“Transformative” Texts?

11/5/2021

Tolle, lege, ”Pick it up an read,” the kids shouted. Augustine heard them and did just that – he picked up a text and it (eventually) changed his life.
Strange story and a strange idea that some texts are “transformative.” You take a few dozen squiggles, called letters, scramble them in various ways, page after page. Someone, perhaps centuries later,, unscrambles them and comes away change for life.
Implausible, but when I asked some trusted friends whether they knew of “transformative” texts, no one seemed to doubt that there were such things.
Here’s a tabulation of the ones they named, followed by a few observations of my own:

Adams, Henry The Education of Henry Adams
Apuleius The Golden Ass
Augustine (or maybe Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo and Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine
Marcus Aurelius
Buddhist texts or books about them, e.g. Buddhism is True by Robert Wright.
T.S. Eliot Four Quartets
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Epictetus
Nietzsche Also sprach Zarathustra
Plato, esp. Apology (
Young, Jeffrey Reinventing Your Life
Observations:
The responses aren’t a sample designed to delight the heart of a pollster. I just wanted to know what friends would think about the matter. But maybe most interesting has been what they didn’t say:

No Greek epic or tragedy. No Vergil, no Dante. Very little of the old Great Books canon.
Nothing from the Jewish or Christian scriptures. Have these lost their hold on our imagination?
Most (but not all) of these texts are “intentional,” that is, intended to induce change in their readers. A few (e.g. Apuleius?) are “immersive,” that is, they invite you to get absorbed in a narrative and thereby find you are thinking in a new ways, One example, Peter Singer and Ellen Finkelpearl’s new version of The Golden Ass

- - Long! These are all B-I-G texts. no short ones like the individual Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the “Great Simplification” in Deuteronomy 6 and Mark 12, or short poems such as Milton’s sonnet 19 (“When I consider .” ), or, shorter still, the Delphic maxim “Know Thyself.” Do long texts really have a monopoly on transformation, or do I just have a short attention span?

Special Thanks to:
Jane Chaplin, Michael Gillespie, Bob Kaster, Harry and Peregrine Kavros, Tom Martin, Dan-el Padilla, Jason Pedicone, Gil Renberg, Paul Woodruff
--
PS These suggestions often came with explanations and stories, rich and intense, but in some cases quite personal. So I have held back from quo ting them. But, many thanks for all!

This conversation is ongoing. Post your thoughts as a Comment and invite others to join in.

5 Comments

Jim O'Donnell

11/5/2021 08:45:38 pm

It's not the text, it's the reader. My mother had a school teacher who managed to make Treasure Island a dreary obligation for them, something you would have thought was impossible. In my more teacherly days, I was pretty good at prescribing books to individual students to hit them at the right moment with the right text. Book 19 of City of God changed my life at least in part because I stayed behind in Princeton to read it while most of my friends went off to march on Washington in November 1969. That was a case of the right text for the absolute right day. I'm told there are actually people who've read City of God and not had their life changed by it.

James ODONNELL

11/6/2021 03:18:23 pm

And P.S. tolle lege: to my point, Augie had been reading at that book both all his life and more seriously for a decade before going off and reading some libri Platonicorum and coming back listening to Ambrose talk about that kind of book made the moment possible. Bob, do you remember the redoubtable (I choose my adjective carefully) Hubert Alyea, Princeton chemist whose crowd-pleasing bangs and flashes lecture was called "Lucky Accidents and the Prepared Mind"?

Clifford Ando

11/6/2021 02:57:23 pm

I'll offer a gloss on Jim's comment: it's not the reader, but the reader in whose company one read. That made the difference for me, in making of Augustine's Confessions a transformative book. My guide in the matter was Sabine MacCormack. She appeared to many as learned and kind in the fields in which they knew her, but she herself had many fields.

And I'll mention one other book, which shifted the trajectory of my intellectual life in a sort of permanent way -- as Arthur Darby Nock might have put it, there was a before, and there was after. This was J.Z. Smith's "Drudgery Divine," which led me on to other Smith.

Carolivia Herron

11/7/2021 02:24:25 pm

What an interesting topic. I would love to hear from all of you. What books would you place here for yourself, and Bob, how can you doubt that there are transformative texts? There are three texts that grabbed me and sent me in a new direction. John Milton, Paradise Lost, plucked me up when I was eleven years old and sent me in the direction I still follow. When I read the Iliad a year later I was astounded to learn that here was another book in the same category as Paradise Lost. I can still remember my World History teacher, Mr. Hall, stopping the class to teach me the word "epic." Many decades later I read Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes, quit my job, and moved to the seaside in Portugal for a year to write my first novel. Terra Nostra tells the epic tale of the coming of the Mediterranean and the Levant to the Americas.

Carolivia

john Immerwahr

11/7/2021 04:07:16 pm

I agree with the comment above that there are transformative texts for an individual at a certain time - for example, my world was completely transformed by reading Summerhill, by A.S. Neill (about a "free school" that he created), but I doubt that anyone would be transformed by it today. Of the enduringly great ones, I would add Descartes Meditations, which, like some of the others, was written to be transformative.

“Transformative” Texts?

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