On March 23rd, we took up Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry," in which Shelly claims poetry to a higher form of expression than prose. (Some readers may see irony in that Shelley, one of the great English Romantic poets, made this claim NOT in a poem, but in an essay.
April 27th was devoted to "The Pardoner's Tale," from "The Canterbury Tales" of Geoffrey Chaucer. Though Chaucer's Pardoner loves to preach that "Radix malorum est cupiditas," ("The root of all evil is greed,") he is quite up front about how it's money that motivates him.
May 18th, Leo Tolstoy's Second Epilogue to War and Peace was featured. Here Tolstoy takes up deep philosophical questions about history, in particular the "Great Man" theory, with Napoleon's invasion of the East as his case study. By the way, now when people ask me, "Have you read War and Peace, I truthfully answer, "No, but I have read the Second Epilogue to it.
On June 22nd, we covered the short story, "The Man Who Would Be King," by Rudyard Kipling. It is a tale of two adventurers in British India who found a colony in present-day Afghanistan. Only one survives and returns to tell the story.
July 27th was devoted to "The Unknown Masterpiece," by Honoré de Balzac, a truly great story that raises deep questions about art and genius.
The play "Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello, was our reading on August 24th. Like the Balzac story, it was concerned with philosophical issues of artistic creation. The characters in this family, which today we would refer to as "dysfunctional," desperately seek to conform their behavior to a mold imposed from outside of themselves.
On September 28th, we discussed Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat," about four survivors of a shipwreck striving to row back ashore in a lifeboat. It is a beautiful depiction of men who teeter on the boundary between sea and shore, death and life.
Sherwood Anderson was our featured author on October 26th. His "Death in the Woods" tells the story of a country woman who dies in a snowstorm on her way home from town, where she had bartered eggs for some meat, liver, and bones from the town butcher. Participants were impressed with Anderson's ability to give us a story that can so readily be approached either realistically or allegorically.
Our year ended on November 23rd, with "The Garden of Forking Paths," by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a wildly unrealistic World War I spy story that nevertheless delights as a reflection on the nature of time and the life choices an individual makes as he moves through time.
By the way, if you were wondering whatever happened in January, we had to cancel, as there were predictions for blizzard conditions the evening we were to meet. Let's hope for better luck next month!
By the way, if you were wondering whatever happened in January, we had to cancel, as there were predictions for blizzard conditions the evening we were to meet. Let's hope for better luck next month!
