Going Out of Print

The kid with the fancy college degree tells me he's read all the hot new books. He's got opinions on everything happening right now. But ask him about Epictetus or Montaigne and he looks at you like you're speaking ancient Greek. Which, in the case of the former, I suppose you are.

C.S. Lewis, the Oxford fuddy-duddy who wrote those Narnia books that all of us homeschool kids love, had an idea about this. He said after you read a new book, you should read an old one before picking up another new one. Lewis even went so far as to say if you had to choose, go for the old book. I'm not telling you to throw out your subscriptions to all those streaming services. But Lewis might be onto something here.

Think about it like this. You walk into a room where a bunch of people are deep in conversation. You catch the tail end of what they're saying, but you don't know what started it all. That's what it's like reading only new books. You're missing all the setup.

Today, everybody's an expert on what happened five minutes ago. They can tell you exactly what some politician tweeted or what scandal is rocking Hollywood. But ask them about the causes of the Peloponnesian War or whether the Age of Enlightenment happened—historian Jonathan Scott would argue that it didn’t—and they go quiet. It's like we're building skyscrapers on sand. We've got all this knowledge about what's happening in the “forever now,” but no foundation to hold it up.

I was talking to a professor friend of mine the other day. She told me her students can explain why various irrelevant celebrities are canceled cringe, but they can't parse the simplest paragraph from the Federalist Papers. Those aren’t rocket science; something's off there.

I'm not saying you need to be some kind of walking encyclopedia; that’s nerd stuff. But there's value in knowing, at least in crude outline form, where we came from. It's like that old saying about those who don't know history being doomed to repeat it. Except these days, we're not even giving ourselves the chance to know where to find that information—which is, thanks to the internet, easier than ever to find. I guess my dissertation advisor had it right: if you want to keep something secret, publish it.

Lewis had another good point. He said old books can show us the blind spots of our own time. It's like when you visit another country and realize all the weird things about your own that you never noticed before.

Reading old books is like time travel without the fancy machine. You get to see how people thought and lived in different times. And sometimes, you realize they weren't so different from us after all. Take Cervantes. That old wounded soldier wrote Don Quixote over 400 years ago, but people still read it today. Why? Because he got something right about what it means to be human. Idealism, delusion, friendship—the context and technologies around us change, but these common things  don't change much over time.

Or look at the Epic of Gilgamesh. It's thousands of years old, but we're still telling stories about the fear of death that drove Gilgamesh to lose his own. That's because they tap into something in our human, all-too-human bones.

Reading, listening to, or even using AI prompts to summarize—and I don’t care how you consume these primary sources; I’m not your dad—engaging with old works isn't always easy. The language can be tough. The ideas can be challenging. It's not like scrolling through your social media feed.

That's probably why a lot of people don't bother. It's easier to read a tweet than to wade through Melville’s Moby-Dick or Pierre, both of which, far from being impenetrable tomes, are surreal classics that reward repeated deep dives. But since when did we start avoiding things just because they're hard? I remember when I was a kid, my grandpa had this big old bookshelf. It was full of books that looked like they'd been around since the Pleistocene. I used to think they were just there to collect dust. But one summer, when I was bored out of my mind, I picked one up. It was The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. I didn't understand half of it at first. But I kept at it, and by the end, I was hooked.

That overstuffed book took my pre-teen self on a wild ride like no JRPG game or high fantasy story I'd ever experienced. It made me think about storytelling and life itself in ways I never had before. There’s a reason the narrator boastfully declares “for my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live.”

You don’t need to read exclusively dusty old tomes. But maybe mix it up a little. For every post you engage with, try something that's stood the test of time. It's like eating your vegetables. It might not be as instantly satisfying as junk food, but it's good for you in the long run. Reading old books can make you appreciate the new junk more. You start to see the connections, the way ideas have evolved over time. It's like watching a movie after you've seen all the classics it's referencing. Suddenly, you get all the inside jokes.

But let's be real. In this age of instant gratification, telling people to read old books—even excerpts, even brief lectures about them—is like telling them to write letters instead of sending texts. It sounds nice, but who's got the time in this economy?

Well, maybe that's the problem. We've got time for everything else—binge-watching forgettable prestige TV shows, scrolling through social media, posting dirty pics in influencer groupchats, leveling up our avatars in the latest addictive JRPG. But we can't find time to read a book that's been around for centuries? It's not just about the books, though. It's about slowing down, taking the time to digest ideas instead of just swallowing them whole. It's about engaging with thoughts that have survived generations, instead of just the hot take of the day.

I know what you're thinking. "History is written by the winners? Huh—I thought it was written by losers," right? And "school's cool if you're a tool or a fool." I've heard it all before, and I’m down with your damage. But you don't have to sit down with a leather-bound volume and a smoking jacket to get this knowledge.

There are audiobooks, podcasts, YouTube videos explaining classic ideas (some don’t suck). Heck, there are even graphic novel versions of some of the great works of literature. The format doesn't matter as much as the content.

The point is, we need to find a way to build that foundation. To understand where we came from so we can figure out where we're going. Because right now, we're like a bunch of kids playing telephone. We're passing on information, but it gets more garbled with each retelling. We need to go back to the source sometimes, to make sure we're getting key parts of the message right.

And who knows? Maybe you'll end up like that Oreo-devouring 13-year–old tublord who picked up Tristram Shandy out of boredom. You might just find yourself taking a meandering journey through time, space, and the human condition, all from the comfort of your grandfather’s basement.