“A five-foot shelf would hold books enough to give in the course of years a good substitute for a liberal education.”
—Charles William Eliot, American academic, and editor of the “Harvard Classics.” Eliot was president of Harvard for four decades, 1869-1909, and, perhaps more than any other single person, made Harvard what it is today.
Hi! I’m Tommy Collison. In the first edition of this newsletter, I wanted to give some background on why I think books are so valuable, and to explain a little bit more on the classic books project.
Why Books, and Why Great Books?
We grew up in Ireland — around us were cows, computers, and not much else. My parents had a lot of books, and I spent most of my childhood in and around those piles.
Where we lived also lent itself to solo hobbies, or at least ones that didn’t require a lot of accoutrements. For one thing, we didn’t live near other people – we lived in the middle of nowhere, far from the nearest town. You couldn’t really go out and play with your friends in the street, because there were neither friends nearby, nor streets to speak of.
Ireland is also quite far north, latitudinally speaking, and so we only get a handful of daylight hours in the winter. All this to say, my brothers and I all developed indoor hobbies – they went deep on computers and programming, and I on reading. (This isn’t to say that we’re not alike in many ways: I -finally!- learned to program in my 20s, and they’re also big readers.)
Reading is kind of a weird hobby. The more you read, the more the point is driven home to you that there’s so much to know. In a known-unknows sort of way, you start to become aware of how much knowledge there is to be had, and how little of it you possess. Reading then becomes a way to “cheat,” taking gems of knowledge and tilting the odds slightly more in your favor each time.
Sometime soon after I graduated college, I heard of the St. John’s College list of foundational Western texts. These great books are, as David Denby put it, “a list of heavyweight names assembled in chronological order like the marble busts in some imaginary pantheon of glory.” The list spans centuries, from ancient Greeks to the 20th century, and touches on everything from philosophy to poetry, and from theology to fiction.
I’d always suspected that reading these great authors, with names like Sophocles, Homer, Plato, Machiavelli, Descartes, Wollstonecraft, Woolf, and Shelley, had significant benefits, even and especially today. I had read one or two of them, and was struck how the ideas in them seemed timeless. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is a man blessed with courage and the favor of the gods, but who spends the entire book wanting nothing more than to find his way back to his home, his wife, and his bed (in roughly that order).
More than being surprisingly human, these books also contain the origins of so many of the great conversations and questions that we talk about today. How do we make democracy work? What are the constituents of a good life? Why do bad things happen to good people? What are the best ways of organizing our communities and our societies? Most of these books contain the intellectual ancestors of ideas and discussions we’re having today.
I’m not sure what catalyzed my desire to start the great books in the winter of 2020, but here we are. Maybe it really was just having more time on my hands.
The project was straight forward enough: five years to read roughly 125 books. At one “classic book” every two weeks, the project promised – and, three books in, has turned out – to be a fairly significant time investment.
My hypothesis is essentially that these are the books that have much to teach about philosophy, science, and morality. They form (especially when the list includes great Eastern works, not just the European classics) a fair history of humanity’s inventing, improving, and imagining.
Why this newsletter?
I revived this newsletter because I want to have something to show for reading the books. I don’t mean that these books don’t have value in and of themselves, as entertainment. Rather, if they have as much to teach me about the world as I think they do, they deserve both close reading and retroactive contemplation.
This newsletter is to both catalyze me to reflect on these books, and to write about them. If I have some great insight, well and good. If I find a classic intolerably boring, with nothing useful to teach us in the 21st century, I’ll say that too. I’m not a masochist and I don’t believe in reading classics for the sake of being able to say that I’ve read them.
If you’re interested in joining for some of the books, by all means! I’m putting the finishing touches on a monthly seminar series with David McDougall – each month, we’ll host a discussion on a significant work and (hopefully!) give attendees the chance to explore some of history’s most influential texts.
If nothing else, though, I hope I make the idea of reading these classics seem less daunting. A month or so (and three books) in, I’m struck by how manageable they are when you break them up into 15-30 minutes each day. I’ve read these books over lunch, before going to sleep, or while walking with an audiobook. So far, at least, these aren’t nose-to-the-grindstone, yawn-inducing reads.
In any event: thanks for signing up! You can always find me on Twitter, and I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on The Odyssey, Antigone, and The Last Days of Socrates. In the meantime, please feel free to let me know why you signed up, and what you’d hope to see from a newsletter of this sort.
Brilliant Tommy! I was anxious waiting for this newsletter to come out! Can't wait to see your thoughts on those classics!