Q&A with Spencer Klavan
Spencer Klavan, author of the forthcoming Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises, joins us for a brief exchange.
Are there one or two authors that have had an outsized influence on your work overall?
As a literary stylist, I'm partial to Plato; as a thinker I'm partial to Aristotle. Among the moderns, though, no one has my heart like C.S. Lewis. It's his lucidity above all: the way his prose communicates high-minded ideas so simply yet so beautifully. I think people have at times mistaken this for oversimplification, or worse, pure simple-mindedness. But in truth real simplicity—cogent ideas given straightforward expression—is the hardest thing of all to achieve. It's the kind of clear writing that can only come from clear thought. In this respect Lewis is my number one role model.
Do you have a favorite novel or novelist or fiction genre?
My favorite novel, recently brought back to the front of my mind at a really rich conference hosted by the Liberty Fund, is Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov. As Dostoevsky lets us know up front, he's pulling off an incredibly difficult feat in that novel. His main character, Alyosha, is accused all the time of being passive or boring. But really Dostoevsky is dramatizing the magnificent act of resisting temptation. It's an amazing literary effect to achieve, because outwardly the action mostly consists in not doing things, in refraining from losing your head as the world goes mad. “If you can keep your head when all about you / are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” as Kipling says: that's what Alyosha's faith allows him to do. As a matter of the inner life, there's nothing more dramatic and heroic than resisting temptation, no adventure more freighted with near-misses or riven with constant danger. But it takes a trick for Dostoevsky to make us see that, and along the way in the supporting characters he gives us some of the most compelling accounts ever written of modern man's fevered mind.
Can we expect more books from you in the future?
I'm working on something new right now that I'm really excited about, yes. More on that anon—but for now I have a foreword and a few new translations in Regnery's Gateway to the Stoics, which I highly recommend as an inroad to the philosophy that shaped the character of the Roman elite before the empire became Christian.
