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?
Jane Chaplin, Michael Gillespie, Bob Kaster, Harry and Peregrine Kavros, Tom Martin, Dan-el Padilla, Jason Pedicone, Gil Renberg, Paul Woodruff
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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!
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