Three Books

If you were shipwrecked on a desert island and could take only three books with you, which three would they be?

I didn't have any trouble deciding when I asked myself that question this morning. The first would be the King James Bible, and I'd want to take the copy I have now, a facsimile of a latter-day reprint of the 1611 edition, with the original 17th-century spelling preserved. Besides being the ultimate repository of wisdom and the primary of the two main sources of western literature (the other being the scattered literary treasure of classical antiquity), the book's language is incredibly beautiful, with its archaic spelling matching and amplifying its equally antique turns of the phrase.

For example, in Chapter IV (or IIII) of Genesis, God says to Cain, "What hast thou done? the voyce of thy brothers blood cryeth vnto me from the ground," which packages the instinctive human need for revenge and exacting retribution for crimes in the neatest possible metaphor. The KJV is an inexhaustible source of these kinds of intensely poetic moralistic images, and its histories are as exciting and entertaining as any ever written, if one takes into account their ideological, tribal slant.

My second choice is pure history, but with strong poetic tendencies: the Modern Library's one-volume edition of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." Edward Gibbon's Roman epic actually embraces the history of the entire Mediterranean region and beyond, and extends nearly 16 centuries, from the dawn of the current era to the beginnings of the Renaissance and the final conquest of the Eastern Empire by Islam. It includes chapters on the rise of Islam and on the spread and early success of Christianity, and serves as a primer of all the knowledge anyone serious about mastering the fundamentals of western history should be familiar with.

Finally, I would spend many of my free hours on this desert isle, of which I would have 24 a day, immersing myself in Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the few indisputably essential works of the western canon. I've only read an outdated English translation of the first third of Dante's masterpiece, which functions among other things as a literary bridge connecting the middle ages with the gateway to modern times, the Renaissance. I'd want an edition with the original Italian on one page and the English translation on the facing page, so I could learn medieval Italian in my spare time.

With Gibbon, Dante, and the Old Testament prophets for company, life on the desert island would certainly be more tolerable that it would be without them. However, I'd still hope to be rescued.

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