November 30: "Don'ts" for Conversation (Vol. 27, pp. 91-98)

It seems to be the pattern of the reading guide that just when you are about to throw your hands up in despair over the parade of overwrought poets, obtuse philosophers and incomprehensible playwrights, a selection comes along that justifies the time spent with it.

Today is a good example of this pattern. It's Jonathan Swift's 343rd birthday, and to mark the occasion, we get "An Essay on Conversation." It is Swiftian satire at its best as he looks at the common excesses in having to talk with other people in social situations.

It holds up wonderfully after 300 years, because people still talk to much about themselves, prattle on with stories their listeners have already heard many times before, force humor into situations where none is warranted, and so on.

Swift's rule is simple: "Never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish we had rather left unsaid." Also, he advises not to interrupt or allow yourself to be interrupted. To achieve his goal of good conversation — "to entertain and improve those we are among, or to receive those benefits ourselves' — one has to apply an old Vermont aphorism — talk less and say more.

November 29: How Ideas Originate (Vol. 37, pp. 299-303)

How do we think? In David Hume's "The Origin of Ideas," he writes that the most vivid thought is inferior to the simplest sensation, that thoughts are subordinate to sensations and that it is impossible for thoughts to emerge without the corresponding sensations.

When analyzing thoughts, Hume writes that we should look for the impressions that formed them. An almost to obvious conclusion from today's vantage point, but I imagine this might have been a revolutionary idea in the 18th century.

November 28: Poems Made from Visions (Vol. 41, pp. 583-592)

William Blake was born this day in 1757 — the man responsible for inspiring Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, among other overwrought English poets of the 19th century. Someone has to take the blame, I suppose.

November 27: What Land is This? (Vol. 36, pp. 191-204)

Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" is tough going, mainly because it is written in the King James version Biblical style of English and because it is written in such a convoluted way that it is gibberish to modern readers. To get even an inkling of what today's passage is about — it concerns Utopians traveling outside their society — you have to go back to the preceding pages to figure things out.

November 26: Shakespeare Should Be Heard (Vol. 27, pp. 299-310)

Charles Lamb's "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," makes the counterintuitive observation that the Bard's work should be read in a book rather than performed on a stage.

Lamb, a 19th century English essayist, is credited (or blamed, if you're not a fan) with reviving interest in Shakespeare's work. He believed that Shakespeare's plays "are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any dramatist whatever."

Why? Because Lamb believed their excellence stems from the way they are filled with "so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do."

In other words, Shakespeare's writing is so strong on its own that performing the plays on stage adds little to their enjoyment.

November 25: Cupid as Shoemaker (Vol. 47, pp. 469-483)

Today, we have Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday." Dekker was a contemporary of Shakespeare's and this is supposedly his most famous work. It's the tale of Simon Eyre, a bombastic London shoemaker totally devoted to his craft to the exclusion of everything else. Eyre had little patience nor attentiveness beyond his cobbler shop. He certainly isn't the typical character of Elizabethian drama.

November 24: The Book That Upset Tennessee (Vol. 11, pp. 23-30)

On this day in 1859, "The Origin of Species" was published. The editors of the Reading Guide here are making a snarky allusion to the Scopes Trial, and the famous row over the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in 1925.

Even though some are still arguing about its contents, there is little debate that this book helped launch the revolution of modern science. As the Harvard Classics editors wrote, Darwin did more than gather "the ripe fruit of the labors of his predecessors" but "built on the foundations laid by others."

Darwin's theory of the evolution of organisms was not entirely new. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle offered glimpses of it and more modern philosophers from Bacon on added to the understanding that plants and animals did not just magically appear fully formed on the Earth, but changed and developed over eons.

However, it was Darwin that seized upon the idea, inspired by Malthus' theories on overpopulation, that "favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones would be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species."

This idea has never been accepted by fundamentalist Christians, who cling to the idea that God created the world in seven days and everything was ready to go from the beginning. Science proves that this is clearly untrue, yet creationism is still being taken seriously as an idea. Some organisms, apparently, still have some evolving to do.