Culture

I've long felt that as an American I have been deprived of a cultural heritage. Really. What is our culture? Hollywood and boy bands? Yuck! I think that Americans are kind of schizophrenic about their heritage. We obsessively know the make-up of our geneologies (for example, I'm 25% Norwegian, 25% Danish, 25% Finnish, and 25% miscellaneous (British kind of stuff)), but we have no idea what that means. So I recently decided learn about these roots of mine. I figure that the miscellaneous portion is tolerably covered by Arthurian legend, so I focused on the remaining 75%. I now have at my fingertips The Norse Myths and The Kalevala.

After receiving The Kalevala, I decided it would make an ideal birthday present for my dad. The Kalevala is a transcription of the Finnish oral tradition. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is epic poetry. It seemed like a good book for my dad since my Finnish blood derives from his mother, he loves the epic poetry of Homer, and The Kalevala served as inspiration for Jean Sibelius, a favorite composer of his. (As it turned out, it was such a perfect present for him it become the 3rd copy of The Kalevala in his library. The other two are in the original Finnish and an English prose translation from the 1950s that was a birthday present to his father from his mother's parents. Yet despite this, and fortunately from my gift's perspective, my dad had never read it.)

So I ordered a copy of it for him, with the grand idea that we could read it together, albeit a cross-country kind of together. Both my father and I really enjoy reading, and often recommend novels to each other. We also used to read together when I was growing up, though he often jokingly makes fun of the manner in which I read books with him. One notorious example is when we read The Trumpet of the Swan many years ago. I grew impatient with the pace at which we read it together, and would typically continue on without him and finish the book from where ever we left off each day so that by the time we finished reading it together, I'd read it quite a few times myself.

I really enjoyed reading The Kalevala. In fact, I found it much more interesting than the Iliad, which it shames me to say I never finished. My dad also likes it, but complains that he's having a hard time retaining what he's read. So he requested that I write short summaries of each of the poems for him since he's unable to find any Kalevala Cliff's Notes. I rolled my eyes and teased him for it, but since I too wasn't absorbing everything, I went ahead and complied. And the exercise really helped me as I was reading it. The summaries themselves are nice, but I think the most important component was just reading with an eye to encapsulating it in a few sentences. That really forces you to grasp the gist of a poem that can otherwise be lost in the details. Unfortunately, only the last 20 poems have been summarized, and my dad kind of wants me to go back and re-read the first 30 so that I can summarize those too. Sure, why not. Though I'd really like to move on and read other things, so I think I'll do it gradually, hitting maybe a few poems a week.

It probably isn't a bad idea to do this for everything that I read. I mean, how often do you really remember the contents of a book that you read years ago? And while rereading a book is a definite option, it almost seems like a waste of time. There are so many other great novels out there. The opportunity cost of re-reading a book instead of one of them is just too high. So having a few pages of notes with the gist of a book would be a great way to return to what you've read. But who am I kidding. As if I'll have the motivation to do that! And that would only be able to refresh your memory of the plot. Great literature is typically great not because of the plot (though these are often stellar), but because of the quality of the writing. I have no pretenses of being able to recreate the amazing style of Dostoevsky, for example. And especially not in a terse synopsis of The Brothers Karamazov. It's like Ben and Jane Austen. It cracks me up that Ben reads her novels. But he claims it's for her "diction" rather than her story lines. Which makes sense, I suppose. You certainly wouldn't read more than a few Jane Austen novels for their stories, since they all pretty much share the same plot.