Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Leo Strauss's "The City And Man"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Leo Strauss's The City And Man. It begins:

The question that used to be put with monotonous regularity to authors was: what book would you choose to have with you if you were marooned on a desert island. One author, a well- known woman who was not immodest about her own literary achievements, insisted that instead of something someone else had written, she would choose to have a paper and pen and write for herself what she would then get to read. With far greater cause for modesty, but with perhaps a better understanding of what life on a desert island really meant, I replied when asked: “Any book with the title: How to Build a Boat.”

This was not fair of me. I should have have taken that question more seriously, imagined that I was never going to get off the island, and that the only book I had to read would have to be one worth reading over and over again. It is a choice that requires more thought than might at first be expected. War and Peace, for example, may well be the greatest novel ever written, but how many times could you read it before the words began to lose all meaning. Plutarch’s Lives, the comparison of famous Greeks and Romans, would allow you to debate with yourself which was the greater: Cicero or Demosthenes, Caesar or Alcibiades, but that would be to devote your life to the outlines of what other people did or tried to do. And how you read it, what you gained from it, would depend on what you had read before.

This is the issue that goes unnoticed. Which one book would you wish to be your only companion depends on what you had you read before, how you had spent your life, or that part of it you had devoted to reading. Did you read to be entertained; reading, for example, mysteries in which the main attraction was the feeling of suspense as you were led through the search for the person or persons responsible for the crime that had been committed until, at the end, you discovered, and were surprised to discover, who the guilty party really was? But, having discovered that, would you really want to read it a second time, much less read it over and over again until your last, dying day? If, on the other hand, you had read to learn, read to study the serious things that attempt to discover what it means to be a human being; if you had studied with close attention the works of Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides; if, that is to say, you had spent years reading the great books that constitute the beginning, and the basis, of Western thought, read them so often that at the bare mention of a phrase in one of their classic works, you remembered, if not the exact words, the main thought expressed on the page, the book you would want, the book you would need, is a book few people have even heard of: The City And Man, written in l962 by Leo Strauss.

Two sentences, the first paragraph of the Introduction, tell you immediately that this is...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man.

--Marshal Zeringue