Reading for Permanence: Books Worth Inheriting

In one of my previous articles, I argued that Europe is increasingly focused on building for utility and impermanence rather than on building to last, with materials and intentions that embody permanence and leave something worth inheriting to future generations. This mindset extends not only to architecture, where ephemeral buildings replace those shaped by thought, beauty, and durability, but also to reading. 

Reading today is no longer seen primarily as a means by which people are formed, in the sense Alexis Carrel meant when he wrote that man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor, but rather as a form of consumption: books that look and sound much the same and often serve more as business cards for their authors than as vessels of lasting value. The reading habits of people today are fragmented because most no longer read in an ordered way but move from article to article and from trend to trend, reading summaries to save time and extract the gist of books, few of which are worth rereading later in life. Such reading is fleeting and leaves little lasting impression. Surrounded by more books and articles than they can ever meaningfully absorb, people treat what they read as immediately replaceable: shaped by trends, stimulation, and controversy, then quickly discarded. Few works today are seen as books one can return to, live with, hand down to future generations, or build oneself around. There is little hierarchy in what one should read. To use Mircea Eliade’s terms, today’s reading is overwhelmingly profane rather than sacred.

One of the ailments of the modern Right, and of modern reading as well, is adherence to traditionalism rather than Traditionalism, with a capital T. Traditionalism, with a capital T, is a 20th-century school of thought whose principal thinkers include René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon. It is not merely “respect for old customs because they are useful,” which is largely what much of the European modern Right offers, often blended with an American liberal conservatism oriented toward small government. Rather, it is the view that a sacred, metaphysical Truth underlies authentic civilisations and cultures and that the modern liberal world is one of spiritual decline, fragmentation, and loss of contact with that higher order, tending to dissolve hierarchy and meaning. 

One of the main ideas of Traditionalism is the distinction between verticality and horizontality. Verticality means orientation toward what is higher than ordinary life, toward the eternal, the transcendent, and the enduring. Horizontality, by contrast, is a life of quantity, utility, comfort, and interchangeability. It asks not whether something is true, beautiful, or worth preserving, but whether it works, is profitable, is convenient, and saves time. Traditionalism therefore holds that a healthy civilisation is ordered toward verticality, while liberal modernity tends toward levelling, interchangeability, quantity, and spiritual flattening. Applied to reading, the modern habit is primarily horizontal rather than vertical. People have lost the sense of what is trivial and passing and what is essential and enduring, and one reason for this is the absence of a canon. In such a horizontal world, the reader is guided by trends and opinion-makers and becomes an isolated consumer, rather than by civilisational standards and elder authority embodied in permanent works.

From this it follows that not all works are equal or permanent, and that there is a clear hierarchy among them. The criteria of permanence are depth, enduring relevance, and survival across generations. Unlike the modern bestseller, soon forgotten, a work of permanent reading does not exhaust itself within an era, but endures across centuries or millennia while continuing to yield new meaning. Homer’s Odyssey stands first, though Odysseus already appears in the Iliad, and the poem itself stands at the end of a much older oral tradition. Seven centuries later, the Romans produced the Aeneid, in which Aeneas leaves fallen Troy and journeys to Italy in an epic voyage modelled on Homer’s, becoming the mythic ancestor of the Romans. More than a millennium later, Odysseus reappears in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where Dante meets him in the eighth circle of Hell. Two centuries later, Luís de Camões would write The Lusiads, in which Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India is cast in an epic form shaped by both Homer and Virgil, with Graeco-Roman gods intervening throughout. Nearly four centuries later, Odysseus reappears in Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, where, back in Ithaca, he embarks once more and becomes the vehicle for new philosophical exploration. He appears again, more obliquely, in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Great works of permanent reading survive not because they are old, but because they possess mythic and archetypal density, are civilisational, and seize the imagination of a whole people. That is why they keep resurfacing not only as reading material, but as sources of inspiration for writers centuries or even millennia later.

Odysseus is not the only figure to have endured for millennia in the European imagination. Prometheus is another. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, he is the bringer of fire to mankind, a rebel and a sufferer punished by Zeus and chained to a rock for that gift. More than two millennia later, he returns in Goethe’s poem Prometheus, now seen through the lens of human self-assertion, creativity, autonomy, and the will to transgress boundaries. Forty years later, he appears again in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In Prometheus, Europe returns across millennia to the question of whether human ascent and achievement are forms of greatness or acts of transgression against the natural order. 

Another example is the recurrence not of a single figure, but of a pattern: Tristan and Iseult, Sigurd and Gudrun, Siegfried and Brunhild, and, in the Greek tradition, Kornaros’ Erotokritos. Another recurring pattern is the myth of the sleeping king. In Britain, it takes the form of King Arthur, who will return when Britain is in danger; in Germany, Frederick Barbarossa, who sleeps beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain until Germany again needs unity and strength; in Portugal, Sebastian, who vanished in battle and is believed to return in the nation’s hour of need; and in Czechia, Saint Wenceslas, who will return when the Czech nation is in danger. In Greece, the pattern takes the form of the Marble Emperor, Constantinos XI Palaiologos, the last Eastern Roman emperor, who refused to flee in 1453 and died fighting among his men, but who legend says was turned into marble by an angel and sleeps beneath the Golden Gate of Constantinople until he is needed again. 

Although these are national myths and epics, they express shared patterns through distinct local forms and through the same themes of honour, tragedy, sacrifice, order, fate, and love. They show that Europe is not merely a geographical expression, a market, or an economy, as bureaucrats would have it, but a civilisation with shared figures, legends, and an imagination taking distinct local forms.

When people build personal libraries nowadays, they usually do so in an almost entirely horizontal way: as “a place to put the books I have read throughout my life,” without looking further than that. A simple exercise in reading and building a vertical library would be to assemble 400 or 500 books, across genres, that have endured through centuries or millennia or, at the very least, decades, and have helped shape European civilisation and its peoples. This would deepen the reader’s understanding both of where he comes from and of what the peoples of Europe have in common and, in time, help strengthen a common European identity. Conservatives should build physical, spiritual, and political structures worthy of inheritance for future generations. A library belongs to that list, for it is one of the most intimate and enduring structures a family can build and pass on to its children. This creates a generational chain of inheritance and continuity not only between ancestors and those yet to come, but also with those across centuries and millennia who read, wrote, copied, and translated these books, and were themselves shaped by them. It makes building such a library not an act of nostalgia, but of responsibility: to be a keeper, one among others, of one’s own civilisation’s best and most enduring works. The children of a nation are the future inheritors, transmitters, and creators of a community’s language, customs, culture, and ways of life, and a library of the enduring works of their civilisation would help them fulfil that task in a deeper and truer way.

Without permanent reading, a society drifts into cultural amnesia. The people remain in their original place physically, but they no longer have an inner memory by which they recognise themselves across time. When a civilisation no longer revisits its eternal works, but focuses instead on technical skill, it becomes technically competent but spiritually empty and symbolically illiterate. Its people are cut off from the myths and stories their ancestors wrote, read, and lived by, and hence lose the inherited meaning and depth that make them a people in the first place, a people tied to the place from which they originate. Hence, Europe suffers from amnesia: she has forgotten the texts that helped her understand fate, order, transcendence, and herself. To read the great European works and build a library based on them that is worth inheriting is to anchor the present in a deeper intergenerational continuity and responsibility; it is to read vertically rather than horizontally, and to recover a form of reading that is not profane or consumptive, but oriented toward memory, inheritance, responsibility, and the sacred.