Early last year, I read that Kushner’s Angels in America would be coming back to Broadway, and realized I’d never actually seen either half of the play (Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, staged separately but part of a single whole), on stage or even on TV (via Mike Nichol’s famed HBO adaptation).  Nor had I even read the play.  So, I got a copy, and banged through it in a single evening.  And while, in some ways, it felt totally dated—an artifact of an earlier NYC where AIDS was a new and ascendant threat and being gay and out meant something very different than it does today; in others, it was totally prescient—in its choice of villain, for example: the closeted yet AIDS-stricken New York attorney Roy Cohen, who famously mentored the (rather constitutionally similar) Donald Trump.

But, in short, Angels blew my mind. And it led me to search out and try to fill other lacunae in my cultural literacy—first more plays (like the Shakespeare and Chekhov I’d missed; so many Richards, so many melancholy Russians shooting themselves), then onto novels (ones I truly loved, like Ishiguro’s perfect Remains of the Day and Proulx’s sly The Shipping News, as well as others, like Updike’s Rabbit Run, that I found easier to admire than enjoy).

In the process, I also stumbled across an original copy of Sartre’s What is Literature, a book both off-putting and deeply fascinating, which gave me a lot of food for thought in my fill-in-the-blanks reading quest.  Though it’s a meandering polemic, one of the points on which Sartre seems particularly insistent is that books are written from a cultural context to an audience that shares that same context.  And, therefore, that when we read things years down the line, from our new context, we invariably have a different, much paler experience than the author intended.  Or, in other words, that my catch-up reading is a waste of time.  Because, as Sartre at one point puts it, “bananas have a better taste when they have just been picked.  Works of the mind should likewise be eaten on the spot.”

On the one hand, I take Sartre’s point.  As I noted, my experience of reading Angels would have been quite different were I a young gay man in NYC in 1992.  And I’m sure, generally, that there’s something far more visceral, far more alive, about engaging with art that, in turn, engages the very world you inhabit.  Yet, on the other hand, I also suspect Sturgeon’s Law—”90% of everything is crap”—is optimistic.  And since, over time, a sort of Darwinian winnowing occurs, while what people still read from 5 or 50 (much less 500) years ago may indeed be dated, it’s also likely to be better than most of what you can pull off the ‘new and noteworthy’ table today.

So, for the time being, I’m trying to hoe a middle road: I’m still working through the endless list of all the great works I’ve somehow missed, but alternating them with the most promising of current releases.  Because, with apologies to Sartre, it seems to me that it’s choosing solely one or the other that would be bananas.