The books we fall back on

Yesterday, I released a video about books I fall back on when I’m going through some difficulties. I want to continue that discussion. Most of all, I want to hear from you about those sorts of books.

If, when someone arrives in the world of Hādēs, he is freed from those who call themselves jurors here, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment over there —Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aiakos and Triptolemos, and other demigods who were righteous in their own life—that would not be a bad journey, now would it? To make contact with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer—who of you would not welcome such a great opportunity?

I think quite a bit about Socrates as he was going to his death. Plato’s Apology, from which the passage above is taken, is a bold example of a man living by his principles. Socrates is put on trial; I suspect that he knows how it will all turn out; still, he puts on his defense. When he is sentenced to death, he accepts it. In the Crito he even declines an offer of jailbreak. In Phaedo, he pontificates on the afterlife, echoing some of the thoughts from the Apology passage above. He had a sense of calm about him. You can feel it through the ages.

Boethius, too, seems to have calm about him as he prepares to die. We don’t get to see it on the page, but we get to see what he is thinking as Lady Philosophy departs from him. Whatever we mean by ‘inner peace’, it seems to me that Socrates and Boethius were able to achieve it.

That’s why in a recent video, I included The Consolation of Philosophy and Plato’s works in a category I called ‘books that get me through hard times.’ They joined an odd bunch: Wendell Berry, Christopher Hitchens (perhaps the most shocking on the list), A.G. Sertillanges, and Seneca.

I didn’t elaborate much on the premise in the video, but that seems like just the sort of elaboration that is fit for Substack.

I said that there were books that I like to fall back on when times get tough. Now, I’m not in much of a tough time by most external standards, and I’ve certainly been in worse times before by internal standards. But anxiety is high, there’s pressure to perform, and so I started looking for the kind of solace that I find in good books.