0:04 thank you very much it's an honor and a really a thrill to be here and thank you Scott for that kind introduction and correct pronunciation of my name I'm very impressed as an Italian are there any other Italians in here great the rest of you can leave no no you can stay you know speaking of Italian I'm reminded as I give this talk in some ways I'm it's kind of strange that someone like me should give this talk because I actually grew up in a house with no books my family were immigrants very smart hardworking people Italian immigrants and yet you know they didn't really have education that a grade school education and so whenever I would be sitting reading you know my mom would come up behind me and saying her
0:51 Calabria and dialect jewsí that's a celebrity Vimala la testa Jill put that book down it's gonna give you a headache so reading in my house you know brought on migraines that was the theory I listened to my parents and almost everything except really for that with a great thing about my family you know they kept you humble I'm one of six kids and when I got my first job after graduate school I said to my mom you know I got a teaching job I was a visiting professor at Penn the University of Pennsylvania and I said mom you know finally I got a job a university Tudela Pennsylvania I even said it in Italian it was founded by Benjamin Oh Franklin founded by Ben Franklin I said you know it's IKEA do you know who Ben Franklin is ma and she
1:37 said that's the meter philia know Tony me know Keiko so up it Colette she owned a leave me alone my son I don't even know what I had for breakfast this morning that's how impressed she was that I taught it and Franklin's universe but you know yeah so it seemed very natural in an organic in a way for me to become a professor because I they they didn't have a great you know there wasn't a lot of books in our house but there are a lot of stories I grew up with a storytelling culture maybe many of you have as well you know these great stories about my my grandfather on my mom's side who had come to America as a gravedigger served in World War one and enabled my mom to get citizenship and she came alone to the United States
2:23 without the family without her four children in Italy and established the family in my dad who had worked two jobs getting up at you know 3:30 in the morning working 16-hour days these were the stories I grew up with and so when it came time to choose a career it seemed real inorganic to pick something that combined both stories and my love for Italy and love for their culture so I became a professor of literature and also Italian Studies so I never really questioned the path that made so much sense and then something happened exactly really 12 years ago in November 2007 that changed everything changed everything for me personally but made me ask this question about literature how it can change your life you know what
3:09 what's the impact is and so I went to teach a class at Bard College where I'm a professor and the morning started out like anything any other you know any other class day and I walked into a 10:00 a.m. class I was joking with my students and I saw a security guard at the door and my immediate thought was I've done nothing wrong so I'm joking you know I said look they're coming to arrest me and I'm laughing and I noticed that the security guard wasn't laughing and he said are you Joseph Lutze and I said yes and I knew in an instant something terrible had happened so I raced out of the building past the Vice you know vice president of the college running up the stairs to get me a van was waiting and I heard the words which would change my life Joe your wife's had a terrible
3:57 accident and my wife Katherine at the time had just had a fatal car accident and so I had left the house that morning at 8:30 by noon I was a widower but also something else Catherine was eight and a half months pregnant and she delivered the child emergency cesarean and the baby was healthy and made it 45 minutes before she died so in one morning everything changed and this is this talks not about me it's not about you know this great tragedy that I went through in the road to recovery but something happened that was really unexpected as part of the road back I turn to something that had
4:42 really been part of my professional life I turned to a book that I had spent years studying Dante's Divine Comedy Dante wrote 700 years ago couldn't be more remote right from us and yet for the first time even after studying him for decades I heard his voice the way I never heard before I heard him describe exile dante spent the last 20 years of his life in exile roaming essentially you know the medieval version of castle surfing from one castle to then and looking for work always on the run and I learned from Dante these words in a dark wood in the middle of our life's journey I found myself in a dark wood in a meadow that
5:28 come in the nostra Vita Miri throw Viper on a salvo scooter I felt that I was in the dark wood Dante's dark wood this book resonated with me this universal space of human suffering and what did Dante teach me I used to think it was what lands you in the dark wood is what defines you but in truth I came to see that it's what you do to get out of the dark wood that defines you and I also learned something else Dante wrote his great work after his exile the Divine Comedy he was rumored to have even perhaps contemplated suicide we don't know we do know that he was absolutely devastated
6:14 by the loss of his hometown and I felt that I felt the loss of my own former life and I wanted my life back and Dante taught me you can't get it back you have to rebuild a new one so my journey with this book became part of my journey back to the living and it made me ask a question that I want to ask you today what is it about literature what is it about great writing these books that stand the test of time that can change our lives why why did someone why did I turn of all people to a poet who wrote 700 years before I did and what can you do in your own lives to make literature great writing great books a part of your own everyday life that's
7:01 the mystery that I want to explore to you today and what I'd like to do is as a almost my scientific I'm not a scientist but you know I'm a literary scholar so I want to give you my take as a scholar as someone who spent his life studying and reading what it means to be what these books do I want to tell you five things that I think of the magic of these books okay the first one is this idea of alternate worlds okay I love f scott Fitzgerald's hair you know you got to love the part down the middle that's old 1920s hairstyle but f scott Fitzgerald who read The Great Gatsby many of you have it's a you know I love it it's a it's a classic it's accessible the story of Jay Gatsby the
7:46 bootlegger who's in love with Daisy and tries to win the girl and eventually by the end of the book loses his life it's an extraordinary story why do I bring it up and this passport to alternate worlds that I think great literature gives us because I want to tell you I grew up in a working-class family an immigrant family we couldn't travel we didn't have money but my town had a library and in books you can go anywhere I remember reading about Renaissance France by this French author Rob Lai I couldn't travel to the real France but through this writer I could go to France and I could go back in time literature brings you all throughout the universe and it connects you to worlds that happen even before you when I think of great got the Great Gatsby
8:33 I think of scenes like these parties that Jay would throw at West Egg I'm sorry in the in the you know in East Egg in the the West Egg area where he would have these mansions and he had gotten everything in life materially he could ever hope for and yet the way that shell describes it he says girls were putting there sure women were putting their heads on men's shoulders in a puppyish way you know but no singing quartet formed around Gatsby when I read passages like that I'm back in America of the 1920s I'm in this alternate world I'm in a world more importantly of Jay Gatsby the man who got everything he wanted materially and as a friend once said to me don't wish
9:19 for something too much you just might get it right he got it and he realized his American dream wasn't what it was caught up to be as I tell my students literature's like this fossil of people who lived in a different time you know like a father an imprint of a fern in Iraq literature gives you the way people thought and felt a history book can tell you about the 20s in America but can it recreate the atmosphere like the Great Gatsby do you see what I mean this idea of creating an alternate world that literature can do which leads to money number two right if literature can create alternate worlds right it can also bring us into the area where fiction almost becomes fact or truth
10:06 this is a painting by another nice Italian boy like Dante Raphael the school of athens right and you see Plato the great philosopher pointing up into the heavens Plato saying truth is up in the heavens there is everything we see in real life is a simulacra beauty justice humans can never know that we're too imperfect we live in the land of the cave the shadows on the wall we have to use philosophy to try and arrive at some sort of notion of extraterrestrial truth but on his right I'm sorry on his you see Aristotle pointing down to earth the Greek philosopher saying no Plato we only know what we see on earth I think that Aristotle is a patron saint of
10:52 literature because literature tells us what we see on earth describes it it knows we're imperfect we don't have access to perfect truths so Aristotle wrote history tells us what happened it gives us the specific the contingent the one-off event literature poetry epic gives us the universal it gives us the code of the should of what you know that it extrapolates you in the particular inch of the universal so think as I tell my students literature is the opposite of fake news fake news pretends it's true and tries to manipulate you into believing it literature is imaginative tells you that it is and then leads you to the truth in this way that Aristotle
11:40 described think of Hamlet by Shakespeare then one of his most famous plays you know Hamlet sees a ghost who's gonna believe a ghost maybe had too much to eat the night before maybe it was indigestion and his dad says Hamlet you must avenge my death Hamlet's doesn't he wants proof right what does he get his proof do you remember the scene when he has Claudius stage he has a play performed for Claudius the mousetrap and the murder of the King Claudius who had killed Hamlet's father his uncle Claudius says his uncle sees the play and runs off the plays the thing in which I'll catch the conscience of the king right that's an imaginative situation that leads to the truth and that's what literature does
12:27 when I read of Dante's exile sure it's autobiographical but it's a poem who knows that we if everything happened the way Dante exactly described it but it was so real it was so truthful that I can imagine myself into it in a way it's the opposite literature teaches you to ask the right questions it won't provide all the answers in books that do provide that all the answers aren't being honest because there's some things that there's no answer to the no rulebook for getting over the death of a spouse or raising a child on your own okay the third thing I want to talk about is universal connections that come with literature we live in beautifully in an age of multiculturalism of we celebrate ethnic identity and this is all great I'm a hundred percent behind
13:13 this I also think we should think about the things that connect us as people what do all people share right this is a painting by Botticelli of st. Augustine who lived 16 over 1600 years ago he wrote the confessions in 398 ad if you went back to 398 ad that would be like landing on Mars right you know the average life expectancy was in the 30s literacy was so low I think they had only dial-up internet nah no just kidding you're talking about a totally different world and yet Agustin wrote the memoir that is still the template for today his confessions Agustin was addicted to the life of the flesh you could almost say he was addicted to sex a little bit
13:59 right he was addicted to glory he could almost say he was a workaholic these are very familiar patterns right I mean you know Keith Richards ain't got nothing on Agustin for his autobiography so this model for an autobiography you can trace back 1600 years and it's still relevant I find that miraculous I'm reminded of that scene in LA story where Steve Martin says you know see that building over there it's over almost you know it's over 20 years old Wow this book is 1600 years old and it still makes sense it speaks to something that's universal in us after the death of my wife I needed to know that I wasn't alone other people had been through it and I found that universal connection the fourth thing I think is reading as a ritual
14:44 this is Machiavelli a not so nice Italian boy right you know he wrote the prince he wrote this book about political brinksmanship and gamesmanship sure we know that but he also loved literature and when he was exiled from Florence he would describe reading like four hours a day getting he says I put on my best clothes and I go into a study where I'm lovingly received by ancient men in there it's that product ritual of reading something happens when we read if I gave you a book right now some of you are carrying them it's just symbolic notations on a page you I always tell my students you're the co-author you bring the book to life each writer needs a reader reading is that ritual with something
15:31 profound happens where it can literally change your life and the last thing I'll say is the power of stories what is it about stories you've all Harare in his book sapiens which some of you may have read says that that's really what distinguishes us from a lot of other creatures our ability to tell stories to bring people together through narrative the power of narrative where we are a storytelling species I think it's just as important as the opposable thumb it's what's made us what we are think of Shakespeare the story of Othello the famous story of Othello he's an outsider in Venetian society he's you know considered old probably in his 40s it wasn't the new 20 back then right and he's married the most eligible woman in
16:18 Venice Desdemona right she'd have her own show Bachelorette right and people are accusing a fellow of bewitching her and you know what a fellow says he says her father oft invited me basically to tell my life story to hear these things with Desdemona seriously inclined she felt compassion for them and I did love her for it dis Damona falls in love with a fellow because he's a storyteller and Shakespeare destroys all the prejudice surrounding Othello through the power of story once you hear someone's story you can never think of them as a category or a group you have to see them as a human being for that reason we need stories
17:04 more than ever today in our society our divided society how can you make these five riches of literature your own I think it's easy or practicable I've created what I call the rule of four okay and I always think of my father when I do this cuz my father was not a reader but boy could he use language he would say things like you know Madeleine over to Albany they made a new harm befall you or you know you know these crazy poetic King Lear like curses de beaujeu pas de la faccia knew gone and made a dog rip your face off you know he was a real poet in his own way it's a he wasn't a reader how do you become readers very simple my rule of force think of it like
17:50 working out or walking or getting good night's sleep four days a week 45 minutes a day four different books one your favorite kind of book let it be romance Harry Potter and whatever anything gardening whatever your second category contemporary writers who were the writers today the fiction writers changing the conversation the third group nonfiction doesn't have to be make-believe to be literature and the fourth group let one of those categories be a classic your Wordsworth your Nietzsche's your Virginia Woolf your WB Dubois eases that mix of four will bring you the greatest glories of reading and it will bring you to what my favorite writer Dante called that thing
18:37 that that connects all readers long study and great love I want to close with an image as I raised my daughter after those years it took it was very hard I needed a lot of help from my family after my wife's death what really brought us together more than anything I look back as when we started reading together and I went through all of Harry Potter with this girl and I felt by the end in that space of long studying great love we were becoming a family again thank you so much [Applause]
