“As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition—I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”

—From Outline by Rachel Cusk 

By Cassandra Csencsitz

Last year I had the great fortune of discovering the New York Review Seminars, a continuing-ed initiative of the New York Review of Books led by Daniel Mendelsohn, through their 2023-2024 series entitled “Journeys.” When I contentedly embarked, little cued me for the profound ride ahead—how intricately Daniel had plotted our itinerary, how the conversations between the chosen works would form a sort of infinity loop, moving us ever forward and backward through literature and time, driving home the constancy of the human condition as well as the endless variety within personal experience and language’s ability to capture it.

Over the course of nine months, five authors, and six books, the celebrated scholar and writer became our literary travel agent, ferrying us through a curation that unfolded like a novel itself, or rather a play in five acts:

Daniel Mendelsohn

1. The Odyssey “by” Homer, c. 8th century BC

2. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), 1927

3. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1924-1987), 1956

4. Rings of Saturn, W.G.. Sebald (1944-2001), 1995

5. Outline (2016) and Second Place (2021) by Rachel Cusk  (b. 1967)

In keeping with the “Journeys” theme, the books were chosen for narrating voyages of epic proportions in literal or emotional terms—from Odysseus’ fantastically perilous ten-year trek home to a boy’s lighthouse quest, from a young man’s cultural and sexual evolution in Giovanni’s Room to a guilt-ridden German’s peregrination through the eastern coast of England in Rings. Finally, through two works by our lone living author, we accompany a divorcée’s travels from Britain to Greece in Outline and another middle-aged woman’s fraught path between her home and guest house in Second Place.

I jumped into the series at Lighthouse, already knowing The Odyssey well and gearing up to know it anew upon the momentous publication of Daniel’s own new Odyssey translation next April. I was also busy with my own Gotham book events, including the launch of Benjamin Taylor’s new Willa Cather biography and my adjacent lecture at NYU. Taken together I had a more rewarding year of fiction-reading than I can recall since graduate school, and my heart was the better for it.

Considered Woolf’s second masterpiece, To the Lighthouse was a revelation, a study in her word-perfect prose and surreal ability to bend time, slowing down life’s clock with what she called “the art of ‘character-reading’: a practice of observing, of speculating about, people, both in life and in fiction.”* Today we might refer to her emotional anthropology as “EI,” a heightened sensitivity that was both her creative genius and personal torment—she simply saw and felt too much. Her ultimate gift to readers might well be the dignifying and even deifying of human emotions, buying us time through more moments of deeper life. Woolf’s worldview might well propose a new cogito that to feel is to be.

Thus reading Woolf in the company of fellow seminarians was blissfully reminiscent of my years in the Great Books program of St. John’s College. In Socratic fashion, Daniel would kick off class with remarks and a few key questions, after which there would be time for about half of the class to participate. First hand raised, first served. The quality of participant commentary was high: eloquent, illuminating, and grown-up without a trace of the pedantry that can accompany the adult student “full of wise saws and modern instances,” to quote Shakespeare’s still-accurate Jacques.

As we moved from Woolf to Baldwin then Sebald to Cusk, I was taken by the dialogue these authors formed with each other. The chronological syllabus flowed as if the authors were in call-and-response with each other, comparing notes with their heightened powers of perception. Woolf and Baldwin shared a preoccupation with memory and time, a theme echoed by Sebald who, like Woolf, refuses to forget the horrors of war and takes history to task with his devastating accounts of colonialism. At the end Cusk weaves it all together, referencing Homer throughout Outline while meeting minds with Woolf’s Lily Briscoe over male prolixity in search of female sympathy. In Second Place her use of hyperdetail and hyperbole is reminiscent of Sebald while her examination of womanhood recalls Hella’s plea of marriage to David in Giovanni’s Room—despite all her intellect, cosmopolitanism, and strength—to, “Just let me be a woman, take me. It’s what I want. It’s all I want. I don’t care about anything else.”

The following passages on memory and time demonstrate the anachronous conversation our authors
shared:

“…Perhaps life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
—Baldwin

“Memories lie slumbering with us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labors expended in writing them down[,] are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business!” 
—Sebald 

“Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living—living in the moment and living outside it—which was the more real?
—Cusk (Outline)

I owe yet another debt of gratitude to my husband Bret and to the Gotham Journey for this experience. I’m thankful for Gotham’s long friendship with Hedermans, owners of The New York Review of Books, who brought Daniel Mendelsohn to lunch and introduced me to the famous scholar. I’m grateful to Daniel for sending me a copy of his miraculous An Odyssey after meeting, my response to which began our friendship and led to my participation in the seminars that became my saving grace during Gotham’s challenging last year.

For Gotham’s part, it was our honor to host two lively semester-end parties with local seminarians, the second which included Merve Emre and her students from a Lolita seminar. This upcoming semester I look forward to beginning my studies with Merve in her series “What Will She Do,” starting with Emma. After reading her Dalloway intro, I can only imagine what she will bring to the study of Austen, Eliot, James, Nella Larson, and Elif Batuman before Daniel fires back up with his series on “Tragic Meaning: The Iliad and Greek Drama.” All roads lead to Homer, and I can’t wait to meet him there. CC

*From Merve Emre’s indispensable introduction to The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

“The woman sitting directly opposite me, whose somewhat startled face was positioned beneath the face of the clock on the wall, so that the two shapes had become joined or connected in my perception to the extent that I had almost forgotten she was there, now said that it had been interesting for her to realise how little she noticed of the objective world. Her consciousness, at this point—she was forty-three years old—was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of other people’s—gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathising, worrying—that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries separating these numerous types of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was no longer certain what had happened to her and what to other people she knew, or sometimes even what was or was not real.”

—Another whopper from Outline by Rachel Cusk