Over the last few years of being a teacher, I have asked a lot of students to read mountains of pages that most Americans would see as a breaking of the Eighth Amendment. Some have balked at my requests. Some have silently refused them. Some have been brave enough to protest my requirements. While some teachers would like to simply strap the student to the chair and force feed them the sauerkraut, I would rather give an apology.
For starters, the journey is just as important as the destination. If the Odyssey was just the story about Odysseus getting home, sacking the suitors, and winning his wife, it would cease to be an epic. The TEN-YEAR-JOURNEY is part of what makes it fantastic. While I hope that none of my students have to trick cyclops in order to finish my homework, the work of merely reading one of the Great Books is a great work. It is something to be commended. It is a trial and a task worthy of toasting with a flagon of mead or at least a conversation over good bread and hard cheese. Jim Kwik, who wrote the book Limitless, often calls reading a superpower and I fully agree with him. Reading is transformative unlike few other actions. It takes time though, like water dripping through a rock. Most of the time it is gradual change. Other times, a single book can shift a paradigm like the Missoula Flood. You’ll never know what change awaits you lying in the pressed corpse of a tree if all it does is collect dust on your shelf. Make some clouds as you flick through its rings. There will be wisdom in there.
Not all corpses are the same though. It does greatly matter what sorts of things you allow to wear through the rock of your heart and soul. There are many graveyards through the world and only a few of them are filled with great men. Many may be good, but only few are great. Your time on earth is finite, no matter how slowly my class feels like it is crawling. While the mind can be trained to hold a seemingly endless number of ideas, what goes in sticks and clogs like the arteries of a man preparing for his first quadruple bypass. A young man may be able to run a marathon upon a box of donuts, but given a few more decades, he will only be fit to flop onto the futon. The Great Books were not put together by some happy accident within a print shop. Adler did not get together with Nobel with a bottle of ink and POOF, there it was. Rather, it is a collection of books that lasted throughout history. They are the books that changed the souls of men before us. They shifted peoples’ paradigms in ways that only a good book can. They talk and argue over things that matter — like love, law, and liberty and how these all fit under God with truth, beauty, and goodness. They are all part of a conversation that has been taking place since the beginning of recorded history. By reading these works, you are stepping into the river of that conversation and shaking hands with Plato or Archimedes or Dante. Cigars and whiskey are an appropriate consumption while reading because that is what is done with old friends. Tea and cookies are also sometime called for, depending on the time of day.
Now, you may say that you don’t like the taste of Lagavulin, the leaves of Longbottom, a cup from Betsy or Turkish Delight. You might say that Plato is boring, Archimedes was wrong, or that Dante was a heretic, and while you may be true in fact, you are lost in the woods. You have veered off the path and are upset with someone who is calling you back before the wolves get you. I just finished Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon yesterday and he gives the example of someone going to the Louvre and not thinking much of the paints there. The response in his example is that “the paintings are not on trial, you are” (pg. 94). Books that have shaped the world are not here for YOU to judge. They are here to shape your soul. You are the rock. They are the water. Holding onto your old thoughts and ideas are merely clogging your heart. These works and ideas must be wrestled with. Be like Israel.
All this to say, the next time a tome is thrust upon you, greet it like an old friend who is there to help you, not as an enemy. All these men are dead. They have no real teeth left in them. You do though. Sharpen your teeth like a dog on a rope, pulling and fighting like it is life or death, and loving it all the way. Go chew an old tree.