There are several good reasons to read old books. But “books get better with age” is not one of them. They don’t. Books are not wine. A couple of decades in the coolness and darkness of a wine cellar can transform a good vintage into something extraordinary. A crappy best seller is going to be crappy twenty years from now — except that it will no longer sell.
Old books — the best of them, at any rate — can be worth reading because of the truth of something that Bertrand Ruseell once said. He said that modern man is parochial in time.
Russell meant, I think, that the present moment is always a hick town with one traffic light, where the same gossip goes around and around and a certain way of looking at life was long ago agreed upon and that is that.
Now I would extend what Russell said to say that every moment in history is a hick town. Periclean Athens was one. So was Elizabethan England. So was the Russia of Dostoyevski. But they were different from the hick town that we live in.
Their being different means, at the very least, that different gossip is circulating among the resident of those towns.
But at certain moments in the past, the gossip that was circulating was of a very superior kind; this was certainly the case in the historic moments of Pericles, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevski.
What does it do for a person to hear gossip that is different from or superior to the gossip that he has been hearing in his native moment? I’m talking about gossip such as Pericles’ Funeral Oration, or “Hamlet” or “The Brothers Karamazov”.
I would like to be able to write that hearing different and superior gossip will make you a better or happier person. I can’t say that reading “Hamlet” has made me happier or better. But it has given me many hours of absorbing pleasure — unlike any other that I have known.
And it just might be that the gossip circulating in a hick town other than your own embodies wisdom that you never would have heard had you stayed home, waiting fot the traffic light to turn from red to green.
Yes Books Matter 