Self Worth and Great Books
Just over a year ago I set a personal life ambition to read the Great Books of the Western World; a series collated by Mortimer Adler from Encyclopedia Britannica which is necessarily the most essential books from the Western literary corpus. As part of this goal, I also want to write an essay/blog post on each book I read.
A year on, I’ve barely even made a dent in the list. But I will forge on.
Nevertheless, I find myself continually struggling with a mix of imposter syndrome and simple bedazzlement at my intellectual servitude in comparison to such great minds. It’s why I have as yet failed to write an essay on The Iliad or The Odyssey. Who the hell am I to talk about Homer, one of the greatest poets of all times? Especially when people spend their whole damn academic lives studying and understanding every nook and cranny of such tomes. Plus, who the hell would want to read that blog post anyway?
At the time of writing, my reading has meandered this year while struggling to read The Old Testament. Partially because of pure procrastination. Partly because that’s how being a prolific reader works, and somewhat because I’m a damn curious person. But mainly because the very idea of reading the Bible is quite intimidating; especially when I have so many close Christian friends in real life, despite not actually being Christian myself. I really wouldn’t want to walk away from reading it with the wrong impression and disregarding Christianity from the point of view that is not intellectually humble.
But I must. Read. On. Word by word. Page by page.
Even if it takes me my whole damn life, I think the endeavour will have been utterly worth it.
Practically speaking, however, right now I must finish one more book before returning back to 2 Kings and continuing that journey. That book is House of Leaves, a brick of postmodern panache equal to Ulysses in grandeur. I’m barely 30% of the way through, and I feel my sanity lurching as I read it. Some passages indeed shake me to my core. This is why I read.
Not every book needs to be as profoundly groundbreaking and unbelievably difficult to parse as House of Leaves, but oddly it’s good practice for building a kind of resilience for persisting through the Great Books. Almost all are written in a time and context wildly different to today, with extreme differences in style, format, language and prose.
When I tell people about the books I read, often the reaction is one of amazement and incredulity. Why on earth would I be bothering to read such books? There’s no way I’m going to get through the whole list. Sometimes I think they’re right. I also think I’m nowhere near “smart” enough to truly grasp virtually any of the Great Books at a deep level. I feel like a mere mortal at the feet of a Greek Titan every time I crack open one of their pages.
But dammit, if there is one thing I’ve learned from the Greeks — specifically the Myth of Prometheus — it’s that there is fire to be stolen.
