People do not know what it costs in time and effort to learn to read.
I needed eighty years for this and I’m not even able to say if I have succeeded.
~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe to his student Eckermann
In 1865, Gustave Doré - one of the most magnificent illustrators who ever lived - told his mother of a list of books that he wanted to illustrate in the next few decades of his life.
Doré was a magician who possessed the secret recipe for an elixir that granted anyone who drank it the chance to approach the pantheon of great minds. The recipe is simple: if you want to become great, you must also be ready to wrestle with the great. Doré’s list included literary heavyweights that spanned two millennia. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Dante’s Divine Comedy; from Plutarch’s Lives to Montaigne’s Essays. His plan for the next few decades of his life was ambitious, to say the least.
Anyone who has seen Doré’s pieces for Dante’s Inferno or the Old Testament knows that they are not merely great additions to these stories, but they tell their own tales. His engravings bewitch us with their sublime atmosphere. Our metaphorical magician understood that illustrations are not merely supplements to a literary text; great illustrations are texts themselves, written with a brush.
I could write an entire book about Doré’s unique style of illustration but let’s go back to the list that he had dictated to his mother. What fascinated me about it is not only his exceptional taste in literature (the works he selected will be remembered not just in centuries but in millennia); not only the diversity of genres that the list possesses (from poetry, history, essays, plays, epics, tragedies, comedies); what fascinated me the most in this list is that he envisaged and planned his life for the next three decades.
While today's self-help gurus advise us to envision where we want to be in five years, Doré crafted a plan for what he wanted to create over the next thirty years. The books he selected captured his attention and imagination for the rest of his life. Sadly, he composed the list when he was thirty-three years old and passed away at the age of 52.
