Reading Classics: A Reader's Chase To Understand The Idea Of Sin, Isolation Amid Existential Crisis

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Hi there, call me Ove. I am a 29-year-old voracious reader who leads a nonexistent life outside the pages of books. I began reading when I lived with a flatmate. He was annoying. And his girlfriend would gang up with him to make things worse for me. This, however, did something good to me as my only escape while living with them was reading books. It helped. I realised what was missing in my life: classics. 

I am no expert on how to read classics. Every reader finds their own journey. I remember the first classic that I read. It was “Notes From Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in which the protagonist was in a state of destitution and self-loathing. I could immediately connect — you know why. 

Themes like isolation, existentialism, death, tragedy, and the like speak to me. The characters whisper to me in my sleep. I still recall the night after I read “On The Road” by Jack Kerouac. Dean Moriarty came into my dream and suggested I go and beat the hell out of my flatmate. Don’t worry, I didn't follow my dream.

Classics help us reconnect with our roots. It's a time portal, which takes you back to the world of mentally fractured characters of Saul Bellow, the frustrated masturbating youth of Philip Roth, the absurd yet mesmerising world of George Bataille, the Elizabethan era of Jane Austen, the self-introspecting world of James Joyce, and many more. 

Italo Calvino wrote in his famous essay, 'Why Read Classics?': “A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.” 

It is the background noise of sin, which persists in Leopold Bloom (main character of Ulysses) who after encountering a young girl starts lusting for her, the same way Humbert (main character of Lolita) lusts for Lolita, the teenage girl who was beyond him but still made for him. Aren’t we all sinners? Aren’t we always falling down on ground? Hasn’t this world already been crippled by our sins?

I always ponder upon the eternal question of absolute. What is absolute? A mere figment of ourselves or a beasty sin that is still breathing within all of us. Some may say death is absolute, some say law. But in reality, in the books that I had read, the only thing that is absolute is the idea of sin. It's in Raskolnikov’s eyes when he kills the pawn broker in Crime & Punishment, it's in Molly Bloom who sleeps with the whole Dublin on her husband’s back, it's in Madam Bovary, it's omnipresent. 

To chase this sin, I read and re-read, as Calvino had said every reading of classics is rereading. But, what does he mean by this statement? To me, it means, what had been written down in classics is something that had already happened to us, so hence when we read classics (even for the first time) we are actually rereading it in terms of lived experience, the only difference is that we are reading it through the eyes of the characters. 

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