Dream Days (Kenneth Grahame, 1898) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 2/3)

There's something to be said for sequels.  While they might be seen by some as derivative, and there's always the sideways glance and comment that "it's not as good as the first one", the best sequels build on the groundwork laid by their predecessors and use it as a springboard to explore different grounds.

Kenneth Grahame's first 'big hit' work, The Golden Age, was a meditation on his own childhood, raised by "The Olympians" who took him and his siblings in after his mother's death.  It explored the childhood mindsets and world that he had grown up in, giving anecdotes of how that childhood life of whimsy and indifference toward adult concerns manifested itself, though without any particular degree of sentimentality; the narrator is quite aware of the things he does that get him in trouble, he simply didn't understand at the time that they were going to be problems.

The second of the pieces collected in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame is the follow-up, Dream Days.  This work shares the setting and characters with its predecessor (though the oldest brother, sent off to boarding school at the end of the previous work, only appears from afar, mentioned in flashback and in the form of letters sent home from school), but takes an altogether different approach to the childhood events, for much of the piece.

This work has longer chapters than The Golden Age, allowing each flight of fancy to be given more room to breathe, and Grahame uses this space to engage in a rather focused way on the realm of daydreams.  This brings along with it an entirely different sense to the work, where each story, rather than being about the little encroachments of whimsy on the reality of a child's life, instead goes so far as to override everything about the world, and engage entirely in that fantasy world.  Several stories actively seek to ignore the world outside of this imaginary space entirely, building to a chapter featuring an entire original fairy-tale, not featuring any of the known characters at all, before coming back to harsh reality in the final story.

The largest theme, then, is the place of imaginary landscapes and settings in the child's world.  The second chapter, for example, begins within reality; the narrator explains how, on this particular day, everyone around him was in a bad mood and that put him in a bad mood as well, so he decided to just start walking outside and let his mind wander.  From there, it jumps into a series of brief fantasies, where the narrator is considering what he might run away and do to make those around him realize how much he means, through his absence.  These are all examples of the sort of adventure yarns that might be seen in children's adventure stories; he imagines running off to join the army and become a great general, or becoming a cabin boy and working his way up to be a pirate captain, or even going to a monastery and becoming a monk, just to spite them.  This obviously misses the deeper, more spiritual reasons behind someone taking up the monastic life, but much of the depth involved in these fantasy-minded escapes is missed in the childhood whims, shaped as they are by what books he has read and stories he has heard but little else besides.

From this establishment of the realms of imagination as a focus, Grahame begins to explore the various ways that the imagination can be shaped, used as both a way to bridge two minds together and to simply add to what one has at their disposal, and how it can serve as an escape when necessary.  The following chapter features the narrator discovering the dangers of inviting someone you don't know into your imaginary world without considering how their own imagination and desires might shape that world.  While some of the daydreamscapes explored in Dream Days are shared with the narrator's siblings, this one instance where an outsider is invited in is almost devastating, given just how different the thought processes of the girl in question are.

Each chapter, then, focuses on a new sort of exploration of this general theme.  One chapter features the thought of using artwork as a window into a whole imaginary world of what happens in the background, then leads from there into the narrator encountering an illuminated manuscript with new wonders on every page, allowing him to venture deeper and deeper into an imagined setting.  Another details an instance where, after offending a guest with his childish behavior, he is sent into the nursery to keep out of everyone's hair, and imagines an entire high-seas adventure for himself while sitting in a child's bath placed atop a towel-horse (thus able to emulate the sense of swaying on the seas as it wobbles).

The longest chapter, and perhaps the best-known piece out of these two books about this somewhat-idealized English childhood, is the aforementioned fairy tale, "The Reluctant Dragon," perhaps best-known now for the short-subject contained within the same-titled Disney 'behind the scenes' film from the 1940s.  This chapter starts out looking much like any other, firmly within reality; the children are playing in the garden, find what one of them is sure must be dragon tracks, and they follow the tracks until they end in a neighbor's garden.  Upon explaining their intrusion to the neighbor, he offers to walk them back home, and tells them the fairy tale during their walk.

And what a delightful fairy tale it is, too!  Written with the same combination of childish whimsy and erudite sensibility that is displayed elsewhere in this pair of books, the story turns everything that might be understood about the typical tale of an English dragon in the countryside, complete with St. George on hand to fight it, on its head.  The dragon has never been in a fight in his life, always letting the other dragons do that; he's rather more an aesthete, preferring to laze about and compose poetry and appreciate the countryside for what it is.  Of course, the nearby townsfolk, with the exception of one boy who befriends the dragon, don't want to have anything to do with it; after all, dragons are "a pestilential scourge" and don't belong near civilized towns at all, so they send for help to remove it, in the form of St. George himself.  It comes down to the boy to act as a negotiator and talk some sense into both sides of the impending fight, and reach an end result that makes everyone happy without any particular bloodshed.

All good things must eventually end, though, and the final story in the book, after the particular high point of the dragon's mock battle with the knight, seems almost more of a eulogy to childhood than anything else.  This story deals with the day where the youngest of the children is deemed by The Olympians to be 'too big for those kind of toys any longer', and the resultant nighttime mission by the two youngest, along with the narrator, to recover just a few particularly cherished keepsakes from the crate due to be shipped to a children's hospital in faraway London.

Even after the rescue goes without a hitch, though, the children have an altogether different intention than keeping the toys for themselves.  Rather than bringing the toys back to the house, where they would likely be quickly found and subjected to the same fate they were rescued from, the three children instead go to a spot they're particularly fond of escaping to when they need some time to just be children, and dig a grave to bury the toys, acknowledging that their days of being played with are over, but also feeling that it's better for their most cherished toys to have never ended up in the hands of children who wouldn't have the same built-up sense of value for them, and that their continued future play on the same spot would let those toys remain as part of the proceedings in spirit, if not as participants.

This ends up being the note on which we leave Grahame's childhood memories and meditations; after Dream Days, he didn't return to these characters, instead moving to other topics.  And so, we must also move on from these children being raised in their Arcadian surroundings, but even in this final act of solemnity, so different from the rest of these two books, there's something important being stated.  Even when we grow up, it's important to hang onto those fragments of innocence and fancy, lest we become as ill-humored and unable to engage with anything but the most serious and purely rational topics as The Olympians; we have to keep that little bit of childhood whimsy buried inside ourselves, always there to draw on, even into adulthood, to help us to take a step back from the real world when we need it.

The Golden Age (Kenneth Grahame, 1895) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 1/3)

I'm sure everyone's seen or read something that makes use of the idyllic, semi-generic rural childhood setting.  You know the one, where everyone lives in either big manor houses or small cottages, and the children run around willy-nilly and get into all kinds of mischief and live in a half-fantasy world where their imaginations get them into all sorts of wild adventures with no real risk involved, and just across that hedge over there is a farmer's field and there's a little village down the way and the grown-ups are all serious and lack proper senses of humor because they just don't understand what's really important in life the way that the children do.

So, what happens if we take that setting, drop a few children into it to have the requisite low-stakes adventures, but then write it with an adult sensibility and sense of diction?

Well, we get some of Kenneth Grahame's works, for one.

Grahame got his start as a writer with pieces written for newspapers in the late Victorian era, a combination of short stories and meditations on life and the simple joys that one can find.  These were mostly collected in a volume called Pagan Papers, which is not at hand for me to read but I may be seeing if I can track it down later.  One particular one of these meditations, "The Olympians," focused on the difference between the priorities of the adults who raised him after his mother died, and those of he and his siblings who were in their care.  After one of his editors asked him to write more like that, he put out several of the 17 stories that made up The Golden Age, though most of the book was original at the time of its publication.  A sequel, Dream Days, followed; I'll be writing about that later.

So, what is it that we're actually looking at, here?  In large part, it's a very grounded set of tales about five siblings growing up in the English countryside and the little games they play with one another.  It's never fully laid-out, but I got the sense when reading that the oldest of the group was maybe nine or ten years old.  There's a sort of timeless sense about it all; the narrator (who seems positioned as a self-insert of the author, without any name ever given) seems to be the third of the five.  The stories seem to take place across about a year and a half of time, shifting lazily from season to season.  Some feature the narrator alone, others some or all of the group, but there's always a touch of ethereal quality to the events, as if the imaginations are layered atop reality in a way that makes them have a slight ability to actually be interacted with.

The central theme, though, is the disconnect between the children and adults.  Grahame's narrator is very in tune with nature, and knows that the most important parts of his world are the ones that he directly interacts with, whether that's the wind, guiding him through the countryside in the first story, or the small rivers that lead to several adventures directly into fantasy; sneaking under a fence in one case leads to a quiet Downton Abbey-like garden, which must clearly belong to a sleeping princess (who is, of course, on hand), while temporarily stealing a farmer's boat in order to play at Jason and the Argonauts leads to the discovery of a young Medea of sorts in the garden of another nearby manor.

There's a sense to the whole piece that Grahame is lamenting the loss of innocence that comes with growing up.  The children as a group get up to all kinds of mischief, but there are also moments where the reality of the world somewhat gets the best of them; one story features their governess leaving, and the children don't seem to quite understand why they feel so sad about it, and the final story deals with the looming departure to boarding school of the oldest of the siblings, with a conclusion that implies that the change from child to 'Olympian' adult comes with that separation from the childhood setting.

Not all adults fit into this 'Olympian' mode, however.  One chapter, which starts as a meditation on the old Roman roadways that still cross the British countryside, features a discussion between the narrator and an artist who seems clearly like-minded, regarding a fantastic 'perfect' city that's where all the spare suitors in fairy tales and minor knights in Arthurian legends end up after the stories; in another case, the 'sleeping beauty' garden's princess has already been 'awoken' by a suitor, but both of them are more than willing to play along with the young boy's surety that he's walked into a fairy tale.  Another time, it goes the opposite way; the children getting into mischief in the night convinces the new tutor that the house is haunted and sends him fleeing the next morning, to sell his story to a supernatural-themed tabloid.

It's clear from reading this that Grahame felt that there's something important in a child's experience of the world, and the sensibility that comes from a more innocent view of the world and what's really important.  Fairyland lies behind every hedge, around every corner, if one simply knows where to look.  The fact that this book was a particular favorite of both Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II (in the latter case, it was the only book, aside from the Bible, that he kept on his private yacht) perhaps speaks to something of the personalities of both leaders.  There's a lot to be said for keeping a bit of that sense of whimsy and wonder; every adult who comes across in a positive way over the course of this book is someone who retains some aspect of that, whether that's playing along with a child's fantasy or simply letting kids be kids.  And really, that seems to be the core message at work here: there's something special about a child's view of the world, and more of us might do well to let a bit of that view in.

The Pillow Book (Sei Shōnagon, ca.995-1010)

 

There's a reputation that particularly old literature starts to gain, to the effect of 'It wouldn't have staying power if it wasn't dry and serious and somewhat socially-conscious of its time.'  And it's true, many of the examples of ancient works that we have fit that to a certain extent.  There are, after all, rather a lot of histories and biographies that have come to us from Greece and Rome.  Shakespeare has some remarkably fun comedies, but with the classics, he's considered something of an outlier.  He's the Bard of Avon, of course he's something special.

So let's just push that thought aside, right now.  There's plenty of lighter fare available in literature, even if it's centuries old, and I found one example, right here.  The Pillow Book is witty, light-hearted, and... well, social consciousness doesn't seem quite the intention here, but it's an utterly delightful read.

Written by a member of the court of the Empress Taishi, the first consort of Emperor Ichijō, this is a somewhat rambling work, happy to change directions with little warning, relate humorous anecdotes in whatever order they happened to come to mind, and generally acts like, well...  sort of a Heian miscellany, really.  There are lists of things that Sei Shōnagon finds to be beautiful, things that she finds distasteful, names of places and flowers and birds that are of poetic significance, and numerous incidents within the tiny, insular world of the Empress's court, all of which are positive in some way.

From the very start, Sei intended this to be anything but a serious work.  The story related in the text is that Taishi received a gift of paper similar to that being used by the Emperor's court engaging in the copying of a Chinese manuscript, and while debating over what to write on such fine paper, Sei suggested, "a pillow," at which point the stack of paper was passed to her to do just that.  There's some lost-in-translation-and-time pun work going on here, but the translator suggests that because the specific work being copied in the Emperor's court was "Shiki" (The Records of the Grand Historian, Shiji in Chinese), and "shiki" also refers to the 'mattress' part of a futon setup, the obvious pairing with that would be a pillow.

There's a lot of this stuff in here, homophones and poetry making reference to other poetry and...  I genuinely wish I was in a position to be able to appreciate all of what's going on in the poetry, because there's a lot of context that is lost simply because English can't elegantly do some of the things that classical Japanese could.  There's just over 100 pages of notes and appendices in the back to help with cultural and lost-in-translation things; it's actually very helpful, given the sheer cultural distance between the author and myself, across 1000 years and an ocean.

All that said, the combination of what was provided as the appendices and the sheer skill in Meredith McKinney's translation brings the images forward marvelously.  Sei has a particular affinity in describing clothing, focusing on the colors, patterns, and combinations thereof in the outfits worn by everyone around her.  There's a whole appendix devoted to giving illustrations of what courtly wear looked like (which was very useful for me; the Heian era predates the ubiquitous kimono so often seen in depictions of Japanese culture, which would have led me to very different mental images) and what the various poetically-named combinations given in the text actually mean in terms of the colors involved.

There are also a number of frankly splendid passages written in the second person, translated in present-tense (the implication being that the original was doing the same thing), describing a particular event in great detail.  This has the effect of letting a suitably-receptive reader experience the setting mentally, and I found these sections to be one of the best uses of second-person narration that I've encountered outside of interactive fiction.

What stands out for me the most in having read this, though, isn't the lists, or the descriptions (as delightful as the anecdotes are), or even the intimate descriptions of Sei's life within the court and her time as one of Taishi's favorite companions, and the entertainments that they devise for themselves.  Rather, it's the way that literature, and waka poetry specifically, is the very lifeblood of interactions between members of the nobility in this time.  If a gentleman spends the night with a lady, when he returns home afterward, he immediately sends a messenger with a poem, and the expectation that she will send a poem in return.  Poetry competitions are a recurring aspect of courtly life, both in structured situations and simply as a way for members of the Palace bureaucracy to engage in small flirtations with the cloistered women of Taishi's court.  Received poetry is shared between friends, responses carefully considered... it's almost like poetry in the Heian period was a spectator sport.

It's directly suggested in the text that Sei's position in Taishi's court is directly related to this literary sport.  She came from a family of poets, and her quick wit is brought up repeatedly as a great asset, often able to craft responses to poetic challenges that are difficult for the gentlemen on the other side of the exchange to top.  She's well-read, and knows her way around the Chinese classics that were essential reading for gentlemen of the courts, but as that kind of knowledge was considered somewhat uncouth for a lady, she has to come up with ways to subtly allude to the stories in conversation without making it clear that she's referring to them specifically.

This doesn't mean she's perfect, however.  There are multiple times that she tells about her difficulties in writing in more structured ways, and several times she brings up times that she worded things poorly, and was suitably chastised as a result.  She's also very much a product of her specific culture; there are numerous times where she writes that she's not fond of commoners, for a variety of reasons, and several times where she does things that seem downright mean (in one particularly cold-hearted passage, she describes how, in response to a commoner who was audibly depressed that his house had burned down as part of a huge blaze that destroyed an Imperial grain storage house, she gave the illiterate man a poem, implied that it was a promissory note, and told him go off to find someone who could tell him what it said as she was just too busy at that moment and was being called by the Empress).  Several times, her wit results in friendships and relationships being destroyed, as well; it may not be a huge surprise that Sei's literary rival, Murasaki Shikibu (who served in the court of Empress Shōshi, Ichijō's second consort), wrote in a decidedly unflattering way about Sei in her own diaries, albeit while respecting her wit and writing skills.

All in all, I'm glad to have read this.  It made for a very cozy read during a power outage, and I find myself rather wishing that I knew of anything else quite like it for me to keep on hand for when I need a bit of a cooldown after other, decidedly heavier tomes.

The largest book on my shelf, and one that's very much impending on my 'The Longing' reading list, is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père.  I don't know how heavy of a read that one is going to be prose-wise, but it's over 1300 pages and I know I'm going to need some lighter, shorter fare after that.  I think I'm going to stay light-hearted for the moment and go read some children's literature first, though.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883-1885)

Nietzsche. It’s one of those names that gets thrown around whenever someone wants to ‘explain’ a particularly potent case of sociopathy, someone who thinks they can get away with doing things with impunity. The two murderers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, inspired by real-life murderers Leopold and Loeb, use his writings as an excuse for why they choose to hold a dinner party for their victim’s family, with the body in a trunk in the same room. It’s proof that they’re übermenschen, Supermen, they say. They even invite the professor who introduced them to Nietzsche’s writings because they think he’ll be impressed that they’ve taken to his teachings so well.

That… really isn’t what Thus Spoke Zarathustra is trying to do, though.

Admittedly, I’m not certain precisely what it actually is trying to do, but I think I’ve at least managed to suss out the general shape of it. This might be the toughest read I’ve yet encountered in here, just from a sheer ideaspace standpoint.

---

A good starting place might be to address the writing style. Nietzsche is generally known for a certain succinct quality to his writing, choosing words to make his thoughts as plain as possible. This is very much not that; rather, we’re looking at something akin to the writer channeling Walt Whitman’s mindset and “sounding [his] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Zarathustra is exuberant in his desire to sound his ideas and opinions, to teach his philosophy to the people, to make sure that everyone knows that “God is dead,” and that the age to come will be the age of the Superman.

That Zarathustra’s ideals are laughed down by the masses, saying that they would rather become like Zarathustra’s “Ultimate Man,” who lives a life of luxury and relaxation without any strife or anything to trouble them, and which stands opposed to the Superman. Despairing, he goes in search of people who will be more receptive to his ideas.

Reading this right after The Time Machine, I couldn’t help but think that the Ultimate Man feels like the predecessor to the Eloi, but I doubt the two are related. However, the idea that the Ultimate Man represents the, well… ultimate endpoint of human desires for comfort and relaxation, leads directly in that direction.

The work as a whole is separated into four sections, each being one of the four volumes that Nietzsche published in the 1880s. The first gives the initial explanations of the Superman/Ultimate Man dichotomy, explains the differences and gives the general shape of the Superman; the second features Zarathustra expanding on his teachings to his disciples; the third is Zarathustra’s journey to return home after leaving the disciples, and commentary on the world and cultures as he travels; and the fourth concerns a group of pilgrims searching for Zarathustra because they are ‘Higher Men’ who believe themselves to be in a position to become somehow better.

The most important takeaway may be the specific way that Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, suggests that we get to the world in which the Superman can exist. Multiple times throughout the book, he describes Man as being a bridge of sorts, between the animal and the Superman. Man has, through sheer force of will, what is described as will to power, ascended to be the pinnacle of what animals can be. This will to power is defined as one of the primary characteristics of the Superman, that he is more interested in shaping his world than in even his own life. The Superman has no fear of self-injury, no outside influence shaping what he wants to create, nothing stopping him from pursuing the challenges he desires, or what he wants to do with himself. He is above all but his own desire to rule himself, living selfishly above all else.

The aphorisms offered as ways of explaining what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for the Superman’s world are perhaps a little hard to wrap one’s mind around, on first glance. We are told that pride is a great sin, but vanity isn’t. Charity is bad, because it is giving in to other people’s desires; in the world of the Superman, there are no beggars, even if some might be wealthier in certain ways than others. Chastity is bad, because it in fact inflames lusts. Conventional wisdom as to what are Good and Evil are turned on their heads, because those ideas are tied in with religion and, after all, “God is dead.” He brings this up repeatedly. God is dead, and will be replaced with the new Superman, who makes his own choices about what is right and what is wrong.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Nietzsche’s Superman, though, is the concept of what happens after life. Zarathustra very openly decries any belief in an afterlife, instead preaching the concept of the eternal recurrence, where one’s entire life repeats infinitely, forever, such that if one hopes for a particular moment to come repeatedly, they must accept the entirety of their life doing such. The Superman, by Zarathustra’s explanation, lives a life such that every second of their life, both the high points and the low points, is a moment that they would gladly experience again, eternally. They have no regrets.

Zarathustra teaches that no man can become the Superman. It’s something to aspire to, to reach for, but not to attain. Rather, the goal of all people must be to create the world in which the Superman can exist, and this requires a tearing-down of religious thought, a complete rethinking of conventional morality, and apparently a great deal of solitude and living in the mountains as hermits, as any life surrounded by others invites the thoughts and desires of others, and the potential desire to submit to others’ needs. This is a big point: there is no submission of any sort for the Superman. The Superman is thus almost a sort of mythic hero, doing what he desires for the sake of doing it, rather than because he was told to. Even the powerful Hercules was not a Superman, because he feels remorse for what he did in a drunken rage and submits to complete the impossible labours assigned to him.

The one thing most explicitly described as a sin, and indeed the greatest sin in Zarathustra’s mind, is pity. Taking pity upon others is against the ideal of the Superman, because if you take pity, you are submitting your feelings to those of the misfortunate, feeling shame because of the shame they feel for themselves; this is even stated to be the cause of God’s death, that he felt pity for the entire human race and shamed himself to death. The entire fourth book is devoted to this topic; Zarathustra walks the forest because he has heard what he believes to be a cry for help, and encounters a number of “Higher Men” who have come to seek his teachings. Over the course of the book, he guides them all to his cave, where they share a meal together and listen to his teachings, an event directly compared to the biblical Last Supper. During the evening, however, these men show that even where they claim to have cast off their shackles, they are unable to maintain this mindset for even the full evening; every time Zarathustra steps outside for a little fresh air, they relapse in some way, culminating in the entire group starting to worship an ass because a proper replacement for the God would have to be someone who is slow, stupid, and never says ‘no’.

Seriously, they start worshiping a literal pack-ass, because its braying sounds like ‘Ye-a’.

That Zarathustra is disappointed in them makes for quite an understatement; he verbally tears into the whole group, until they renounce the false idol before them. The ass, for its part, doesn’t seem to much care, though someone got it drunk so when the Dionysian revelries that ensue during the night begin, it dances right along with everyone else.

The work as a whole ends on a cliffhanger; apparently Nietzsche planned it out as six volumes, but only wrote four of them. Zarathustra spends the whole work talking of the pride of his eagle and the wisdom of his serpent; they are joined in the last few pages of the book by a lion who, in the prophet’s estimation, indicates that the time to return and preside over the noontide for his followers is at hand. The book simply ends there, though; what would have come is lost to time. We can only wonder what the creation of a world that follows the ideals of Zarathustra might have been, to bring about the Superman.

In any case, by the end of reading, I had a very specific idea of what the Nietzschean Superman looks like in mind, and it’s certainly not what the Nazis were trying to create when they got done reading this book in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

I see the Superman, as described here, as being one of those off-the-grid sorts, living out in the mountains, off the land, not because it’s easy, but because it’s a perpetual challenge for them. The only rules are those they make for themselves, because nobody else is around to enforce anything. They just live a solitary existence, enjoying their life to the fullest and answerable to nobody, because they’re above everyone, figuratively but also literally, living at the high altitides offered by, well… a mountain.

Basically, what I’m getting from all of this is that Nietzsche’s ideal Superman is a doomsday prepper.

The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895)

 

This is not science fiction.

I know everyone thinks it's science fiction.  It's cited as an early entry in the genre.  H.G. Wells, it is said, is the father of modern science fiction.

(I'd point more at Mary Shelley as the mother of the genre, but Wells certainly does fit the bill, through some of his other works.)

The thing is, though...  This is barely a science fiction book.  If anything, it's a class-conscious satire, a Utopian work in a the same genre as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but using a scientific framework based on then-current understandings of the world to hold it up and make its point.

The Metamorphoses (Publius Ovidius Naso, 8 CE)

One of the things that always stands out as a potential sticking point when dealing with any work of literature is the question of the language on display.  I don't mean the quality of the language, though that's certainly an aspect; rather, I mean the language the work was written in.

Let's take as an example the book I finished today, a 2000-year-old poem written in Caesar's Latin and focused on tracing the theme of transformation through the entirety of the Greco-Roman mythology, from the creation narrative all the way through the deification of Gaius Julius Caesar.  It's a long piece, covering both well-known and less-known stories, and including shortened and focused-in versions of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid.

There's basically two ways to go about reading this book.  Well, books; Ovid wrote it in 15 volumes, originally, but it's typically released as a single volume, now.  The option exists to read it in the original Latin, but one needs to be able to read Latin in order to do that.  There's plenty of words that look vaguely recognizable to an English-speaker, but if you're not fluent in the language, you'll be looking back and forth between The Metamorphoses, a Latin dictionary, and a guide to grammar, and all of the elegance that exists in the language is lost.

viribus absumptis expalluit illa citaeque
victa labore fugae spectans Peneidas undas
“fer, pater,” inquit “opem! sī flūmina nūmen habētis,
quā nimium placuī, mūtandō perde figūram!”
vix prece finitā torpor gravis occupat artūs,
mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro,
in frondem crinēs, in ramos bracchia crescunt,
pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret,
ora cacumen habet: remanet nitor unus in illa.

The alternative is to read it in translation.  This can be a bit of a touchy subject; there have been numerous translations of The Metamorphoses with different objectives in mind; Penguin Classics alone has three different ones that are maintained in print, with one being a prose translation by Mary Innes, another being a verse translation by David Raeburn, and the third being Arthur Golding's translation from 1567, the first translation of Ovid's work into English and certainly an influence on Shakespeare (this likely being where the Bard found the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, as depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream and retold with a changed setting as Romeo and Juliet, and located in Ovid's Book IV).

When faced with a vast array of translations, it can be hard to choose one to read.  When I decided I wanted to read this (based on encountering it in The Longing), the version immediately on offer was the 1727 version published by Samuel Garth, and translated by... rather a team, including John Dryden, William Congreve, and Alexander Pope.  This particular translation struck me as somewhat flawed; while there is poetry to be found here, the forced rhyming schemes combined with the way that spelling in the eighteenth century was more of a set of guidelines than any kind of hard-and-fast rules made it rather difficult for me to enjoy the content while part of my brain wanted to just scribble all over it with a red pen:

The nymph grew pale, and in a mortal fright,
Spent with the labour of so long a flight;
And now despairing, cast a mournful look
Upon the streams of her paternal brook;
Oh help, she cry'd, in this extreamest need!
If water Gods are deities indeed:
Gape Earth, and this unhappy wretch intomb;
Or change my form, whence all my sorrows come.
Scarce had she finish'd, when her feet she found
Benumb'd with cold, and fasten'd to the ground:
A filmy rind about her body grows;
Her hair to leaves, her arms extend to boughs:
The nymph is all into a lawrel gone;
The smoothness of her skin remains alone.

The translation I was able to find on short notice, in a quick local search of the thrift stores and used book stores, was that of Horace Gregory, currently published by Signet Classics.  This translation came out in the 1950s, and was far more readable, perhaps less poetic but also not forcing itself to try and rhyme lines that don't rhyme in the original Latin:

The girl saw waves of a familiar river,
Her father's home, and in a trembling voice,
Called, "Father, if your waters still hold charms
To save your daughter, cover with green earth
This body I wear too well," and as she spoke
A soaring drowsiness possessed her; growing
In earth she stood, white thighs embraced by climbing
Bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying
In a cloud of leaves; all that was Daphne bowed
In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green
Leaf twined within her hair and she was laurel.

When I was almost completely through, a third translation became available to me, as a copy that I had requested from the public library arrived, the 1990s translation by Allen Mandelbaum.  I really wish that this had been the one I was reading all along; from what I've perused of it, it feels like the best of the bunch (though obviously I haven't had a chance to see what any of the ones offered by Penguin look like, yet):

Exhausted, wayworn, pale, and terrified,
she sees Peneus' stream nearby; she cries:
"Help me, dear father; if the river-gods
have any power, then transform, dissolve
my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well!"
As soon as she is finished with her prayer,
a heavy numbness grips her limbs; thin bark
begins to gird her tender frame, her hair
is changed to leaves, her arms to boughs; her feet—
so keen to race before—are now held fast
by sluggish roots; the girl's head vanishes,
becoming a treetop.  All that is left
of Daphne is her radiance. 

These are all interpreting the same Latin passage, and obviously the same core meaning is there, but with somewhat different voices showing through the lens of translation.  Speaking as someone who doesn't actually have any functional knowledge of Latin beyond knowing root words that are used in English, all I have that I can base my understanding of Ovid's writing on is the translations on offer; as such, I have to go by the translation that feels the best to me, to judge which one best shows what the ancient poet's craft was actually putting forth.

With so many different ways to render the passage into English, it really ends up coming down to a question of what one wants.  With these ancient works, not just Metamorphoses but also those of Homer, Virgil, and the other ancient poets, you have your choice of old or new, verse or prose, workmanlike accuracy or lyrical flow, and this isn't even a problem that's limited to finding dead-tree books; Wikisource has two complete translations, two additional partial ones, and two more that they appear to be planning on putting up at some point.  Many more recent novels that are translated between languages only have one translation on offer, so a reader doesn't have to worry about this dilemma. But with these ancient works that have been translated repeatedly, well...  we're rather spoiled for choice now, and deciding which version to read can have some rather significant consequences for your enjoyment.

Even works originally in English are affected by this; Penguin offers both Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in prose, verse, and untranslated versions, the latter being the original unmodified text (in Beowulf's case, with a glossary and pronunciation notes provided on every page to help you with words you might not know).  I can handle Chaucer in the original, with a minimum of effort... but the last time I read Beowulf, it was an edition with side-by-side original and translated text, and...  English that far back has extra letters that we don't use anymore, and, well...

Hwæt! Wé Gárdena      in géardagum
þéodcyninga      þrym gefrúnon·
hú ðá æþelingas      ellen fremedon.

All that said, this is why I don't mind that my Penguin Classics collection has two different copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh.  But more on that on a later date.