My introduction to the Great Books

For middle and high school, I went to a Catholic school, run by Benedictine monks, called The Saint Anselm’s Abbey School. And every year, for the entirety of the tenth grade, every student was enrolled in a class called, I think, The Humanities. And in this class, a teacher named Dr. Charles Downey would school us on the evolution of Western cultural and artistic history, from Petrarch through Modernism.

There was art, music, literature, philosophy. And he basically taught us the names, the movements, and a little of the work. He had his own website that he made. And the class wasn’t easy, but it was basically about memorization: when he did quizzes and exams, he was only assessing whether we understood the facts that he himself had taught us.

Dr. Downey started with the Italian Renaissance. I remember Petrarch was the beginning. Then there was Dante. Then at some point there were other Renaissances—the English Renaissance seemed to happen pretty late. Like, a lot of other countries had their Renaissances already, and England was just catching up in like the 1500s. But by the time they’d only half gotten going, it was already time for the Baroque.

After that, new artistic movements come a lot quicker. There’s the Neo-classical, Romantic, Realist, Impressionist, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism and all kinds of other stuff—towards the end, the new movements are coming at a rate of one every five years or so, very dizzying, considering we started with that fidgety, creaky 400-year-long Renaissance.

Anyway, the class ended around 1930, and which feels like a good amount to cover in a single year.

What’s funny is that this school had no equivalent class that covered the Greek and Roman period! I think Dr. Downey had a PhD in Music, with a specialty in medieval music, and he wasn’t as conversant with the classical past (and maybe not as personally interested). If he had been, then he could’ve surely sold this school on a classical version of The Humanities.

We did learn a fair amount about the classical past, but not systematically. Latin was required at this school—I took six years of Latin. But they didn’t necessarily teach us about the Pre-Socratics, the Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, The Cynics, The Skeptics, the Neo-Platonists. They taught us a bit, usually in our Religion classes, but these teachers weren’t quite as dutiful as Dr. Downey so they didn’t give us the full story--even now I don’t know as much about the visual art and music of the Greek and Roman eras as I’d like to.

I’ve filled in a lot of the gaps, but when it comes to the classical past (and the East and India), I miss that all-encompassing story that Dr. Downey told us about Europe.

What an incredible story it was! He really had a vision. It was such a great performance. He was not one of these powerful, incantatory teachers, by the way. He stood and lectured for fifty minutes in a pretty typical manner, I can still hear his somewhat-nasal voice. He just told us the story! Day after day! There’d be some slides and music, but mostly it was talking, with a little blackboard work. Not a lot of discussion, as I recall.

He changed my life.

Like, why did I decide at age 23 to really read the Great Books in a much more serious way? Why did I even get the idea that this was a normal or desirable thing to do? You know, I understand reading Tolstoy—that makes sense—but I read Euripides, Thucydides, Herodotus. I enjoyed it, but it also felt somehow important.

I didn’t have a career back then as a Great Books influencer—I was an aspiring author, but the Great Books weren’t directly-germane to the kind of work I was writing (mostly science fiction).

At the time, I thought, ‘People say it’s important to know this stuff’. But what people? Who was saying that? I didn’t know anybody who was telling me to read Euripides. Somehow the message that I got from Catholic school was not just that I should read Euripides, but that in order to be a civilized person you needed to do it.

Where did I get that message? It’s so comical.

In writing my own book on the Great Books, I really wanted to impart that message to other people. But I actually don’t know how. Like, if it was done by anyone, it was by this Catholic school, and they did it through the very inefficient means of forcing me to learn Latin for six years! I don’t remember a thing about Latin, by the way. I am only focusing on Dr. Downey because I actually remember much of what he taught me.

In writing my book, my main aim was to identify people who already think, on some level, that they ought to be reading Euripides. And then I just wanted to encourage them that...yes...they should probably actually do it (I personally read the translation by Moses Hadas, and it was incredible—I will remember for the rest of my life reading Alcestis’s lament to her husband while I sat eating a Grand Slamwich in the Emeryville Denny’s).

But even in retrospect, it is amazing the conviction I possessed, at age 23, that somehow what was missing in my life was the Great Books.

At that point, I had not really had great, transformative experiences reading classic literature. I had enjoyed reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald in college. That was really it, for anything I’d call the classics. There was no natural affinity there.

Sometimes people hear about my experiences being unmoved by the classics in middle school and high school and college are like, “This is why kids shouldn’t be forced to read the classics. They’re too young.”

And I want to respond, “Is that actually the lesson? Or...is the lesson that it is good to force people to read the classics, even if they don’t enjoy them.”

Honestly, my education in middle school and high school quite literally revolved around forcing me to read Classical literature. I was forced to translate Cicero and Vergil and Ovid and Catullus.

And maybe that was good!

But I think the larger lesson that I’ve come learned from my life is that...people will read whatever is good for them to read.

People know what is good. When I was in middle school and high school and college, I educated myself really thoroughly about the science-fiction world, in a way that was pretty systematic. I bought all these old anthologies, I read through lists of Hugo winners. I didn’t read everything, but I read most things that were really important for an aspiring sci-fi writer to know.

Once I experienced diminishing returns from reading sci-fi, it was time to read other stuff. And I still haven’t read that much science fiction that was published after the year I graduated college. That’s why I’ve read Charles Stross but not Martha Wells.

Given this belief of mine—that people will read what is good—I eventually came to believe that it was pointless to write a book about why it was important to read the Great Books. It’d just be reiterating what people already know, which is that...reading these books is good.

There’s various objections to reading the Great Books, but it’s never been clear to me how seriously they’re advanced. Some objections are snobbish: “Oh you can’t really understand them in translation”. There’s a whole genre of objection like this: Don’t read them, you can’t really understand them unless you’ve been trained.

But many people do read them on their own and get something out of it. That’s why you can buy them in most bookstores. So it’s just a self-evidently false objection.

Then there’s some concerns about how the Great Books are racist, sexist, etc. I don’t really think these objections are being seriously advanced either. To some extent, these objections are just people on Twitter who’re saying stuff, trying to get themselves angry. Like “Hegel is racist”. Okay...but so someone who is interested in Hegel shouldn’t read it then? Like...what’re you trying to say?

It’s just trolling.

These objections only have meaning when it comes to the school system, where people are being forced to read stuff. On a curriculum, you do need to make choices.

So it’s a difficult position—I have a desire to defend and propagate the Great Books, without actually believing that they’re necessarily in danger—but nonetheless I’ve done my best.

Dr. Downey’s class was so effective (at least for me), because I really understood its aims. He thought that it was important for us to know this story about the development of art, literature, philosophy, and music from 1200 to (roughly) 1930. So he just taught us about that story. I agreed, even at the time, that this was important. I distinctly recall enjoying his class, which is why I took an AP Art History elective with him the next year.

Both of these classes mostly involved memorization. He quizzed us on whether we could remember the various things he had taught us. And why not? If you’re a doctor, it’s important you know the names of all the bones. He thought if you were a human, it was important that you should be able to describe what Neoclassicism entailed in the world of music, painting, architecture, etc.

I cannot give that description today, by the way, but at least I remember the Neoclassical era exists.

With other classes, I really didn’t understand their purpose. We had a class in college called Introduction to the Humanities. For this class, at some point we were supposed to read Brothers Karamazov and then write a paper about it.

I did not really see the purpose of this activity, so I did not read Brothers Karamazov, but I wrote the paper anyway, and I eventually received my degree, so surely the paper must’ve been adequate.

Later, I read Brothers Karamazov, on a boat in Bangladesh (where I’d traveled for work), and I loved it. But I didn’t come away feeling, “Wow I really should’ve read this back at age nineteen.” I wasn’t ready to read it at nineteen, which is why I didn’t.

Introduction to the Humanities seemed like a low-effort way of teaching us about the humanities, compared to the lengths my high-school, so I just didn’t understand its purpose. I also never understood what was supposed to be in these papers I was writing: Brothers Karamazov was a fictional story. I could read a fictional story and tell people what happened in it, but I would’ve had trouble telling people any deeper meaning.

I still have difficulty with this. Like I read Les Miserables last month. What’s the deeper meaning of that novel? I said it was ‘about’ redemption, which was sort of true. But that theme really felt secondary to the tremendous life that was thrumming through the book—its interest in everything under the sun. Describing the experience of reading Les Miserables definitely seems like a meaningful and worthwhile thing to do (which is why I did it), but that’s not precisely what my college was asking me to do.

In retrospect do think one purpose of my college I-HUM class was to impress upon us the importance of the great works of the past. I never got the sense, from my college, that these works were overrated or that they didn’t deserve the attention they were getting. I do not believe the slander, leveled against university English departments, that they somehow undermine the canon—this has never seemed the least bit true to me.

But college humanities classes taught me canonical texts in a way that felt confused and didn’t clarify how I, as a young person, was intended to receive these works. It felt like my college wanted me to study these works, while Dr. Downey really wanted me to possess them. He wanted to furnish my mind with knowledge about the great works of the past. And, even as a high school student, I felt Dr. Downey’s aim was both good and achievable.

I wish that I had a better understanding of the aims of my college education. Many people have tried to explain it to me, but I’ve just never gotten it. However, I am certain many people would find it equally pointless to be quizzed on whether they possess some superficial understanding (which I’ve since forgotten) of the Baroque, Rococo, and Romanesque periods.

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A painting (Cimabue’s Maesta) that I surely only know about because of Dr. Downey.