I love the Gateway to the Great Books of the Western World

Imagine having the perfect uncle.

Not only does he introduce you to the world at large, but he is a relentless adventurer. He travels far and wide in search of brilliant trophies.

Your perfect uncle (or aunt) knows all the best stories. He knows all the best places to go.

But more than that, imagine he is of the highest discretion and so only speaks to lead you out into further adventures of your own. Imagine his tact and forebearance allow you to explore exactly what you need to at your own pace and depth.

This is what the Gateway to the Great Books are.

"The works in that set [the Great Books] have a certain magnitude, but they also occupy a unique place in the formation and development of Western Culture. Each of them represents a primary, original, and fundamental contribution to man's understanding of the universe and of himself. It has been said of them that they are books which never have to be written again, that they are inexhaustibly rereadable, that they are always contemporary, and that they are at once the most intelligible books (because so lucidly written) and the most rewarding to understand (because they deal with the most profound and important subjects). It has also been said of them that they are the repository and reservoir of the relatively small number of great ideas which man has forged in his efforts to understand the world and his place in it; and that they are over everyone's head all of the time, which gives them the inexhaustible power to elevate all of us who will make the effort to lift our minds by reaching up to the ideas they contain."

The above sustained and sublime piece of prose is from the Introduction to the Gateway to the Great Books. From the prose style I believe it may be written by Hutchins, but it doesn't say.

I read and reread this paragraph with wonder. The Great Books are larger than my comprehension. And it is the Gateway to the Great Books that have enlarged my sensibility bit by bit so that I can appreciate the truth of these words.

For the last 18 months I have been taking a liberal arts degree through the Gateway to the Great Books. I am just over half way and feel my sense of myself, the world, other humans, nature, and God has been profoundly deepened by this study. It has been liberating. Becoming an autodidact has been empowering. And sharing what I have learnt has been enriching.

Montaigne on Managing the Will.

Michel says "In my opinion, a man should lend himself to others and only give himself to himself."

This is good food for thought!

What does it mean to lend oneself? He says to lend your faculties to another is make yourself a slave to them. You need to be thrifty in lending yourself out. What does it mean to give oneself?

Is happiness more in being fully involved in life, or in detachment, or in involvement without attachment, or in something else? Montaigne says it is in involvement with detachment.

Soon I find myself agreeing with Michel. When we act without passion for outcome, we act freely and happily. We can lend ourselves wholly to the task and keep ourselves for ourselves. To give all and keep all at once is the wisdom of prudence indeed!

Montaigne's prudential guideline1 : want only what is near and free.
Montaigne's prudential guideline 2: the reasonable man prefers peace and avoids disturbance above all else.

Is this quietism? No; in Montaigne's age is was realistic. Confucius agrees: when the leaders are vicious the wise men act stupid.

Reading Dostoyevsky For Kicks and Giggles

Every few days I read a bit of Augustine; he is magnificent reading, but difficult, irregular, and strange.

I read Augustine in the middle of the day, in snatches.

Even in his word choice I can feel the chaos and confusion of his age. In the irregularity of subject and the novelty of the autobiographical voice, we see for the first time what I call the Christian difference. Before Augustine the chief figure of the age were nobles. Augustine was a common school teacher, and a bishop. After Christ, it is the common folk who make history.

But the palpable darkness of Augustine frightens to me. His profound seriousness is the only relief from human nature. His century is a frightening place.

In comparison to Augustine, Dostoyevsky is a blaze of light.

Before I sleep I read as much Dostoyevsky as I can. Before sleep is best - his work is liminal - that is, on the edge of unconsciousness. Reading him when you first wake up or after meditating seems altogether too cheerful to me, but in the dark hours Dostoyevsky shines.

I'm reading Demons; the new Penguin translation is flat out fine work. Translator was Robert A Maguire. I love how well Penguin has translated his work. Maybe the choppy rough Russian just moves better into modern English than the French? I don't know.

Demons is confusing and superb. First I had trouble with the names, and had to bookmark the cast of characters list at the end of the text and refer to it constantly (I still do a bit). Second I had to deal with the allusive and hysterical way characters have of delivering major plot points. My thinking goes something like this:

"So... Stephan Verkovensky is maybe betrothed to some nobody called Sonya or Dunya who is the protege of his patron Vavarya Stravogina, for manifold deeply suspicous and impure reasons other. But Vavarya's maybe looney son, is returning home soon, bringing along with him Stephan's son who is an unknown and sundry complications. And Kirilov thinks everyone should commit suicide to prove there is no God. And Liputin is a vile gossip who seems to know everything and say nothing. And there is a new governor in town whose wife doesn't like Vavarya Starvogina. And everyone speaks French when they're excited, which is all the time, which is tiresome to deciper into English but simpler than having to stop to look it up in the stupid notes at the end of the Penguin Book because you know what it means anyhow if you stop reading for a minute and dig out the French vocab but that means you have to stop reading to translate French."

Jeebus himself couldn't sort out this kind of absurd mess, but it sort of makes sense, if you ignore the many maybes in the plot. Reading a summary online would take away the surprise and leave the hysterics.

At 17 years of age, when I last read Demons, I doubt I understood it anyhow.

Do you know why I find him funny? Because I really enjoy Dostoyevsky's company. I really like Fyodor Mikhaylovich the man. I empathize with him. I feel his wild humor. I see how he sees the Russian people. Dostoyevsky cannot see the future, the Bolsheviks and the present Russian Mafia kleptocracy. Instead he sees the foolishness genius and passionately misplaced devotion of the Russian intelligentsia to French frivolity and sentimental vacuity a la Russe. He sees it clearly, and sees it fully, accepts it all in himself, and he laughs.

Do I love Dostoyevsky most of all because he laughs at himself? I don't mean him to reduce him to a character out of Gogol. He is much more than anything Gogol could invent.

Hm. Please allow me to help non-Dostoyevsky readers understand what kind of experience they are missing out on:

Reading Dostoyevsky is like being trapped in a big hessian sack with twenty-seven affectionate lapdogs: it's unpleasant at the time but when its over you secretly enjoyed it so much. All those flickering pink tongues. Mmm.

On Sainte-Beuve On Montaigne

Sainte-Beuve writes messily, but the fine feelings sweep you along quickly so you don't notice until the second read.

I have forced Sainte-Beuve to speak here of Montaigne in epigram, as I can only imagine he would have wished if he had a modern audience to communicate with.

Much as his work has been demolished for me by Proust's criticism, Sainte-Beuve's wonderful love and enthusiasm remains:

- "It may be said of Montaigne's style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor."

- "Montaigne is a writer naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very center."

- "If we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns - it is absolutely necessary to enlarge and extend the French language."

- "In imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished, inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated, by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources."

Some stray birds:

Can even a Frenchman still speak about enlarging the language? And now that English cannot be engrossed by any one human mind, can it even be called a single language, or is it rather a super-language or complex of languages?

I find in Montaigne's classicism the best possible kind: to treat the Roman and Greek authors as a matter for pleasure and wisdom alone, and to avoid all pretense of learning and unnatural composure.

The very same things said of Montaigne are also said of Dante by the critics. Can it be the sweet new style is anything other than a sweet fresh mind made intimate with the minds of the ancients?

Finally, how can we account for Dante in Italian, Montaigne in French, and Shakespeare in English? The mystery at least can be traced to the Roman writers. But that does not explain the light that entered the world through their work.

Cicero On Friendship, aka, De Amicitia

I'm reading the Great Books syntopically on the subject of friendship, and Cicero's number came up to receive a jolly good reading.

The essay on friendship by the Cice honors a great mutual mancrush between one Scipio Africanus and Gaius Laelius. Laelius extols his dead buddy Scipio (aka 'Skip the African'), shares his definition of friendship, and gives rules to be observed in regard to said ship.

Cicero's On Friendship contains a preface where Cicero dedicates the essay to one of his dear pals. Then two younguns suck up to Laelius to extract the good oil from him.

Cicero's a straight talker. Virtue equals friendship. This means never asking for an unethical favor, not letting passion, politics, or pain intervene in virtue practices, and learning and sharing knowledge together. S-weet.

It's about that simple. The Cice ends with another extolatory clusterfuck and some sweet words to the effect that virtue practice is the be all and end all of friendship. It's an inspiring read and unlike this piece of writing contains absolute zero percentage of hot chicks.

A hard man but a fair one that Mister Cicero.

What Do You Think of These Four Dante English Translations?

It's customary to comment on parallel translations. Instead I will invite you to read and judge for yourself which is superior. I will say just that the great translations here seem to me a foregone conclusion.

Dante and Virgil are in the middle of the circle of the lustful, and Dante has just seen the damned and is describing them, so it's Canto V of Inferno, lines 40 to 51.

James Finn Cotter

And as the starlings are lifted on their wings
In icy weather to wide and serried flocks,
So does the gale lift up the wicked spirits,

Flinging them here and there and down and up:
No hope whatever can ever comfort them,
Neither of rest nor of less punishment.

And as the cranes fly over, chanting lays,
Forming one long line across the sky,
So I saw come, uttering their cries,

Shades wafted onward by these winds of strife,
To make me ask him, "Master, who are those
People whom the blackened air so punishes?"

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Longfellow:

And as the wings of starlings bear them on
In the cold season in large band and full,
So doth that blast the spirits maledict;

It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them;
No hope doth comfort them for evermore,
Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.

And as the cranes go chanting forth their lays,
Making in air a long line of themselves,
So saw I coming, uttering lamentations,

Shadows borne onward by the aforesaid stress.
Whereupon said I: Master, who are those
People, whom the black air so castigates?

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Cary:

...As in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,
The starlings on their wings are borne abroad;

So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls.
On this side and on that, above, below,
It drives them: hope of rest to solace them

Is none, nor e'en of milder pang. As cranes,
Chanting their dol'rous notes, traverse the sky,
Stretch'd out in long array: so I beheld

Spirits, who came loud wailing, hurried on
By their dire doom. Then I: Instructor! who
Are these, by the black air so scourg'd?

XXXXX XXXX XXXX

Mandelbaum:

And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:

now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
There is no hope that ever comforts them
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.

And just as cranes in flight will chant their lays,
arraying their long file across the air,
so did the shades I saw approaching, borne

by that assailing wind, lament and moan;
so that I asked him: Master, who are those
who suffer punishment in this dark air?

XXXX

What do you think?

Contra Niall Ferguson and Moral Relativism

I watched Niall Ferguson's propoganda piece on the end of World War Two thisafternoon on SBS Australian TV. Ferguson takes the view of Primo Levi that the war was a "tainted victory".

This is a specious claim and a truism, not a wise judgment. ALL wars are tainted, victorious or otherwise, morally and emotionally, for both sides. War is tainted - so what?

Ferguson props his view up with poor Primo Levi's authority. Because Levi was a sophisticated intellectual with scientific training (he was a chemist), we impute the authority of good judgment to his views. But Levi's judgment is that of a suicide overcome with horror and despair - not of a survivor. Levi's view of the war is not just not good for life - it's anti-life. He willfully rejects facts that may make meaning of the event. You only have to compare Levi with Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search For Meaning' to see that Levi left historical documents while Frankl left great literature as a result of the same experience of interment.

So Niall Ferguson is culpable of propagandizing this despairing view in his documentary. Let's look at his claims:

First: Bombing of civilians occured out of a desire for vengeance.

FALSE. Allied bombing arose from the practical need to break the will of the enemy. The Nazi bombing of civic populations was motivated by vindictive hate; the Allie motive was to end war.

Second: The Allied colluded with the evil reign of the Soviets at the end of the war.

FALSE: the Allies spent 40 years to defeat the Soviets after the war. (That was called the Cold War - remember?) In addition, starting a war against Russia immediately after defeating the Germans was not feasible; the Soviets were not an immediate threat, and we had no responsibility to save the Russians from their poor choices of governance.

The most evil aspect of Niall Ferguson's documentary is implied, because if it were clearly stated we would see its falsity immediately:

Ferguson implies that the Allies were morally no better than the Axis powers, that the atomic bombings were not preceded by the most painful and delicate moral deliberations; worst of all, Ferguson implies that human nature is inexplicably evil and without a reliable source of absolute goodness and truth in the world. It is this last implication that reveals Ferguson for the bleeding moral relativist, and really sinks his propaganda piece.

Because we are still here and alive, and for the most part happy and free, Niall Ferguson and his relativist crew are proven wrong.

Literary Tonglen: Reading the Gateway to the Great Books of the Western World

I spent a few hours last night integrating what I had learnt from grade one of the Gateway to the Great Books. Seeking and making connections between stories, images, themes, feelings. Sensing forwards and backwards into experience for meaning.

The key to it leapt at me from the ABC's monthly magazine, Limelight, to unlock the first grade of readings in the Gateway to the Great Books. Limelight notes brain studies that reveal that, while people are reading books, the brain lights up as if it is actually engaged in what the reading describes. In other words, reading is not escaping reality but practicing it!

Now in that light, consider what grade one's stated purpose is:

The introduction states that the first grade is for readers either limited in life experience or about the age of 11 and 12 years old. The readings are adventure stories, stories of sea and nature, stories of heroism and teamwork, and stories that give rare entree into exclusive social millieux of the great and living dead.

We imagine the adventures at sea and land of working men. We see the ordinary challenges of daily life in a new light. We read adventures that draw out our inner resources. The great adventure stories, far from being idle daydreams, imperceptibly infuse new courage into undertaking daily difficulties. Havings stretched ourselves to live the extraordinary adventures in books makes common challenges more doable.

Not only that, but many of the readings introduce us to great men - Caesar, Lincoln, Xenophon, Socrates, Jesus, Solomon, Napoleon, Aristotle - and introduces us also to their great ends. So imperceptibly the first grade provides a critique for our own ends, means and motives. How do we compare to the greatest of the past? By contact with them we are enlarged.

On the deeper philosophical level of greatness, the first grade first introductes us into the Platonic Form of the Good. It does this through the obvious Platonic reading of the allegory of the cave in 'Republic', but also through fine literary criticism pieces of a general nature.

Why, we ask ourselves, do we need literary criticism? The introduction to the Gateway answers: literary critics direct us to the best, which is another way of saying they show us the most good quality beauty, in books. Not only that, they draw out the precise nature of the good through definition, demonstration, and comparison. So the beauty of a work is augmented by the good judgement of the critic, and refined by the true discernment of the critic. The critic reveals the complete Platonic form of the Good by describing the truth and goodness inherent in the beautiful work of imagination. Best of all, good criticism challenges our own judgment to improve in the light of their judging. The good, true and beautiful make up the Form of the Good, and literary criticism demonstrates this and whets our desire to become better acquainted with It.

Thematically many of the grade one readings pit social morality or natural justice against individual choices. Inevitably individual choice fails, but in doing so it shows us our natural limits as human beings.

I could imagine no more useful and freeing tragedy than one which shows precisely and overwhelmingly the exact nature of the limits by which human nature is circumscribed, and shows no more than that.

The overall impression of the first grade of the Gateway to the Great Books is that they provide a gradual course in what I call "literary tonglen". Tonglen is the Buddhist practice of giving the ease and joy you have away and taking the pain and suffering of others into yourself. So literary tonglen is the process of educating the heart to consider and align and share with the sufferings and joys of others. Literary tonglen is the process of becoming a full human being, for better and worse, richer or poorer, til death parts us from the brute world.

I Visit The Great Books of the Western World in My Local Library

I visited the South Australia State Library on North Terrace, with excitement in my belly. I was off to visit the Great Books of the Western World. To my astonishment, the State Library didn’t have the books. The librarian looked it up for me at Adelaide University Library website, and found them in the marvellous Barr-Smith Library.

I zipped behind the State Library, across the State Gallery grounds, down the physics building carpark and carried the bike down four steps to then cruise along the main side street of Adelaide University on my bike, my long blonde hair flying in the wind, feeling fairly astonishingly great.

I trotted down two flights of stairs and circled around the stacks of books, sneezing a little in the dust, til I found them… the complete collection of the Great Books of the Western World.

I sat cross legged beside them. The Great Books are nestled beside the stairwell window, so as I settled in I glanced up and got nice view of the young people’s legs as they sashayed upstairs and downstairs, adding significantly to the sensual pleasure of the finely printed and bound hardcover classics. I read the reading plan introduction, taking notes, rephrasing key points, and soaking up the glorious insights.

Gradually I entered a heightened state; I sat cross legged there forgetting myself completely until my legs went numb. An hour must have passed.

Then I took the books entitled “The Great Conversation” by Hutchins and “The Syntopicon, Volume One” by Adler, and went and sat down. I kept expecting someone to walk by and see me sitting there glowing and exhilarated almost out of my body and demand I leave shouting “No intellectual joy allowed here, sir!”

I read the entire “Great Conversation” book. It was irresistible; compelling. Among our contemporaries, where else can you find genuinely timeless erudition? It’s almost unknown, a forgotten excellence. And Hutchins made it seem effortless. Most remarkable, perhaps his brilliance really is effortless.

Imagine talking to such a man in person. I counted the great authors and came to 73 men (excluding the trio who wrote the US constitution; Jefferson alone suffices.) I imagined a great shadowy vault of a room where these men sat and conversed together through the ages, and the world outside the portals and the eaves of this quiet room trembled to their words. I imagined this and my body fairly shook with gratitude.

I started on the syntopicon with the essays on "Angel" and "Animal". I almost made myself late for my evening appointment reading - it was a huge rush to get to Glenelg on bike in 35 minutes. And I suspect as soon as my present batch of book reviews is done I will be spending a LOT more time by the window to the stairwell in the State Library.

On the Timaeus of Plato

I love how Plato uses multiple frames of introductory ideas in his work.

The Timaeus is framed first by the fanciful gossip of Solon’s story of Atlantis, and second by the superb verbal-magical invocation of Timaeus himself, which is what I wish to quote here (segment three: prelude). Plato’s third frame in the Timaeus, introducing chance and free-will, alters this second frame significantly and is the subject for another post.

So here is the second frame, Timaeus’ invocation of the creation of the cosmos:

“We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that whichis always becoming and never is.”

This is the basis for the physical world for Timaeus, for the macrocosm. But it is important to note that Timaeus is coming out with substantially the same idea as Lao Tze, on the other side of Eurasia at roughly the same period. He here invokes the Tao with these words and those to come. Timaeus, fully aware that speech is a magical act, prefaces this quoted statement with an invocation both to the gods and to his own powers – that is, he wisely invokes the macrocosm and the microcosm before beginning to talk of first and last things.

“The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real.”

This is a startling description of the quality of Yang and Yin, or Shiva and Shakti. The most modern concept of this is the particular and the wave. The wave is potential particulars, or a conceptual carrier for particulars, or in some way a not-quite-real concept which fills in all the explanatory gaps which the particle concept does not.

But Timaeus goes further, describing the subjective response to these macrocosmic forces. The basis of physical reality is implied to be the source of subjective activity: that is to say, our (microcosmic) awareness of changeless evokes reason and intellect, and the awareness of the always-changing evokes opinion, obscurity, sensation and irrationality. Thus the perrenial wisdom of getting our focus of changeable things, and putting attention of the changeless: by focusing on the changeless we submerge into quiescience our irrational and sensational qualities. The process of self-enquiry suggested by Ramana Maharshi recommends that as the classical direct path to truth.


But listen to what Timaeus says next:

“In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owning to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause.”

We can infer then that the unchanging, reasonable, and intellectual is self-caused or uncaused, arising from its own nature directly.

What follows next is THE key statement of classical thinking:

“Whenever, therefore, the maker of anything keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product the result must be good; whenever he looks to something that come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good.”

If that sentence doesn’t move you then how do you know you are still alive?

In one sentence Timaeus transmits the essence of classicism as method and means to the creation of art. The esoteric meaning of what Timaeus is saying is that the creation of a thing along classical lines is a recreation of the cosmos, and at the same time an emotional and energetic participation in the original creation. Each and every creative act invokes God into the person of the creator. Creative work is theurgy, and creation brings the reason into alignment with the Reason of the cosmos.

Think about that one for a while!

The Top Top Ten List

THE TOP TOP TEN LIST

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov.
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot.

I have tried to read all of these. I found these four hard going and retreated to try another day: Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Chekhov. I am in the process of reading the Proust, obviously enough.

Which ones haven't you read yet?

This list comes from a wonderful and amusing book which asks hundreds of writers to list their top ten books, then counted recommendations as if they were votes to create the above list.

What is most striking but not at all apparent about the top top ten list is that they are all canonical classic works. The reason a classic is a classic is because it is universally recognised as being excellent, not simply because of the social conditions or such rubbish. This list re-validates the reality of the core of classic Wetern civilization.

Consider Western Civilization With Me For A Moment

I feel privileged.

I invite you to consider the reality of Western Civilization for the space of three to ten in and out breaths. Just sit and consider the following:

I am surrounded by the most beautiful music ever written in every culture;
By the greatest books and teachers of the ages;
By the accumulated wisdom of a dozen successful societies infused into the society I inhabit.

I am surrounded by a culture distinguished by continual and constantly increasing

- invention in the arts,
- innovation in the sciences,
- and practical applications in medicine, agriculture, technology.