’ and also ‘a most agreeable and useful evening’.
My daughter is surprised the Salon beat the fishdogs at Camden Market.
Last weekend we had a Salon overnight in Villennes-sur-Seine outside of Paris with a wonderful group of readers working carefully through Virgil’s Aeneid: rich work, lovely, floating in the air setting and scrumptious eats…felt like a Spa for the mind.
Here are some of the participants’ comments:
“Thank you, once again, for a stimulating, interesting, and just plain fun book salon on Saturday! I really enjoyed it. It reminds me how important it is to have an English language literary conversation in my life again… Oddly enough, it makes me feel more integrated in France!”-WWM
“Once again what a great session that was, and a difficult and demanding one. I think we really managed to do justice to The Aeneid even in that short space of time…and it was so great being AWAY, out of Paris, in a spacious house with the fire at night and the rooms full of light and sun the next morning. A lovely experience and Lizzie was such a relaxed and generous host.
I came away my mind still full of the reading and realised that the characters that stuck with me most were the WOMEN. Juno – wonderfully complex with her passionate nature but also the wisdom of her advice to Aeneas about letting the Latins keep their own name and culture etc; the wonderful, tragic Dido; Camilla the woman-warrior, bosom bared…(and for me to a lesser extent Juturna). Truly great portraits of women!
I wish I’d picked up on the post-script by Fagle before…I found the parallels between the first half of the Aeneid and Aeneas’ wandering and the Odyssey, and the second war-packed part and the Iliad absolutely relevant and true.
Hope you had a good evening and now you’re back in London, swimming in Hampstead pool as I write perhaps, life packed with more sharing and teaching…
Looking forward to Melville!”
Coming Salons in Paris for 2013 (Proposed)
weekend of January 25th-27th –Short story study, Aeneid, Beowulf (to be confirmed)
Weekend March 22nd-24th Moby Dick, Sound & The Fury and…? Send your requests now!!27.11.12
Toby’s Aeneid weekend in Paris: Traffic jams and twilight wanderings to experimental Japanese food down cobbled streets with dear friends…braving the trek to the western suburbs to study the Aeneid on a ship like huge home perched in the edge of a hill overlooking the Seine valley…nine hours of engaged reading and discussion on the strivings of Aeneas and the powerful female characters that disappear in wisps of smoke around him…fine food to keep us going through the founding of Rome…dashing back to Paris through startling Sunday sun to a Thanksgiving feast amongst more Paris friends–one brief quiet moment I stood in front of the Gare St Lazare full of words and love and blooming in the winter sun.
From a Paris participant on the value of studies that meet over weeks… I bear (sic) a grand nostalgia for our previous salons where we would spend a month on an oeuvre. What luxury to be able to expand time like that, to be able to work and dream, giving our subconscious the freedom to stir things up and take a seat alongside those other parts of the brain. So I jumped at the overnight concept, as the participants would have at least 12 hours to think alternatively, bringing new insights with breakfast the next morning. Being able to sit on something for a while is magic. It’s another kind of thinking.
Great session, by the way. A real treat, not only to be back with everyone, but also to be working with such a rich author.
Just to say what a tremendous salon that was…Faulkner really works for us all! Hope the Carter one went well, you need a lot of energy to do two demanding works in one day…you’ll need a good long swim in THE POND when you get back..
From London participants:
Thank you again for a great session. A bit like personal training for the mind. ( you can do it yourself, but it is great to get the instruction and inspiration).
Hi Toby,
It’s been two nights now, and Cathedral is still in my mind, so all I can say again, is thank you for running these salons, as my life certainly would have been poorer without them.
I come to CL Salon to have a time out in my day, when I can consider the creative thoughts of others instead of the many small decisions and adjustments that are part of being a parent and keeping a household running. It’s a way to find space in a busy day, even though you have to make space to do it! Well worth it.
I love to come to the CLSalon. For me, it has been a way to discover genres -short stories and poems- I was not familiar with and that I’m really enjoying. Moreover, the opportunity to be “guided” by Toby and the discussions which take place with the other participants make the experience really pleasant and fulfilling. And it’s a great way to plunge, once a week, in a parallel world!
The Great Gatsby as an eight-hour marathon–what could be more delicious? This gorgeous book offers a provocative commentary on our very ambivalent relationship to the dazzle of privilege and wealth. The London Literary Salon will offer a one-day Salon Intensive study of this Modernist classic in June…contact me now if you are interested.
On paper it looks like punishment: an eight-hour stage production (albeit with a dinner break) during which the entirety of a novel (albeit The Great Gatsby) is read aloud and the scene shifts, inexplicably, between a 1980s office setting and the jazz era of the original. I go to see Gatz at a theatre in downtown Manhattan, as you might visit a disagreeable relative: expecting discomfort and boredom, but feeling virtuous for making the effort. As the lights go down, virtue gives way to dread.
The idea for the show came to John Collins 10 or so years ago. He is the founding member of the Elevator Repair Service, an experimental theatre company devoted to making unusual work out of what he calls “non-dramatic source material. To take something from one medium and make it work in our medium.” At the time, Collins was thinking about creating a puppet show “by finding random objects and sticking eyes on them”. Another member of the company happened to be rereading his favourite novel, The Great Gatsby, and, since Collins likes to use whatever is to hand, they started messing around with ideas. Doing a straightforward adaptation was one notion, but then Collins had a brainwave: why not focus on the very thing that most productions would try to disguise: the medium. “We could try to smooth over it by adapting it into a play. Or we could hit that problem head on and try to stage it as a novel. That was exciting.”
I mention all this as further evidence of just how unpromising a proposition Gatz is. Once the idea to present it as a novel was in place, Collins and Scott Shepherd, who plays the lead and is hoarse when I speak to him from yet another marathon performance, started rehearsing in the only space available to them, a roughed-up office above a theatre. Something about the setting made sense. And so, bit by bit, a scenario evolved: of a bored office worker, finding the novel in a filing cabinet and getting slowly, inexorably sucked into it over the course of a single working day. The audience watches in real time as he reads it aloud and various colleagues come over, take the book from him and assume characters in the play, switching back and forth between realities. It is an insane idea. It militates against every commercial principle in the book. It is also, as I discovered when I first saw the show in 2010, heart-stoppingly brilliant.
The trepidation of the audience in the first 20 minutes is something everyone in the company is aware of. Collins thinks it actually plays in their favour. Low expectations make the slow realisation that it isn’t going to be awful much more powerful. Somewhere around the first hour, as Shepherd’s narration gathers pace, you can feel a collective sigh move through the room, and from there on in it’s electrifying. His is an extraordinary performance. Such are the physical and mental demands of the role, that the only way he can approach it, Shepherd says, is like a regular day at work. After all, it is set in an office. He cannot process Gatz as a single entity. It is more like performance art than acting.
“The show is so big you can’t keep it all in your mind. When I go out at the beginning, I’m not thinking about the end or even chapter two. It’s like not looking down from a high ledge. If I start to think of the hours that are ahead, I get overwhelmed.
The original idea was, let’s see what happens if we just start reading a book and don’t stop. I hang on to that idea so that I don’t feel I’m going out there to present, so much as to have another encounter with this book and try to be as open to new meanings in it as possible.”
For the last 10 years, the show has been performed on and off at theatres and festivals around the country, and several generations have moved through the cast. Kate Scelsa is one of the original members, and she has a weird time sitting for long stretches on stage without anything to do. She plays a secretary, who assumes various roles, enlivening the scenes with heavy dialogue. A recent graduate, she was an intern when Collins first conceived of the show and, since she answered the phones in real life, he said why not try it on stage? She is subtly hilarious in her cubicle, but what is she actually doing in there the rest of the time, while the action unfolds around her?
Editing her novel, it turns out. “You have to have a strategy,” she says. “For Scott [Shepherd] it’s one thing, a crazy endurance test, and I don’t know how he does it. The rest of us have to have another project going on that has our attention.” You simply can’t keep up the adrenaline and treat it like a regular performance, she says. And so, during the off-hours backstage, while one actor practises the piano and another looks after her young baby, Scelsa edits her novel for young adults – the difference being that she can also do this on stage. “I feel like my character would be the person in the office who spends time on her laptop doing something else. You can only see me from the shoulders up in my cubicle; so I’m editing my book.” (It’s called Fans of the Impossible Life; she is looking for a publisher). After seven years of performing the show, the rhythm is so ingrained that Scelsa never misses a cue.
Shepherd, meanwhile, has Gatsby almost entirely by memory. The rest of the cast sometimes challenge him in a game called Test the Freak, where they read out three words at random and see if he can continue. This was put more scarily to the test on stage, says Shepherd, when the book fell apart in his hands one evening. “We’ve only used two books for this show. One book became so deformed it was held together with duct tape. We had a superstitious attachment to it – the Book – and finally it turned into a taped-together sheaf of papers. Then we had a new book and that started to fall apart. One day, a chunk of chapters went flying out and slammed against the back wall. Fortunately, it was part of the book I’d already read. When they taped it back in, they taped it one page off. The next day I was reading, turned the page and there was a page missing. I had to rely on memory. And I did it.”
The show’s commercial success has been “shocking to everyone”, says Scelsa. It has toured in Australia, Norway and Singapore. The New York run, at the Public theatre, was sold out. At one point, they tried to split the show in two and run it on concurrent evenings, but “it totally backfired”, says Ariana Smart-Truman, the producer. “We realised that it’s hard for someone to come back two nights in a row. You have to get your babysitter back, find parking again. So people would see part one and say it’s terrific, but I’m not coming back. Part one would be full and part two would be half full.”
The impact of the show was also squandered. The extraordinary thing about Gatz is that, by the end, a feeling of common cause has arisen between the audience and the cast. You have been through this experience together; a usually private activity, reading, has been turned into a collective one and it is intensely, surprisingly moving. “This is not an experiment to test an audience to see how much they can take,” says Collins. “Durational performances have a special appeal, but that’s not what we’re doing here. The work you’re committing yourself to – The Great Gatsby – is worthy of it. It’s only as long as it has to be.” What’s more, he says, “if you want to make something that’s exceptionally successful, there have to be some things that are exceptional about it. It has to take risks.”
Even after all this time, when Shepherd reaches the end of another epic performance, he hardly knows how he got there. “I can’t contain the whole experience in my head at that moment – but I can feel the impact. We’ve all been there all day. It’s a pretty tremendous feeling.” Waves of emotion flow up from the audience, so different from their nerves at the start of the show. “It’s not as hard as they think it’s going to be. It turns out that literature works.”
• Gatz is at the Noel Coward theatre, London WC2, 8 June to 15 July. Details: liftfestival.com
Wonderful Salon Intensive on Sunday Evening January 08, 2012
We worked to understand the multi-perspective narration of the epic journey of the Bundrens: farcical tragic comedy, existential philosophy or modernist experiment? Or a roiling engagement of family dysfunction?
I don’t know…my mother is a Fish…
Some feedback: Thank you so much for hosting a great salon yesterday. I may have had to work too hard to enjoy reading the book (reading for me is largely an escape) but I thoroughly enjoyed discussing it. If my english teachers at school had been as inspirational as you, who knows, I might not have been a medic today. (good or bad?) The intensive format suits me far better than the weekly sessions which I find count my life away….please keep me in the loop for more of these!
And a few thoughts from our own Bill Faulkner:
“I decline to accept the end of man.”
William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950
“All his life William Faulkner had avoided speeches, and insisted that he not be taken as a man of letters. ‘I’m just a farmer who likes to tell stories.’ he once said. Because of his known aversion to making formal pronouncements, there was much interest, when he traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on December 10, 1950, in what he would say in the speech that custom obliged him to deliver. Faulkner evidently wanted to set right the misinterpretation of his own work as pessimistic. But beyond that, he recognized that, as the first American novelist to receive the prize since the end of World War II, he had a special obligation to take the changed situation of the writer, and of man, into account.”
–Richard Ellmann
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work–a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
It was a very good salon and I really don’t think I would have taken on this huge and mysterious work without you. It was definitely worth going through the whole work—it is wonderful to actually experience real learning again as I know I did throughout the Divine Comedy (it got so much easier!).
I liked going round and having everyone pick out their passages—I think this worked well. I also think it could work well to identify anyone’s particular knowledge of an area and ask them as appropriate, to provide some background.
I also liked the probing questions you asked about why Dante would have spent so long on a topic or what he was trying to convey. Your questions do help guide the conversation especially when we—as always—manage to veer away a bit.
Thank you so much for your time and guidance through the work—that afternoon in the yard when the weather was divine, the food was abundant, and the conversation was intellectual I just had to pinch myself.
