to be an ass...a golden ass

The only test of a work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.
- Gerald Brenan

Ah, reading, that thing that writers often forget to do (much like poets who seldom read poetry). It would be like asking a chef to learn how to cook without ever eating or telling someone to learn how to be a great pilot without ever stepping foot into a plane. It's weird and a little awkward. Like getting onstage to play guitar when you've never picked up a guitar. Or even - enough analogies?

Point is, you should read. When I was younger, like really little, I read all the time. I entered every reading competition there was and shook my fist at the person who capped the reading entry per day at 2 books for the library's summer reading competition (still a little bitter). It should've been survival of the fittest, those who could read 3, 4, even 6 books a day would triumph! Not only those stinkers who read 2 measly chapter books a day and religiously made it to the library every afternoon (even though I did, abiding by the rules, and won several times - so there).

But as the years progressed, and school became more tedious, my love of reading went as well, as it became more laborious and time-consuming. During a long reading break, the only thing I read, but gladly, was Lord of the Flies, still one of my favorite books.

Fortunately, I've since snapped out of the reading fog. College helped somewhat, and graduate school has continued what was started during my years as an English major.

For the past few months, as you know, I have been reading Don Quixote, seemingly the biggest book ever with the littlest words. And for the past three weeks, I have been immersed in Lucius Apuleius' novel, The Golden Ass. Written in the 2nd century AD and influential to a countless number of writers, genres, works, and studies, both as a piece of literature as well as a look at Greek and Roman history, it has proven to be as fantastic as my father has been telling me it is since forever.

Basically, the story goes like this: Lucius, the main character (which just so happens to be the author's name as well), travels to Thessaly in Greece, notoriously known as a haven of black magic. While he's there, he engages in an affair with a slave girl, Fotis, and desires to learn the ways of her lady's black art. One thing leads to another, and the next thing he knows he's smothering himself in a potion that he thinks will turn him into an owl, an animal associated with wisdom. As it turns out, when he starts trying to flap his "wings" only to find out he's grown hooves, Fotis realizes that instead of giving him the turning-into-owl potion, she gave him the turning-into-donkey potion.

www.jnanam.net/golden-ass/apuleius.html

And who hasn't had that happen to them before!

Thus begins the adventures of Lucius, the ass, as he embarks on a dangerous, painful, and unwilling journey from cruel masters to even crueler masters. Full of fantasy, enchantment, intrigue, irony, humour, wit, and interpolated stories, the novel delves into the world of the lower classes, with Lucius, a former young member of the aristocracy turned into a beast of burden, as the eyes and ears of the reader. In the end, he is redeemed by the goddess Isis, who helps him find the healing potion he has been waiting all season for - roses.

You have to read it. You'll love it, I know it. The only thing is, you might find it, as I did, slightly more than disturbing just how everything that happens in the novel and the people you meet are so similar to things that happen and people we all know today. Anger, jealousy, sadness, cruelty, nervousness, dishonesty, gossip, hubris, greed, class differences - not much has changed. Two thousand years ago or yesterday, it's all so very similar. And while no one should be too surprised, it just brings the point even closer home when you read it all in a novel written in Roman times.

Fortunately, for the reader anyway, Lucius Apuleius presents it all with humor, grace, and honesty. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you might even fall out of your seat - but most important, you'll never look at a donkey the same way again.