Why Should We Read The Great Books?

People who question or even scorn the study of the past and its works usually assume that the past is entirely different from the present, and that hence we can learn nothing worthwhile from the past. But it is not true that the past is entirely different from the present. We can learn much of value from its similarity and its difference.

A tremendous change in the conditions of human life and in our knowledge and control of the natural world has taken place since ancient times. The ancients had no prevision of our present-day technical and social environment, and hence have no counsel to offer us about the particular problems we confront. But, although social and economic arrangements vary with time and place, man remains man. We and the ancients share a common human nature and hence certain common human experiences and problems.

The poets bear witness that ancient man, too, saw the sun rise and set, felt the wind on his cheek, was possessed by love and desire, experienced ecstasy and elation as well as frustration and disillusion, and knew good and evil. The ancient poets speak across the centuries to us, sometimes more directly and vividly than our contemporary writers. And the ancient prophets and philosophers, in dealing with the basic problems of men living together in society, still have some thing to say to us.

I have elsewhere pointed out that the ancients did not face our problem of providing fulfillment for a large group of elderly citizens. But the passages from Sophocles and Aristophanes show that the ancients, too, were aware of the woes and disabilities of old age. Also, the ancient view that elderly persons have highly developed capacities for practical judgment and philosophical meditation indicate possibilities that might not occur to us if we just looked at the present-day picture.

No former age has faced the possibility that life on earth might be totally exterminated through atomic warfare. But past ages, too, knew war and the extermination and enslavement of whole peoples. Thinkers of the past meditated on the problems of war and peace and make suggestions that are worth listening to. Cicero and Locke show that the human way to settle disputes is by discussion and law, while Dante and Kant propose world government as the way to world peace.

Former ages did not experience particular forms of dictatorship that we have known in this century. But they had firsthand experience of absolute tyranny and the suppression of political liberty. Aristotle’s treatise on politics includes a penetrating and systematic analysis of dictatorships, as well as a recommendation of measures to be taken to avoid the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.

We also learn from the past by considering the respects in which it differs from the present. We can discover where we are today and what we have become by knowing what the people of the past did and thought. And part of the past — our personal past and that of the race — always lives in us.

Exclusive preference for either the past or the present is a foolish and wasteful form of snobbishness and provinciality. We must seek what is most worthy in the works of both the past and the present. When we do that, we find that ancient poets, prophets, and philosophers are as much our contemporaries in the world of the mind as the most discerning of present-day writers. In fact, many of the ancient writings speak more directly to our experience and condition than the latest best sellers.

~ Mortimer Adler

The Case For Slow Reading

Photo: Steve Caplin

Teachers can enhance students’ pleasure and success in reading by showing them how to slow down and savor what they read.

“Speed her up, 401!”

—The president of Electro Steel in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times

Open any newspaper and you are likely to find a story of some school whose students have read a million, two million—some big number of pages. As a payoff, the teachers wear pajamas for a day, or the principal shaves his head or agrees to eat worms, a reward to the delighted students. Then Pizza Hut or some other franchise that sponsored the event hands out coupons for nonnutritious food to the voracious readers.

It’s all great fun, a good story, a terrific photo op. But something bothers me about this picture—it’s as though reading has become a form of fast food to consume as quickly as possible, just one more cultural celebration of speed.

This association of good reading with speed permeates our schools, from the hugely popular Accelerated Reading Program, to “nonsense word fluency” tests in which young children have to decode “words” at a rate of more than one per second, to standardized tests in which reading is always “on the clock.” To be quick is to be smart; to be slow is to be stupid.

The High-Speed Reading Blur

As a confessed slow reader, I would like to make a case for slowness. By slowness, I don’t mean the painful, laborious decoding some students must do or the plodding march through some assigned novels that may take weeks. Any pleasure or success in reading requires fluency and the ability to read with some pace.

But there is real pleasure in downshifting, in slowing down. We can gain some pleasures and meanings no other way. I think of the high-speed trains in Europe that I always wanted to ride, ones that hurtle through the French landscape at more than 200 miles per hour—that is, until I learned that at these high speeds, even the distant scenery becomes a blur. The retina simply can’t take in a clear picture at that rate of movement.

The same thing can happen in reading. I’d like to explore what we miss when we define good reading as fast reading and to argue for what Ellin Keene has called “dwelling” in the texts we read.

Author and media theorist Neil Postman provides a foundation for this argument in his classic book, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979). Schools, Postman argues, should act on a thermostatic principle; a thermostat acts to cool when a room is too hot and heat when a room is too cool. According to Postman, schools should act to check—and not to imitate—some tendencies in the wider information environment. “The major role of education in the years immediately ahead,” he writes, “is to help conserve that which is necessary to a humane survival and threatened by a furious and exhausting culture” (p. 25).

Schools need to take a stand for an alternative to an increasingly hectic digital environment where so many of us read and write in severely abbreviated messages and through clicks of the mouse. Postman frames this imperative as a moral one. But, like the slow food movement, we can make a case on the basis of pleasure. The term taste applies to both literacy and eating. And to taste, we have to slow down.

Silencing Reading

First, some background on how we got here. The greatest debate on reading instruction occurred early in the 20th century. The “reader” of McGuffey’s famous textbooks was an oral reader. Comprehension was part of the picture, but to be an ideal reader, the student had to be able to perform orally. If a teacher addressed the reading rate at all, it was to caution the student about reading too fast. But this approach became increasingly viewed as antiquated, inefficient, and mismatched to the ways people read outside school.

In a classic study of the psychology of reading, Edmund Huey (1921) claimed that oral reading had a ceiling of about four words per second, whereas silent readers could process texts at two or three times that rate—with no diminishment of comprehension. It was time, he argued, for reading to go silent. Lip readers and subvocalizers (like me) were viewed as too stubbornly tied to the sound of words, too limited by the inefficient mechanisms of breath and speech. Huey did claim that silent readers retained a form of inner speech with traces of sound awareness, but at the higher and more efficient speed of reading, readers only sampled sounds—the train was moving too fast.

So reading went silent.

This is the world of reading that we have inherited—one suited to the faster pace of 21st-century life, one better matched to the new abundance of books and magazines. (Who wants to rush through reading if only a few books are available?) Yet our attraction to sounds, to the rhythms of speech, and to a human voice in the text is primal. We attend readings, listen to books on tape, or feel the presence of a narrator in fiction—all of which return us to the “inefficient” rate of regular speech. Authors like Richard Ford painstakingly read their nearly finished novels aloud; writers continually attest to the importance of finding the right “voice” for their work. Some of us begin our classes by reading a poem aloud, and we ask our students to read their work aloud in workshops. In church, we may listen to and meditate on a single verse from the Bible, one we have heard many times before. And we are alienated by authorless, bureaucratic letters—like the ones I get from the IRS informing me of my annual arithmetic mistakes.

Slowing Down

So I would like to propose some strategies for slowing down and reclaiming the acoustical properties of written language—for savoring it, for enjoying the infinite ways a sentence can unfold— and for returning to passages that sustain and inspire us. Many of these strategies are literally as old as the hills.

Memorizing

Memorization is often called “knowing by heart,” and for good reason. Memorizing enables us to possess a text in a special way. My father tells the story of waiting with my uncle outside a probate office in Covington, Kentucky, after the death of their mother. No one seemed in any hurry to assist them, and Uncle Charles, never known as a great student, sighed, “The law’s delay, the insolence of office.” At that moment, he called to mind a phrase from one of Hamlet’s soliloquies that he had memorized 50 years earlier. We all should own some texts in that way.

Reading Aloud

Reading aloud is a regular activity in elementary classrooms, but it dies too soon. Well-chosen and well-read texts are one of the best advertisements for literacy. By reading aloud, teachers can create a bridge to texts that students might read; they can help reluctant readers imagine a human voice animating the words on the page. Besides, some passages seem to beg to be read aloud.

One of my favorites comes from Harry Crews’s essay, “The Car,” where he describes the love of his young life:

After the Buick, I owned a 1953 Mercury with three-inch lowering blocks, fender skirts, twin aerials, and custom upholstering made of rolled Naugahyde. Staring into the bathroom mirror for long periods of time, I practiced expressions to drive it with. It was that kind of car. (1998, p. 367)

When I read this aloud, I just love the sound of “rolled Naugahyde.”

Attending to Beginnings

Writers often struggle with their beginnings because they are making so many commitments; they are establishing a voice, narrator, and point of view that are right for what will follow. These openings often suggest a conflict. They raise a question, pose a problem, create an “itch to be scratched.”

Readers need to be just as deliberate and not rush through these carefully constructed beginnings. As teachers, we can model this slowness. Take the memoir of the well-known children’s writer Jack Gantos. In his opening paragraph of Hole in My Life (2002), he refers to the book’s cover, with its repetition of a mug shot of a bearded, mustachioed young man with an ID number stamped across the photo:

The prisoner in the photograph is me. The ID number is mine. The photo was taken in 1972 at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky. I was twenty-one years old and had been locked up for a year already—the bleakest year of my life—and I had more time ahead of me. (p. 3)

Clearly, he had committed a serious crime to be locked up in a medium-security prison for more than a year at such a young age. How could a 20-year-old dig such a deep hole for himself? What kind of crime put him there? How did he survive this “bleakest” year of his life? What connection does this experience have to his later success as a children’s writer? There is also a slowness to this opening, as though he is making his admission, piece by piece. Gantos has given us a road map for the rest of the book—if we pay attention.

Rethinking Time Limits on Reading Tests

We currently give students with disabilities additional time to complete standardized tests; we should extend this opportunity to all students. Tests place too high a premium on speed, and limits are often set for administrative convenience rather than because of a reasoned belief in what makes good readers.

Even as a strong reader, I felt pressed in the reading passages section of standardized tests to exceed my normal reading rate. I would resort to survival strategies I never used voluntarily— skimming, sampling, and beginning with the questions.

For reluctant or slow readers, the testing situation can be humiliating, and they quickly learn that they are set up for failure. They often just fill in (or make designs with) the bubbles on the test. But in the real world, we frequently compensate for our lack of speedy comprehension by persevering and spending more time on a task. These patient, slower workers are often extraordinarily valuable. In the folktale, the turtle always wins.

Annotating a Page

In this activity, students probe the craft of a favorite writer. They pick a page they really like, photocopy it, and tape the photocopy to a larger piece of paper so they have wide margins in which they can make notations. Their job is to give the page a close reading and mark word choices, sentence patterns, images, dialogue—anything they find effective

For example, this sentence appears on the opening page of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996): “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood” (p. 11). We can hear the way McCourt repeats the words worse, miserable, and Irish, creating an ascending scale of misery. It’s a great sentence that deserves attention.

A variation of this activity is a quote-and-comment assignment in which students copy out passages by hand that they find particularly meaningful and then comment on why they chose those passages. Copying a passage slows us down and creates an intimacy with the writer’s style—a feel for word choice and for how sentences are formed. At the end of a unit in which my students have done a great deal of reading, we celebrate by selecting passages we want to hold on to and reading them aloud to the class. It always interests me to see which passages the students select.

Reading Poetry

Even in this age of efficiency and consumption, it is unlikely that anyone will reward students for reading a million poems. Poems can’t be checked off that way. They demand a slower pace and usually several readings—and they are usually at their best when read aloud.

My colleague Tom Romano begins every one of his classes by reading a poem aloud. He invites his students to comment on images or lines that strike them, although without engaging in the overanalysis that killed poetry for many of us. More than any other genre, poetry calls on us to see the world differently, to break out of conventional perception: Images can “arrest” us—they can, as Webster’s online dictionary says, “cause [us] to stop.”

Take the ending of Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” where she describes the moment of panic when she sees a snake:

But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—

We might comfortably have expected “Numbness at the Bone.” But zero arrests us and forces us to feel something new, the momentary weakness or helplessness we may experience when seeing a snake. We can’t help but pause.

Savoring Passages

Children know something that adults often forget—the deep pleasure of repetition, of rereading, or of having parents reread, until the words seem to be part of them (“And Max said, ‘BE STILL!’ and tamed them with the magic trick…” [Sendak, 1963]). There are passages that continue to move me, like the ending to James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” (1916/1967), which I read each winter. The main character, Gabriel, confronts his own emotional failings:

Yes, the newspapers were right, snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. (p. 651)

I am always touched by the dark beauty of this ending, by the deep sadness of Gabriel as he contemplates the snow, the early death of his wife’s first love, and the remains of his life.

We never really “comprehend” these anchoring passages—we’re never done with them; we never consume them. Like sacred texts, they are inexhaustible, continuing to move us, support us, and even surprise us (until I wrote out the passage, I had missed the word mutinous).

This is, after all, the way people have read for centuries—and it is a way that my father read near the end of his life. He was never a religious man in the churchgoing sense, but in his last years he returned every day to Psalm 46 in the King James Bible, which begins:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.

It was the passage my brother read and reread to him as he lay dying, as his earth was being “removed.” By this time, his Bible was so worn that it had to be held together by rubber bands. As the minister said at his memorial service, “Here is a book that has seen some use.”

Not all our reading, nor all our students’ reading, can or should have this depth. We read for various purposes. But some of our reading should have such depth, inefficient as that might be.

References

Crews, H. (1998). The car. In D. Cavich (Ed.), Life studies: An analytic reader (6th ed., pp. 366–370). Boston: Bedford Books.

Dickinson, E. (1955). A narrow fellow in the grass. In T. H. Johnson (Ed.), The poems of Emily Dickinson (pp.711–712). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gantos, J. (2002). Hole in my life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Huey, E. (1921). The psychology and pedagogy of reading. New York: Macmillan.

Joyce, J. (1916/1967). The dead. In Lionel Trilling (Ed.), The experience of literature. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. (Original work published 1916)

Keene, E. (2008). To understand: New horizons in reading comprehension. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

McCourt, F. (1996). Angela’s ashes: A memoir. New York: Scribners.

Postman, N. (1979). Teaching as a conserving activity. New York: Delacorte.

Sendak, M. (1963). Where the wild things are. New York: Harper and Row.

~ Thomas Newkirk

Thomas Newkirk is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. His most recent book is Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones: Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting For (Heinemann, 2009); thomas.newkirk@unh.edu.

The Iliad

Achilles Tending The Wounds Of Patroclus

The summary of the classical Greek epic poem The Iliad, written by Homer:

Beginning with the immortal hexameter line: “Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles,
Pelias’s son,” it deals with events that are thought to have occurred
three or four hundred years before it was composed, perhaps around
1200 BCE.

According to Homer’s version of the events, Paris, the
second son of King Priam of Troy, eloped with Helen, the wife of
Menelaus, king of Sparta. Helen was apparently willing to leave her
husband and her daughter Hermione for this handsome stranger, and
Paris took her back to Troy where, after a suitable period, they
married. They lived there as man and wife for twenty years, Helen in
particular enjoying the luxurious life her new husband provided for
her in what was then perhaps the wealthiest city in the
Mediterranean world. Troy was the capital of an empire that encompassed
much of what we now call the Middle East, and Priam seems
to have been a benevolent ruler who was loved and admired by his
subjects. Mainland Greece at this time was probably primitive by
comparison with the civilized world that Paris had described to Helen
when he wooed her away from her old home and carried her off to a
new one.

But Menelaus never forgot her, and after many lonely years he
prevailed upon his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, to gather
an army to retrieve her. This first expeditionary force was beset by
bad luck; among other things, the Argives, or Achaeans, didn’t know
where Troy actually was located. Agamemnon returned with little to
show for his efforts except some treasure stolen from small cities
along the way, and slaves―males to row his ships, and females to
perform their usual services.

Menelaus continued to urge his brother to “make things right,” as
Homer writes, and another, much larger army was raised about ten
years after Helen’s abduction. The siege of Troy began and continued
for another ten weary years, with neither the Argives nor the Trojans
able to claim victory. Victory for the Trojans would mean the destruction
of the entire invading army, with perhaps only a handful of
refugees able to return to their far-off homes. An Achaean victory
would result in the destruction of the city of Troy and the devastation
of its hinterland.

In the tenth year of the siege, the Trojan general, Prince Hector,
was killed by Achilles, the chief Argive warrior, and shortly thereafter
Troy fell, was burned to the ground, its male inhabitants put to
the sword, and its women and children sold as slaves.

Things like that happened fairly frequently in the twelfth century
BCE, and it is not entirely clear why the Greeks commemorated this
tale with religious intensity, as they did no other expedition,
successful or not. The Homeric poems were said to have been
divinely inspired, and the story they told was interpreted as revealing
the true story of the gods in their relation to men.

Later epics―for example, The Song of Roland or The Saga of Burnt
Njal―are primitive, in the sense that they present scenes of heroic
warfare unalloyed with profound or subtle emotions. They are about
raw courage, raw revenge, and other strong feelings. Homer, in The
Iliad, deals with these feelings, too, but the poem is not primitive. An
astonishing thing about it is, although Homer obviously knew
nothing about the amenities and comforts of our life today, he knew
most of what we know about the human heart. Maybe even more.

Hector and Achilles are an extraordinary pair. There is a sense in
which both are the hero of The Iliad, another sense in which neither
is. Both Achilles and Hector have their moments of “stardom,” as we
might call it, in the poem. Achilles is far and away the best of the
Greeks, but he is deeply insulted by Agamemnon, who humiliates
him in front of the entire army. He retires from the fray to sulk in his
tent, surrounded by his followers―his Myrmidons. In his absence,
Hector tears through the Achaean army, killing many famous
fighters, and finally reaches the Greek ships, which he tries to set
afire. Without their ships, the Achaeans will never be able to return
home. Win or lose, they will be stranded in Asia. The burning of the
ships is therefore a major crisis. Hector is beaten back not by
Achilles, who should have been there, but by the giant Ajax, whose
slowness of wit then and thereafter deprives him of the honor that
should have been his due.

But Hector has overreached himself. He is so certain of victory he
ensures his own death and the destruction of his family and his city. In
a mad rage he kills Patroclus, the best friend of Achilles, and Achilles,
wracked by this unbearable loss, finally returns to the battle. His
revenge is terrible. He is like a great scythe slicing through the Trojan
ranks. Finally the field is left alone to the two antagonists, Hector and
Achilles. The Achaeans fall back to the water’s edge; the Trojans
retreat within their walls. There is an awful silence on the plain, the
only sound the crunch of Achilles’ feet and the rasping gasp in Hector’s
throat as, in heavy armor, he runs for his life. He doesn’t make it.

Achilles, still enraged, insults the body, dragging it naked behind
his chariot, round and round his Myrmidon encampment. Finally, old
King Priam, who has lost both his general and his dearest son, determines
that he must retrieve the body. Alone he goes, out into the
silence, with a wagon drawn by mules, piled high with a ransom of
gold, rich robes, jewels, and ornaments. It is night and Priam, aided
by the gods, drives the wagon through the Greek encampment,
seeking the tent where Achilles sits, still mourning the death of his
friend. The old man enters, kneels down, and “kisses the hands that
had slain so many of his sons.” Achilles, shaken, moved beyond grief,
accepts the gifts and returns the body. Priam, the old king, loads the
corpse of his son on the wagon and drives the mules back to the city,
where the funeral takes place.

On the twelfth day, when the funeral ends, the war will begin
anew. The poem ends here. It does not tell what happens. Everyone
knew, and still knows, that Troy will be taken, burned, destroyed,
wiped from the face of the Earth, that Helen will run back to the arms
of Menelaus and be forgiven, and that many Achaean leaders will be
lost or killed on the way home. Agamemnon, the chief Argive
general and the king of Lacedaemon, will reach home but be slain
there by his wife, Clytemnestra, as he struggles to emerge from a
richly embroidered shirt he discovers has no sleeves or neck hole.
Before he dies she tells him she has made it as a homecoming gift.

The Greeks thought the siege and defeat of Troy was the most
terrible thing to ever happen, and the most wonderful. The gods were
involved in it as much as the men and women and children. It was a
conflict on every level the Greeks could understand, and yet they also
understood―or Homer did―that nobody won. They recognized that
the deaths of the three great men―Achilles, Hector, and Patroclus―
were all tragic and would define the meaning of tragedy for millennia.
Perhaps most astounding of all about The Iliad is that its author,
writing at the very beginning of recorded history, already knew everything
there is to know about the deep folly of war.

People who have never read The Iliad but who know of it are often
unwilling to open it in the belief that it is unrelievedly sad, a seemingly
endless series of bloody battles. In a sense this is true, but in
another sense it is not. Homer never fails to tell us what is going to
happen, but even so, when it happens, it is a surprise. You hope
against hope and are exhilarated by your love and admiration for the
three main characters. The deaths leave your heart broken, but the
epic is inspiring nevertheless.

And there are many wonderful interludes in the savage brutality
of the fighting, moments during which the beauty of peace shines
through even though it cannot be enjoyed. The scene where Hector
unknowingly says goodbye for the last time to his beloved wife,
Andromache, and his little boy, brings tears to the eyes of the
hardiest reader. The response of Andromache to the return of her
husband’s body from the encampment of Achilles is wrenching: she
understands perfectly what must happen to her and her child now
that her husband can no longer protect them. And the last dirge for
Hector, spoken by Helen herself, who remembers that he was always
kind to her even though he knew, as did she, that her very presence
in his city was a curse, is riveting. You realize you will never forget
these remarkable men and women and that you are richer for having
known them.

~ Charles Van Doren

The Pleasure of Reading

Photo: Johan J. Ingles/Flickr

There are two kinds of reading, reading out of business necessity, and reading as a luxury. The second kind partakes of the nature of a secret delight. It is like a walk in the woods, instead of a trip to the market. One brings home, not packages of canned tomatoes, but a brightened face and lungs filled with good clear air.

~ Lin Yutang

Marc Antony’s Funeral Oration

The Rostra -- the central platform where Julius Caesar's coffin was laid.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

~ William Shakespeare, from the play, “Julius Caesar”

List of Great Books

 

Photo: Emily/Flickr

GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD

IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE

HOMER,

The Iliad,
The Odyssey

AESCHYLUS,

Complete Plays

SOPHOCLES,

Complete Plays

EURIPIDES,

Complete Plays

ARISTOPHANES,

Complete Plays

VIRGIL,

The Eclogues,
The Gorgias,
The Aeneid

DANTE,

The Divine Comedy

CHAUCER,

Troilus and Criseyde,
The Canterbury Tales

RABELAIS,

Gargantua and Pantagruel

SHAKESPEARE,

Complete Plays,
Sonnets

CERVANTES,

Don Quixote

MILTON,

English Minor Poems,
Paradise Lost,
Samson Agonistes,
Areopagitica

SWIFT,

Gulliver’s Travels

FIELDING,

Tom Jones

STERNE,

Tristram Shandy

GOETHE,

Faust

MELVILLE,

Moby Dick

TOLSTOY,

War and Peace

DOSTOEVSKY,

The Brothers Karamazov

HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

HERODOTUS,

The History

THUCYDIDES,

The History of the Peloponnesian War

PLUTARCH,

Complete Lives

TACITUS,

The Annals,
The Histories

MACHIAVELLI,

The Prince

MONTAIGNE,

Complete Essays

HOBBES,

Leviathan

MONTESQUIEU,

The Spirit of Laws

ROUSSEAU,

A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,
A Discourse on Political Economy,
The Social Contract

SMITH,

The Wealth of Nations

GIBBON,

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The Declaration of Independence,
Articles of Confederation,
The Constitution of the United States of America

BOSWELL,

The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

HAMILTON, MADISON, and JAY,

The Federalist

MILL,

On Liberty,
Representative Government,
Utilitarianism

MARX,

Capital

MARX and ENGELS,

Manifesto of the Communist Party

NATURAL SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS

HIPPOCRATES,

Complete Works

EUCLID,

Elements

ARCHIMEDES,

Complete Writings

APOLLONIUS OF PERGA,

On Conic Sections

NICOMACHUS,

Introduction to Arithmetic

GALEN,

On the Natural Faculties

PTOLEMY,

The Almagest

COPERNICUS,

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

GILBERT,

On the Loadstone

GALILEO,

Two New Sciences

KEPLER,

Epitome of Copernican Astronomy,
The Harmonies of the World

HARVEY,

Medical Writings

HUYGENS,

Treatise on Light

NEWTON,

Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,

Optics

LAVOISIER,

Elements of Chemistry

FOURIER,

Analytical Theory of Heat

FARADAY,

Experimental Researches in Electricity

DARWIN,

The Origin of Species,
The Descent of Man

JAMES,

The Principles of Psychology

FREUD,

Major Works

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

PLATO,

Complete Dialogues,
The Seventh Letter

ARISTOTLE,

Complete Works

LUCRETIUS,

On the Nature of Things

EPICTETUS,

The Discourses

MARCUS AURELIUS,

The Meditations

PLOTINUS,

The Six Enneads

ST. AUGUSTINE,

The Confessions,
The City of God,
On Christian Doctrine

AQUINAS,

Summa Theologica

BACON,

Advancement of Learning,
Novum Organum,
New Atlantis

DESCARTES,

Philosophical Works,
The Geometry

PASCAL,

The Provincial Letters,
Pensees,
Scientific Works

SPINOZA,

Ethics

LOCKE,

A Letter Concerning Toleration,
Concerning Civil Government,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

BERKELEY,

The Principles of Human Knowledge

HUME,

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

KANT,

Major Philosophical Works

HEGEL,

The Philosophy of Right,
The Philosophy of History

All the world’s a stage…

Photo: Chris Smart/Flickr

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.

— Shakespeare

Love For Learning

Photo: Cecil Walker/Flickr

My purpose in studying is not to write, much less to teach …but simply to see whether studying makes me less ignorant.

- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

 

Latest Pompei Collapse:Garden Wall Collapse

Photo: Wikipedia

ROME – A stretch of garden wall ringing an ancient house in Pompeii gave way Tuesday after days of torrential rain, the latest structure to collapse at the popular archaeological site.

Pompeii officials said an inspection found that a 40-foot (12-meter)-long section of wall forming part of the perimeter of a garden area near the House of the Moralist gave way in several points. They said the extreme sogginess of the soil brought down the wall in an area that hasn’t been excavated near the house.

Italy’s is struggling to preserve its immense archaeological wealth for future generations.

A few weeks ago, Italy was embarrassed when a frescoed house, the Schola Armaturarum, where gladiators prepared for combat, was reduced to a pile of stones and dust in seconds. Less than a year ago, another building, the House of the Chaste Lovers, collapsed in Pompeii.

The House of the Moralist wasn’t affected by the wall’s demise “and isn’t at risk for collapse,” Pompeii excavations director Antonio Varone said.

The Schola and the House of the Moralist are only a few steps away from each other along one of Pompeii’s main streets, which are usually thronged with some of the 3 million tourists who traipse the paths each year.

The House of the Moralist includes the remains of the homes of two families in the ancient city that was buried by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. It is one of many structures in Pompeii that are off-limits to tourists, and no one was injured in the wall’s collapse, which was discovered early in the morning before opening hours.

Made of tufa rock, the garden wall was heavily damaged during the U.S. bombing of the Naples area in World War II. It was rebuilt after the war using a mix of the ancient stones and modern material, said Daniela Leone, an official of the state Naples and Pompeii Archaeological Superintendency.

Earlier this year the wall was reinforced, but the reinforcement work was “swept away by the violence” of the storms, the Pompeii archaeology office said in a statement.

Coincidentally, Carabinieri police were in the ruins when the garden wall came down. The officers were inspecting the gladiators house as part of efforts to pinpoint the cause of that collapse and decide if that structure can be reconstructed.

Culture Minister Sandro Bondi instructed ministry officials to keep monitoring Pompeii but warned against “useless alarmism.”

A no-confidence motion against Bondi, proposed by opposition parties after the gladiator house collapsed, had been scheduled to be voted on in Parliament on Monday, but work on legislation caused the vote to be put off until a date to be determined.

- Source: Yahoo.com

This is sad… Such  a loss is irreplaceable.

The Relevance of the Classics

Photo: Wikipedia

The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.

- C.S. Lewis