A Cartography of the Inexhaustible: On Re-reading Great Literature

Some works of literature demand not just reading, but rereading—slowly and deliberately. They are not to be consumed and set aside but to be lived with, returned to, studied and puzzled over.

Somewhere between nostalgia and revelation, there lurks an old paperback—battered spine, dog-eared pages, a whiff of yellowed mustiness that stirs something inexplicable, a reminder that books are, if nothing else, artifacts of who we were when first we turned their pages.

I, for one, recall my adolescent infatuation with Agatha Christie, the undisputed Mistress of Murder, whose cunning webs of intrigue ensnared me somewhere between the seventh and eighth grades. I read perhaps half her oeuvre that year, lost in the world of Hercule Poirot’s punctilious investigations, Miss Marple’s deceptive frailty, the crisp certainty of locked-room murders neatly resolved.

Years later, in a secondhand bookstore in Montana, I stumbled upon a cache of those old mysteries, their garish yet charming covers unchanged by time, and was compelled to revisit them. The experience, I found, was delightfully rewarding. It was a return to a childhood haunt seen now through adult eyes, a rediscovery of the pleasures of tight plotting and well-placed red herrings.

And yet. There is a finite quality to such pleasures. One can return to a well-crafted detective novel after many years and find it as diverting as before, but to return again and again, to wring new meaning from the same sentences indefinitely—this is not what such books were made for. Their satisfactions, though real, are transactional, ephemeral. Not so with what we call “great literature,” those inexhaustible texts that, rather than being mere puzzles to be solved, are instead infinite gardens in which one might wander indefinitely, marveling at the flora and fauna, tracing out new paths never before noticed.

When I first began teaching, say Macbeth, Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, revisiting them not as a student but as a guide, I discovered—no, was startled by—the realization that these works (and many others like them), read and reread, taught and retaught, never exhausted their riches. A Shakespearean tragedy, a Gothic masterpiece, a medieval mosaic of human folly and wit—all deepening with each encounter, each reading layering over the last like sediment forming a deeper, richer soil.

Consider Macbeth: on a first reading, one might be struck by the inexorable descent, the terrifying momentum of ambition metastasizing into bloody inevitability. But a second or third reading begins to unearth strange undercurrents: the shifting power dynamics between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the uncanny omnipresence of the supernatural not just in the witches but in virtually every aspect of the world they inhabit. Consider these two quotations from Act II:

And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
Is 't night's predominance, or the day's shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb
When living light should kiss it? [...]
Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man's act,
Threatens his bloody stage. By th' clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.

or

The night has been unruly. Where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i' th' air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events
New hatched to the woeful time. The obscure bird
Clamored the livelong night. Some say the Earth
Was feverous and did shake.

The text yields more: subtle rhythmic variations in the meter betray a character’s unraveling mind, the motif of sleep—“Macbeth shall sleep no more”—takes on an enveloping significance, an irreversible breach in the natural order. And always, there is that final, desperate realization: “Life’s but a walking shadow,” words that land differently with each passing year, their bleakness growing sharper, their resonance deeper.

Or Frankenstein, a novel that at first reading is an atmospheric tale of hubris and horror, a warning against unchecked ambition. But with every return, new dimensions emerge: the novel as a meditation on creation and responsibility, on loneliness and the human need for companionship, on the nature of monstrosity itself.

It is a text that reflects back the reader’s own concerns, so that in youth one might sympathize with the lonely creature, while later one sees the tragedy of Victor Frankenstein, his Promethean overreach not simply hubristic but deeply, painfully human. The book’s structure—layered narratives within narratives, voices collapsing into one another—becomes more haunting, its themes more unsettling. What once seemed a mere gothic horror story morphs, in time, into an existential reckoning.

The same holds true for Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales offers not only a cross-section of medieval society but an ever-unfolding exploration of human nature. “The Pardoner's Tale,” with its merciless irony, first appears as a simple exemplum, a moral tale of greed leading to destruction. But rereading reveals the true depths of the Pardoner himself: a hypocrite who preaches—and preaches convincingly and poetically—against avarice while reveling in it, a man whose cynicism is so profound that even his self-exposure feels like an act of manipulation.

And then there is “The Wife of Bath's Tale,” an Arthurian yarn that transforms depending on the reader’s perspective. Is it a proto-feminist assertion of female agency, or a sly satire of the same? Does the Wife’s voice empower or entrap? With each return, her words shift, her laughter echoes differently, and her meaning somehow evades final interpretation. Chaucer’s genius lies in precisely this: the ability to construct characters so alive, so contradictory, that they cannot be confined to a single reading.

Of course there are many others, the oft-returned-to, the volumes that withstand the erosions of time and taste: Steinbeck, whose dust-choked valleys and wayfaring souls yield fresh heartbreak on each traversal; Dickens, whose tangled, teeming London—sooty, serried, singular—reveals ever more interstices of vice and virtue; the febrile dreamscapes of Poe, where doom drapes itself in metric perfection, or Hawthorne, whose Puritan specters flicker anew in the dim lantern-glow of each rereading. Great poetry, too, stands the test: Emily Dickinson’s lapidary enigmas, her dashes like doorways into infinities of meaning, or Christina Rossetti, her verses oscillating between the sacred and the sorrowful, their cadences haunting in ways no single reading can exhaust. These are not texts but topographies, maps forever expanding, growing more intricate, more revelatory with each return: a cartography of the inexhaustible.

And this is the gift of great literature.

There will always be more books than one could ever hope to read in a single lifetime, an ever-expanding horizon of unread masterpieces. But some works demand not just reading, but rereading—slowly, deliberately, over the course of years, even decades. They are not to be consumed and set aside but to be lived with, returned to, studied and puzzled over, each time revealing something new. Not merely for pleasure—though there is pleasure aplenty—but for something more: the sharpening of thought, the deepening of understanding, the edification of the soul.

Michael S. Rose, a leader in the classical education movement, is author of The Art of Being Human, Ugly As Sin and other books. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, New York Newsday, National Review, and The Dallas Morning News.