Me and the Great Books

It’s no exaggeration to say that one of the most exciting moments of my life occurred at a church book sale in my hometown of Castro Valley, California, when I bought a set of the Great Books of the Western World for only thirty-five dollars. At the age of seventeen, I’d long been fascinated by the Great Books set in my high school library, with their uniform spines and the names of their authors enticingly lettered in gold: Homer, Lucretius, Plotinus, Augustine, not to mention Fourier, Faraday and two volumes of Gibbon. (Later, upon reviewing my own set, I noticed that the volumes for Darwin and Marx were missing, an omission that I note here without comment.) I’d always been a sucker for canons and reading lists, so I rashly vowed, in a column published in my high school newspaper, to read all fifty-four volumes in the two years before graduation. And indeed, for a while, I may have been the only high school junior in the country who was furtively reading Gibbon behind a textbook in calculus class.

More recently, it has become fashionable, in such books as Alex Beam’s A Great Idea at the Time, to dismiss the Great Books project as an inexplicable manifestation of mid-fifties middlebrow Americana. Certainly the set, with its rather prissy air of righteousness, is easy to mock, and there’s no denying the various ways in which it falls short: the complete lack of women; the poor translations of such authors as Virgil and Goethe, chosen mostly because they were in the public domain; the omission of such obvious choices as Martin Luther or Voltaire; the somewhat uninviting format, with its small type and double columns. (“It’s like reading the Bible!” one of my high school friends exclaimed.) There’s the curious Syntopicon, a compendium of what co-editor Mortimer J. Adler deemed to be the greatest ideas in history, from Angel to World, with its comically exhaustive subsections and page references to each of the set’s authors. And there’s the unfortunate fact, over which the editors had little control, that the sets were mostly hawked by traveling encyclopedia salesmen to families that probably never had much of an inclination to read Epictetus or Huygens.

All of these criticisms are fair enough. Yet when I look at my own set of the Great Books, which I recently had shipped from my parents’ garage to my new house in Oak Park, I’m struck above all else by the grandeur of the enterprise. Perhaps it’s because the idea of a publisher printing any set of fifty-four hardcover books, much less a collection like this, seems increasingly laughable these days. Or because the books themselves, now that the political and social circumstances of their origins have fallen away, seem nothing less than beautiful. Speaking from my own experience, I can say what while these books, in practice, may have seemed daunting to a casual reader, this is less important than what they promised to me in high school, and what they still promise today: a gateway into a world of ideas accessible to anyone with the patience to enter. It’s true that in many homes and libraries, these books may have been nothing but furniture, but for all their flaws, it’s hard for me to see them as anything less than what their editors meant them to be: a treasure hoard for the serious reader.

Needless to say, I didn’t end up reading all fifty-four volumes in the two years before I graduated. But over time, the Great Books, in their supposedly unreadable volumes, provided me with my first—and in some cases only—encounters with books and authors like Dante, Sophocles, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Gilbert’s On the Loadstone, William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, Gulliver’s Travels, Tom Jones, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Moby-Dick. (I still haven’t read all of Gibbon.) More importantly, the books set me on a path that eventually led to a summer program at St. John’s College, one of the few liberal arts institutions that still put the great books at the core of their curriculum, and ultimately to majoring in Classics. My experience has taught me that while the great books, in any form, have their limitations as the heart of one’s education, I haven’t found anything better. And now that these books are back in my life, I’m looking forward to discovering their riches again—as soon as I find Darwin and Marx.