dead poets' society

"Both Mandelstam and Akhmatova had the astonishing ability of somehow bridging time and space when they read the work of dead poets. By its very nature, such reading is usually anachronistic, but with them it meant entering into personal relations with the poet in question; it was a kind of conversation with someone long since departed." Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope.

I'm not buying the "usually anachronistic" part -- curious what others -- you there -- not you, Macaca, but you in the white t-shirt and burkha, think. Seems to me the point of reading things that are worth reading as in, you're gone, lost, out of mind and body for as long as you are immersed, which can include times when the book is just sitting there and you are rollerblading, sandblasting, or whatever it is you do when not reading.

le uscìo di bocca e con sì dolci note,
che fece me a me uscir di mente;

That is to say, the experience of "a good book" can rival or exceed the intimacy you think you have with your dear ones. Which latter relations could indeed offer some interesting resemblances to certain of the books you've read.

No, anachronistic would not be the word I'd use, unless to describe what the quotiddly self can seem to one who happens to be reading something pretty good. Some books remain distant cousins on first, second, nth readings, but then somehow, with the "conversation" underway, you're now putting your thoughts where and surely how the text puts its thoughts, less of a conversation than a putting on of the idea and of its fashion, taking in and being taken, discovering the wonderings it has are those you seemed to have but didn't know how to ask, back when your mind worked at all, that then of your mind voiced now and then in the now of the book that then can be an anachrony, a summoning of your dispersed wits to play with a fuller deck, filling and fitting out this ghost you cap-a-pe in volumes of attitude, graces of diction, cadences of logic, where you "live" when not engaged in podcasting, sandblasting, or piano tuning, though some of the best conversations with and about dead poets can be had during these activities of the allegedly living citizen-at-large.

"This would probably have been understood by Keats, who wanted to meet all his friends, living and dead, in a tavern," says Nadezhda Mandelstam.

чуть-чуть, Za Vas!