Great Books
“Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one ‘hegemonic discourse’ in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead.” ― David Denby, Great Books
I have been reading and discussing the Great Books for more than thirty years with fellow readers in various groups and classes. I recently returned to a book I read more than twenty years ago by David Denby, a prominent film critic. He had returned to the Ivy League classroom to consider the Great Books as a front-line correspondent on the culture wars.
Denby spent an academic year attending Columbia University's famous "core curriculum'' classes in the great books, "Literature, Humanities, and Contemporary Civilization". He recreates his experience of reading, pondering, and discussing classic texts from the ancient Greeks (Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Euripides, and Sappho) to Nietzsche, Freud, and Conrad, all the time maintaining and meditating on his intensely cosmopolitan yet family-centered life. When Denby reads Plato and Aristotle, or for that matter Austen, he contemplates how the "media fog" to which he contributes as a film critic envelops his fellow students; when he reads Woolf, or for that matter Virgil, he considers the transformations wrought in his own lifetime by feminism. He makes a sensible, if gloomy, argument that the Great Books are too hard for today's underprepared and thus overwhelmed undergraduates. Needless to say, based on my own experience, I reject his epiphanies over a feminist critique of Aristotle's Politics. By recording his own intellectual experiences while glossing over his own cultural blindness he does a disservice to those texts he critiques.
Rather than distilling some of the significant ideas of the great thinkers that he read he merely tosses off a rejection of "ideologues" in general with lines like this:"By the end of my year in school, I knew that the culture-ideologues, both left and right, are largely talking nonsense."(p 459) This conclusion may have a grain of truth, but I would rather hear what he learned about knowing and thinking, what lessons still have meaning in the twentieth and twenty-first century, and what truths he discovered that our culture still adheres to with justification.
While he does put himself on the line as a student and as a person by actually reading the classics, his humility should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. At the risk of being too skeptical, based on my own reading of these texts, I found this an unconvincing look at the classics. I would recommend you read the original classics - the Great Books - with an open mind and then, if you choose to, consider Denby's book.
Books from my Parents' Library
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Before I was born and continuing after I arrived along with my sister (two years later) my parents had a small library in the home where we were raised. This library consisted of bookshelves that spread along one wall of our living room; shelves that were filled with books from my earliest memory. These books formed a not insignificant part of my reading from my earliest days - they were the source of such early reads as the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and more. As I grew older and read more I remember my first encounters with Treasure Island and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. I became a life-long fan of Stevenson's writing, but above all I still keep and cherish an age-worn copy of A Child's Garden of Verses because it was one of my mother's books from when she was a very young girl. It was from those shelves that I experienced my first taste of horror and speculative fiction with Edgar Allan Poe and dipped my toe into the world of Dante whom I do not claim to have understood on my first encounter. What I could understand a bit better was the development of Jane Eyre from her terrible days in boarding school to her romantic encounters with Mr. Rochester, or Carol Kennicott and the events on Main Street depicted by Sinclair Lewis. Along the reading way I acquired my own bookshelves in my bedroom. It was here I began my own collection of classics like Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain, The Jungle Books of Kipling, and a collection of biographies of scientists and inventors like Michael Faraday, George Washington Carver, and Thomas Edison.
Later in my teen years I opened a tome that changed my life, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand whose heroic architect, Howard Roark, was among the heroes that I admired in my reading. Heroes like Roark included Edmond Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas' novel was a book I read as part of my school reading which augmented that program of reading that already had a sturdy foundation built at home. There were other books for school including Willa Cather's My Antonia, Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and the wonderful tale of immigrants, Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag. These and many more as my reading for school expanded in high school and University.
My sister and I both spent many hours at the local library, The Matheson Memorial Library, in our home town. It was there that we encountered many other authors and books that we enjoyed reading. I first met Philip Carey on those shelves as Somerset Maugham's tale Of Human Bondage mesmerized me much as Jane Eyre had some years earlier. The library books were a luxury that we could afford because they were free for us to read and make our own. This was all part of a reading life that began in the home and did not stop, but continued during our school years as an independent and important part of our lives. With all of our reading, in school, in the library, in the park and around town, and the reading that continues to this day, both my Sister and I continue to live in homes that are filled with books. Because our love of reading had its start in the home of our parents with their library of books that they read and cherished as well.
