Poetry and People

1. The Fear of Freedom by Erich Fromm
2. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

And the poems of Stephan Crane…

Tradition, thou art for suckling children,
Thou art the enlivening milk for babes;
But no meat for men is in thee.
Then —
But, alas, we all are babes.

1. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. (Persig)
2. The Worthing Saga. (Orson Scott Card)

From the sublime to the ridiculous – Athier-than-thou hack Anthony Grayling has cobbled together something marketed as an atheist’s bible: ‘The Good Book: A Secular Bible’. Actually, searching for it on Amazon divulged the fact that there are a fair few others available.

I think Brecht’s poetry, especially “To Posterity,” has been a source of inspiration for many nonbelievers.

http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/WordsworthTinternAbbey.htm

There are some books I’ve read more than once, but nothing like reading re-reading and re-re-reading theological source works. What fills that void is music. Some pieces I never get tired of hearing, and most music is “uplifting” in one way or another. I even listen to Bach, in spite of being an atheist…….

Keep going back to over last 40 years?

Wilfred Owen at least twice a year
Rilke: Hours, Neue Gedichte, Elegies
Ulysses, Doktor Faustus
Nietzsche, George Lukacs

The Good Books for atheists don’t tell us what to believe, but how to think, how to see, how to feel.

The secular humanist needs a respite from her wisdom and sagacity in the bright light of maximal confusion. Like Hunter Thompson taking 100o mics once a year, “just to blow the tubes out” The problems for the intellectual secular humanist may be a) addiction to abstraction, and b) teleology, ideology, narrow-mindedness. Ulysses, for example, with its fierce naturalism and relentless perspectivism, can help us understand once a year that we don’t see anything and everything we know is wrong.

Gardening might work as well.

Since becoming an atheist (well, an Ex-Catholic) I have returned to the Bible. Infact, I only really read it once religion dropped away. It is, I find, addictive in a way it wasn’t before. I feel like Randolph Churchill who, reading the Bible for the first time after being bribed to do so by an Evelyn Waugh desperate for a respite from his endless adolescent babble, got totally caught up in it, only pausing for the occasional rermark of admiration: “Isn’t God a shit!”

It’s true that novels, even those a person greatly enjoys, are difficult to revisit as there is so much that hasn’t been read that deserves one’s attention. But shorter works I return to again and again which inspire:
“Ward Six” Chekhov
“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” O’Connor
“Bartleby The Scriver” Melville
“After Apple-Picking” Frost
“Sailing to Byzantium” Yeats
“Buffalo Bill’s” Cummings

Delicious humor substitutes. Ignacius Riley in A Confederacy of Dunces always lights me up. A.J. Leibling’s The Earl of Louisiana has priceless whole chapters. When I want to read great sentences, I reread a couple of Raymond Carver stories, a Cynthia Ozick essay – read The Impious Impatience of Job for your religious wonder – and always Prufrock. His “in the rooms the women come and go, talking of Michelanglo.” These are always at hand.

Alexander Nehamas’ Nietzsche: Life as Literature.

There are things I turn to for comfort, or release, or to focus my attention, or .. not inspiration, maybe activation energy? Music yes, typically instrument only (Bach, Monk, Haydn, Coltrane, Chopin, etc.) for intellectual work, all sorts for other purposes. Nonfiction that I can read again and find just as moving – Steven J Gould, Martin Gardner, Hannah Arendt – the theme seems to be well-written essays on inherently interesting subjects. Borges fiction probably falls into this category. Blogs (not the news ones) definitely count. This is not what people do with the bible, though, is it?

When I was reading it, Pamuk’s Snow gave me the something of the feeling of revelation that I imagine a believer getting from a sacred text. That was only a few years ago, and I have not yet gone back to it.

Meredith, The Iliad is my desert-island book, too. Well, unless it’s Borges’ collected short stories, js.

Lately, Schubert Fantasy in F minor for two hands. Winterreise. Schuman Kinderszenen. Handel, “L’Allegro” or “Art Thou Troubled” (with K. Ferrier). Mozart Mass in C minor — or any other mass. Also, “A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings”. Big Bill Broonzy. I usually turn to Youtube to explore old-time country music and sacred harp.

Books: Peacock. Also Wordsworth. Edwardian novels.

Yep. Paragraphs 3, 4 and 5 should follow the formatting of paragraph 2.

I’m surprised not to see anyone mention Seneca. That might be my pick. Recently I’ve read a fair amount of Marcus Aurelius and can see how it would fit. (I was reading it because I needed a book that would fit in a jacket pocket and that could be read in small snippets and wasn’t related to anything I was working on, not for any deeper reasons, but it is really quite nice in parts, even if also quite alien.)

Seconding Lemuel Pitkin @7.

Also,

Penelope Fitzgerald’s “The Beginning of Spring”
Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution”
Lucretius
“The Winter’s Tale”
The Ithaca chapter of “Ulysses”
“Moominvalley in November” and “Moominland Midwinter”

Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway is a very important book for me. As are a couple of Douglas Adams’ books – Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, in particular. Annie Dillard. Then a few mentioned here already, as well as assorted poetry (cummings springs to mind).

I’m glad someone mentioned Middlemarch. Also Jane Austen in toto, and I find great comfort in the huge baggy monsters of Anthony Trollope. Something about that omniscient narrator, perhaps?

Colin Danby articulates what prompted my response above. The Greek and Hebrew bible(s), if it/they offer comfort: well, it’s comfort of a most challenging sort.
Alter is amazing.
I have no idea what was in Shakespeare’s heart (do I sound like the Amish grandfather in Witness? yes, I do, a bit), but I am reasonably sure that his imagination was imbued with god-li-ness (Shakespeare in Love gets that much very right). Let’s not force ourselves on others. Socrates’ last words, after all: he owed a cock to Asclepius.
Some comment above about Seneca. Yes, indeed appropriate for our times. (Scarily so.) Though he makes you work. (I got a junk email yesterday with the subject line: Effortless Learning. Who in their right mind would want that, I thought?)

From 9/11 onwards, The Secret Agent helped me keep some perspective. Four Lions now performs approximately the same function.

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
William Morris, News From Nowhere
Poetry by Yeats, Browning, Tennyson

I like Colin Danby’s question – where do you go when you’re too complacent? – but think that I’m more likely to seek out new books than revisit familiar ones for that. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, has been the transformative and jarring book for me this year.

I’ll second Matt’s (#35) nominations of the Stoics. Aalthough I only read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus once, the core message is still one that I return to. The little I’ve read of Taoism (the book of Chuang-Tzu) is another dourse of ideas I return to, while the original text is no longer needed.

As far as books that I’ve gone back to for guidance or support, I can think of two. The first is Wanderings by Hermann Hesse, a little book of short reflections and poetry that he wrote, which has a lot of wisdom about living packed in it. I’m lucky to have come across this obscure gem in a used book store back in my younger days. The other is Montaigne’s Essays, which incorporate a lot of the stoic ideal but leaven it with a generous dose of humanity.

The essays of Stephen J Gould.
The songs of Leonard Cohen.
And of course, the one we’re all allowed to say: the music of JS Bach
I’d also like to thank TheSophist for managing to express my feelings about LOTR so well.

“Anything that involves the Nac Mac Feegle.”

So good it should have been mine.

“a couple of Douglas Adams’ books – Long Dark Teatime of the Soul”

This to. A fantastic book! I just wished he had lived much longer and written many more Dirk Gently books.

The Elemenets of Style
War and Peace
George Seldes’ The Great Thoughts and The Great Quotations

The Substance a poetry-kultur guy!

You should read his original works (warning NSFW). He was almost an award-winning poet laureate.

Straight-up consolation or anti-depressants:

Thoreau, Walden
Emerson, “Experience”
Montaigne, “Of Experience”
Rilke, Duino Elegies

General restoration of sanity:

Stendhal’s novels
Nietzsche (esp. Gay Science, Beyond Good & Evil, Twilight of the Idols)
Montaigne

Poetry:

Anthony Hecht: Venetian Vespers, Transparent Man
John Hollander: New York, Movie-Going, From the Ramble
Stevie Smith: practically everything
Samuel Johnson: Vanity of Human Wishes

Essays:

Johnson’s Rambler.

I am not sure if they are a source of strength or merely comforting schadenfreude, but when things are really bad I find the various apologia of Nazi generals to be soothing…Rommel, Guderian, others I can’t remember but sitting on the shelf at home.

If I think I’ve got problems, the retreat on the Eastern front always seem to make them shrink. I can’t say I care for their politics, though.

King Lear.
Pynchon, especially Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow.
Margaret Atwood, especially Surfacing.
Miles Davis, especially Kind of Blue.
Monk and Coltrane, Live at Massey Hall.
Any number of individual poems, including this one by Joy Harjo:

Remember

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war
dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.
Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.
Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.
Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember that language comes from this.
Remember the dance that language is, that life is.
Remember.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Pablo Neruda, Love Sonnet XVII
Vaclav Havel’s speeches, especially the ones contained in The Art of the Impossible
Miss Rumphius, Barbara Cooney (often give this as a graduation gift)

I used to go back to Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, but haven’t looked at that as much recently. I loved Emerson and Benjamin Franklin when I read them, but haven’t gone back often.

As far as explicitly religious works, I do sometimes look at Faith and Practice, but more to dip in and out. And I love The Donkey’s Dream, by Barbara Helen Berger, but at least as much for the luminously gorgeous illustrations as the text itself.

for solace: Borges’ poetry, TS Eliot reappears though mostly in the form of the snatches I have memorized rather than rereading the books, ee cummings similarly.
for comfort: LOTR as already observed, and in general any fiction that hews to Miss Prism’s formulation, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” The baggy monsters of Trollope, the douce campagna of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, the Moomins, David Lodge novels; I know it’s all merest fantasy but it provides an objective correlative for hope or at least a reasonable simulacrum of hope, enough to trick the limbic system into going on.

Oh, and Rabby Burns.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. I’ve never understood all the praise heaped on The Little Prince, but Wind, Sand and Stars is a work of breathtaking beauty.

YouTube videos with “… gone wrong” in their titles.

Pedantry intrudes: American Gods is Gaiman, not Stephenson

A lot of interesting suggestions, but I maintain that you’ll not find a bettar and moar poignant picture of teh human condition than in teh collection of YouTube videos with “… gone wrong” in their titles. Although I’m not sure how one would go about swearing an oath on one.

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

If it’s very personal solace — grief for loved ones who die, say — or for other afflictions or turbulations of the soul, Emily Dickinson. Must get her name on record her.
That’s when you’re ready for words — I agree with many others here, music first.
For solace and uplift at the intersection of the personal and the public/political, and if we’re thinking movies, too, I can’t think of a better one than Local Hero. Close second, though very different, would be Gods and Monsters.

One should remember that the bible is a collection of different books, stories, poems, etc, written by several people over a very long period. 
So, composing a new bible for atheists or just for people living in today’s complicated world, would mean putting together a new canon. Some books might get a permanent role in the canon, others might come and go, as happened to the real bible. 
I found some fine ideas in the above discussion, but I think no one mentioned George Orwell. For me, at least Nineteen Eighty-four should be part of any new bible, and I’d add several of his essays. 
Other proposals would be: José Saramago, for instance Blindness, and the poetry of Neruda (Canto General, Sonetos de amor). 
And what about Max Frisch: Gantenbein. There is so much. 

No Orwell in the Bible, please! Oy!

This is a great thread and unfortunately I am be too busy to read all of it right now but I want to thank Phil up top for Tom Phillips’s A Humument which I had not heard of and looks wonderful. I also look on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) similarly, in fact the eject function of my CD in my car has been getting all wonky and is about to go and I just want to make sure that that is the CD that finally and irrevocably gets stuck in there. And sometimes I’ve approached Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as like the I Ching, sometimes it’s had that quality for me – oracular.

Over the last two or three years I’ve returned again and again to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, all of them, but particularly Porco Rosso, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Howl’s Moving Castle.

So, religious texts serve many purposes:

For pouring over minutia to decode in a sort of mystical confusion, I prefer Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”

For sympathy (learning or receiving), I recommend Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Joyce’s “The Dead”.

For moral education, fantasy literature, which forms the core of all scripture anyway, is key. I like most of it, from Pratchett and Gaiman to Lewis and Tolkein, but I especially appreciate the Harry Potter series, as it presents a world in which love, sacrifice, and goodness prevail out of nothing.

All great suggestions, folks, but for me it is entire traditions that inspire as much as individual works–for instance the tradition of Romantic and Victorian literature in English, for instance, or the tradition of progressive thought, creativity, and action. Admittedly, this is not as readily accessible as a single sacred or privileged text, but then the great diversity and richness of various traditions has great strengths as well.

The Four Noble Truths. Not theist. Milton, Wordsworth. Bach, Schubert, Scriabin. Celer.

I haven’t read all the comments, so I apologize if I’m repeating, but this is a very 19th century question, asked by people like Matthew Arnold and George Eliot and (I think) J S Mill. The answers tended to be Goethe (I guess Rosa Luxemburg would have agreed) and English poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge — of course they were looking to get beyond not merely the Bible but Byron.

A three-way tie twixt Goethe’s Faust in the original German (no English translation lives up to the original), the collected poems of Emily Dickinson, or the collected (that is to say, surviving) poems of Sappho.

Right, the “secular Bible” and “literature as solace” questions are subtly different things. A list of books I go to for solace is basically the list of my favorite books — that’s what constitutes a “favorite” for me. But there are different kinds of solace, and the kind that derives from wisdom or a sense of rightness, good judgment, good form in the broadest sense, is probably the closest to the specifically consolatory function of a secular Bible. For me, the favorites are a weird set: just about everything Robert Musil ever wrote; James Tiptree, Jr.’s Star Songs of an Old Primate; the Divine Comedy; “East Coker”; To the Lighthouse; The Death of Ivan Ilyich; The Castle; many more… Most comic writing about the bleakness of life, so universally renowned for providing solace, depresses the bejesus out of me.

I was also very comforted by the discussion of extinctions (i.e., the end of all known earthly life forms) in The Beak of the Finch.

I think the idea of books ‘provid[ing] support’ is a pretty deadly one, killing for literature, but it is fun to read bits and pieces of people’s favourite poetry which is how the tread has turned out. I second Tohm Hurka’s choice of Larking and would add Edward Thomas who is similar to Larkin in lots of ways, just as direct and intimate, but with a very different emotional resonance. Here’s one which I prefer to all other WWI poems:

As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,
The ploughman said. ‘When will they take it away? ‘
‘When the war’s over.’ So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
‘Have you been out? ‘ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps? ‘
‘If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more…Have many gone
From here? ‘ ‘Yes.’ ‘Many lost? ‘ ‘Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.’
‘And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.’ ‘Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.’ Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Reading: DeLillo’s White Noise and C. K. Williams’ poetry

Music: John Fahey

Film: Tsai’s Vive L’amour

Asked about it, who would not repent
Of all he ever did and never meant,
And think a life and its distresses,
Its random, clutched-for, homefelt blisses,
The circumstances of an accident?

Randall Jarrell, “A Country Life”

Ok, in addition to what I’ve mentioned above – or rather seconded, for too much of this thread I could just go “me too, me too!” and the rest I’m busy jotting down,

Poetry: Rumi, Hafez and Sa’di, preferably in my now very rusty Persian. (There are some decent non new-agey translations of Rumi, but English can never approach the Persian).

Film: Tarkovsky; “The President’s Analyst”; probably too many more to mention. Someone mentioned Miyazaki above, for anime (not a movie though), FLCL.

Music: I smile whenever I hear Eric Dolphy; also Love’s “Forever Changes;” The Harry Smith compilation known as the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music (which is every American’s birthright); Patti Smith’s “Horses;” Mickey & Sylvia’s “Love is Strange;” and a whole lotta Johnny Cash.

“You look to books for the truth, not support”

“The truth is invariably anti-supportive”

I dont know why you accept these two statements as so self evidently correct.

When I was at a very tricky point in my life, an unplanned third child on the way, financial collapse in my wife’s business, at risk of getting fired at my job, I found great comfort in Harry Potter (stop snickering, when you’re desperately trying to keep your shit together, small words and simple plots are a bonus). Reminding myself to act like Cedric Diggory from book 4 helped me keep my temper, my job, and my marriage.

In less desperate and more reflective times:

The Bible: (Old and New Testament even though I grew up Jewish and am currently unchurched). I teach it parts of it every year in my Ancient World class and it never fails to astound me.

Shakespeare plays: All the usual suspects here.

Graham Swift’s novel Waterland. I read this one about every 5 years or so.

Richard White’s brief history of the Columbia River: The Organic Machine.

Through college I would have said Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang but as my perspective widened my enthusiasm faded.

Classic country music (and it’s modern day equivalents – Iris Dement – for example) in my darkest hours is a great comfort. Late punk and new wave for my angry moments (The Jam, Talking Heads, early U2, Midnight Oil – the music of my lost youth).

James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. The last line especially….deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired. And there’s gotta be some Blake — a lot of Blake in these days when we find ourselves surrounded by so many sleepwalkers.

@John

Well, as for the proposition that you look to books for truth rather than support, obviously, insofar as you admit that the two may fail to coincide, to decide to choose words that are comforting rather than true is to engage in transparent self-deception. That transparency defeats the project of choosing support over truth, because if you know you’ve chosen comforting lies, that itself removes any comfort and support the lies might provide, plus it saddles you with the consiousness of yet another example of your own stupidity and weakness.

That leaves the proposition that the truth is invariably anti-supportive, that it systematically afflicts and undermines, rather than comforts and supports. Here we are indeed at a question of faith, as it were, and I can’t dispose of this objection of yours as logical inconsistency, as I could your first objection. Or perhaps, to put it more inclusively, your first objection only makes sense if it is simply your second objection stated in a less direct form. If you start from the assumption that the project of setting out to find comfort and support in the truth is one that can achieve success, then it is certainly true that you might indeed set out to find comfort in books, because you believe that you can leave your BS detectors fully operational, and at least some comforting things you read will survive the test and prove as true as they are supportive. “Not all that glitters is gold.”, so to speak, and many comforting things will prove deceptive, but that hardly means that there is nothing that both glitters with comfort, and is also the gold of truth.

But, of course, what Shakespeare actually wrote, and it is admittedly a hard teaching, is that, “All that glitters is not gold.” Nothing that is supportive is true. To cite another hard teaching, or perhaps the same hard teaching in another form, what Jesus says about spiritual riches is that to those who already have much, more will be given, but those who have little will have even that taken from them.

This really is a matter of axioms, so it’s not as if there is any way you could be convinced that I am right by some argument, or that you, if you truly believe that some things that glitter are gold, can be convinced that I am right. But I think it is worth formulating as clearly as possible these axioms we live by.

And, just to make my seemingly anti-social creed a little more accessible, if not convincing, think of it in terms of perspective. No matter how wise and generous we might be, all of us are stuck in a universe of experience in which we are the absolute and sole center. But the truth, which I think you will admit unless you are a solipsist, is that we are absolutely not the center of anything. We are quite contingent. There was a universe here before we existed, there will be one after we’re gone, and even during this brief period when we are around, that universe would function quite well without us.

Of course there’s nothing terribly disquieting about this Copernican dethronement of the ego as expressed in the abstract. We all have to stop being practical solipsists some time around age 2 0r 3 in order to successfully navigate an outside world that really would squish us like bugs unless we followed its rules rather than live as if things were arranged entirely as we would like, and we lived in a magic world in which we merely had to wish to make things happen. It’s not as if you have to achieve Buddha nature to get to the point of following the world’s rules in order to exploit them to maximize your comfort. That’s a trick we all master by age 2 or 3.

What you don’t have to do to get by is take this Copernican dethronement of your ego any further than just getting by. My idea is that truth and comfort battle it out as categorical enemies in that zone beyond merely getting by. Nothing that reassures you that you are the center of the universe is at all true, because that is simply not true. And anything that tends to the realization of the truth that you are not the center of the universe, and takes that realization past the minimum it has to attain in order for you to get by, is not going to be comforting. Where we have not completed our own individual Copernican revolutions and attained complete selflessness, there we find the truth undermining and obnoxious, but it is only there that we find any truth.

I have to admit, lately when I’m feeling down I have more of a tendency to seek out stuff on the Web that makes me feel even worse (mostly expressions of political outrage), on similar grounds that the truth is basically uncomfortable and there’s something unseemly about consuming information that makes you feel good.

But actively seeking discomfort in this way doesn’t actually seem to help any: doesn’t help me understand the world and doesn’t help me get motivated to do useful things. And anguished rants maximized for discomfort can actually be as ridiculous as anything that’s soothing. On balance, backing off and recharging with something pleasant might be better for the perception of reality in the long term.

Hopefully it’s ok to interpret “people” sufficiently broadly to include stuff like webcomics. The conclusion of the Phillipe thread in Achewood was weirdly poignant for me (not least because it was the last cohesive and complete storyline in Achewood). And in terms of the sheer number of times I’ve returned to an item for inspiration and solace per time unit, nothing much compares to the xkcd with zombie Marie Antoinette. (This is cheating the chosen metric a little, because it’s printed out over my monitor at work. But still.)

A quick argument for why including comics/webcomics seems fair. A comic combines the full cognitive engagement of text with the gestalt instantaneous recognition of static visual art, so it’s a uniquely well-positioned format to convey emotional relief. (Which just makes the nearly comprehensive fail of Hallmark cards, whose insert passages are uniformly wincing-cringe-inducing, all the more astonishing. When scholars generations hence look back on us, they’ll comment drily on our apparent inability or unwillingness to match the poetry of our epoch’s best writers to the visuals of our epoch’s best artists and then mass-produce them on cardstock. If you’re commissioning a couplet or sonnet to pair with a ‘get well soon’ or ‘congratulations on your achievement,’ you’re doing it wrong.) It’s nice to be able to instantly reabsorb the image and allow the text to be recalled to mind, with gaps of words already filling in.

It’s much easier (for me at least) to imprint an extended block of poetry into memory by superimposing each stanza on a readily identifiable and coherently related image, rather than memorize the sound or syllables themselves. (Fair warning though, this led me to memorize sweet is the sleep of hand-to-hand, sweeter still the sleep of heart-to-heart while completely forgetting its context. Of the various questions one’s future in-laws can ask on a first visit, there’s few more panic-inducing than “last night on your way to bed, were you quoting Sumerian fertility poetry to me?” … Uh. … “Just wanted to check if you two had news for us.” Dislodged quotation snippets are dangerous in the era of google.)

Also: pretty much anything by Beckett, even the remote later stuff. Reading Malone meurt cured my first major depressive episode, though if I am unsentimental I should concede that the fact I found it funny (and, frankly, the fact I could muster the energy to read it) meant I was already well on the way to remission.

Also, too: though it’s cheating because it’s the bible, sort of: Stephen Mitchell’s version of Job. And let us not forget King James’s version of Ecclesiastes. That Qohelet was a pretty wise man, for a god-botherer.

A suggestion for a follow-up post, maybe when we enter December:

Maybe Ingrid could ask the good people and readers of Crooked Timber to come up with translations of their favorite native language poem.

@ a.y.mous at 109:
I have only read one translation of Rubaiyat, and that is by Frank Kuppner, based on le Gallienne (In a Persian Garden) in Kuppner’s Everything is Strange, a wonderful book of poetry!

A few examples
1
Ah, Dawn is here! And, like a morning star,
The Sultan’s palace glitters from afar.
No false mirage of morning, fair as dreams;
But stone, recalling us to what we are.

5
For some have luck, some gold, and some have fame.
But we have nothing, least of all a name.
Nothing but wine. That is, nothing but heaven.
The purest fire burns with the slightest flame.

(Favorite first to lines in the one below)…
9
Drunkards! So be it yet, if all were wise,
All would be drunk like us, with dazzling eyes.
Poor sober world, day-long in misery.
Leave mosque and mart – come: join our Paradise.

27
I am not fit for hell – I am too small.
Eternity can have no cause to call
On such an insignificance as me.
I am too poor a prey for it to maul.

Cheers,
trane

Noting with delight the variety of poetry and other literature or novels or movies being cited here (must say, so wonderful to be reminded of Rumi and one of the world’s great gifts, Pharsi (in general) and Persian poetry specifically (even in translations, no doubt most second-rate: the sense of longing that in itself becomes the beauty it longs for — I can only compare Sappho, Homer, Stevens and Louise Gluck and Merwin (did someone actually mention him, or am I imagining it?) — well, many others too — at certain moments), and Turkish! (never though about it much before — now I’m enticed, being seduced), and Erse (boy, what a damnably hard language! would be worth the effort, though)…. All this desire! Is that why we put our faith in the young? Their desire, their yearning? (Ours too, but it’s different now….)

IN THE CAPITAL

‘Who rules here?’
I asked.
They said:
‘The people naturally.’

I said
‘Naturally the people
but who
really rules?”

—Erich Fried

The Idiot.

Camus’ The Rebel

Junger’s On the Marble Cliffs

Nietszche’s Ecce Homo helped me through cancer…

Any non-fiction histories of Rome, Byzantium or early Islam.

Classical Indian ragas, Sigur Ros and Scandinavian jazz.

Finally, any Lonely Planet guidebook gives me great solace when I flick through it.

I’ll second (Quaker) Faith and Practice as a source of great passages for me, anyway. And
“Plain Living” by Catherine Whitmire. I used to browse Alexander’s “A Pattern Language”
as a kind of Bible; while it doesn’t cover all of life, it outlines an utopia much more compelling than any fictional utopia.

Also Whitman. For some strange reason I used to find “Three Poems” by John Ashbery soothing, maybe the poetic equivalent of those CDs of babbling brooks and meadows that used to be popular. Dickinson. As a teenager Thoreau and Aldo Leopald (and, um, Tolkien). I couldn’t stand Thoreau’s voice when I tried re-reading Walden a while back though.

For shaking me up? Chekhov stories. I can only take so much shaking at one time, so I can’t read them very often.

I always find lighthearted fiction always helps provide support. In particular:

The Ukridge stories and the Clicking of Cuthbert by Wodehouse.
Jasper Fforde
Douglas Adams
Prattchett that doesn’t get too too preachy

Bob I agree with you, the solace must be something which we make from the poem. Like a stone in the mouth stimulates saliva – you can’t extract infinite moisture from a stone, and yet it is never used up. But some poems stimulate the response better than others, for some reason. I think it’s a mistake to say any set of words could do it just as well. If that were the case I think the choices in this thread would be completely randomised.

Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters)

Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet — particularly the section with this passage:

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginnings of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses: perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.”

Diane Duane, So You Want To Be A Wizard (et seq.) — the Wizard’s Oath.