Great Books of the Western World

One crisp evening last December it was beginning to get dark, as I was dutifully dumping newspaper, glass, and tin cans into recycling bins behind the civic arena in beautiful Williams Lake, B.C., Canada. I remember thinking that it was on a night like this one some 20-odd years earlier that I had nearly severed my left thumb whilst cutting kindling with an inappropriately large and heavy double-bladed axe. Suddenly, a brown station wagon pulled up, a gentlemen got out and asked me, "can you dump books here"? I nodded affirmatively toward the central bin that handled newsprint, cardboard and books. "Are you sure that nobody wants them anymore? You could try Sally Ann." He shook his head. "All of this stuff is on the internet nowadays. You can have them if you want." He heaved three cardboard boxes onto the pavement, said goodbye and drove away.

I peeked inside one box and immediately recognized several volumes belonging to the original 1952 Great Books project, put out by the University of Chicago and the Encyclopedia Britannica. They were just like the ones that had been in the Public Library since (at least) the early 1970s--only in much better condition. And, sure enough, upon further inspection, all 42 volumes were there.

As luck would have it, the apartment I would move into in Edmonton on January 1st was also built in 1952, and this old set of books looks right at home with my wood floors and bookshelves and tall rounded living room ceiling. And now, almost every night after my regular duties are completed, I crack a great work and fill a small gap in my classical learning. A useful reference work, and a helpful reminder that (despite 12 years of university, including 2 Oxford degrees), I am far from fully educated.

Not that the Great Books is without its share of critics...far from it. Dwight MacDonald's sparkling review in the 1952 New Yorker, "The Book-of-the-Milennium Club" , is a savage appraisal of this "behemoth", from its biased criteria of selection (e.g. the fetish for Great Writers at the expense of great works by lesser writers), to its cramped type face, poor editing, lack of user-friendly exposition, not to mention the deplorable commercialization with which it was flogged mercilessly for the benefit of America's baby boom. Yet, for all my agreements with Dwight MacDonald over Dr. Mortimer J. Adler (or with Martha Nussbaum over Dr. Allan Bloom, for that matter), I don't mind having my first two bookshelves filled with such a historic and controversial monument to the Western Tradition. Dead White European Men are a good place to start, if not to finish with, an extended contemplation of the great ideas; and whatever its ponderous scholasticism, this is merely the nucleus, and not the essence, of my own compilation.

Besides, the price was right.

Homer's Iliad

Now, I am an Odyssey kind of guy. Most modern men (and women) are. After setting out for England to complete my graduate studies in 1990, (and fighting the one-eyed monster and several screaming sirens along the way), I am still trying to find my way home. Nevertheless, it is important to our understanding of ourselves to try and understand why it is the Iliad that speaks the most to men over the centuries. It is not just that warfare was a way of life in ancient or early modern times; James Joyce wrote his great work Ulysses between two World Wars in the middle of the bloodiest century ever. I think the answer may lie in two key concepts that occupied a higher place in the pre-modern world than in our own: honour and self-mastery.

We should not attribute an ideal of honour to the ancient Greeks that is more noble than it actually was. Indeed, Greek society allowed much petulance. Personal honour determined social status, and (in times of war, at least) a great part of such honour was represented by the spoils of victory--including the possession of such fine trophies as Helen, Khryseis, and Briseis. But there must be a reason why Homer starts his epic poem in medias res with a quarrel among Greeks that characterizes both Achilles and Agamemnon. We are meant to learn a lesson about honour. While Agamemnon has (in his own eyes, at least) saved his honour, by taking Achilles's female prize Briseis instead of Khryseis, who is returned to her father for a ransom, this is only achieved by angering and alienating Achilles.

"Most noble son of Atreus, covetous beyond all mankind, how shall the Acheans find you another prize? We have no common store from which to take one. ...We have followed you , Sir Insolence! for your pleasure, not ours--to gain satisfaction from the Trojans for your shameless self and for Menelaus. You forget this, and threaten to rob me of the prize for which I have toiled, and which the sons of the Acheans have given me."

The jealousy, greed and selfishness of Agamemnon is of a different order and magnitude than that of Achilles, who, despite the vindictiveness displayed by his dragging of Hektor's body in Book XXII, rises above it in response to Priam's supplication. While the Iliad is a poem of war, and one which glorfies force, it ultimately fails as fascist propaganda. The wrath of Achilles, first toward Agamemnon, who has cheated him of his earned spoils, and then toward Hektor, who has killed his beloved Patroklos, dissolves once he learns the claims of other peoples' grief, and sympathy for their loss. He matures as a man.

There is also another scene much earlier, in Book IX, when Achilles has withdrawn from the battle and questions the ethos of glory and shame that seems to govern the rest of the poem. This is the moment of consciousness that gives this first great work of Western literature its critical edge, groping toward a better sense of honour:

"we are held in a single honour....A man dies still if he has done nothing, as
one who has done much."

For the greatest warrior in the known world, this was quite an admission. He is a hero who both embodies and questions the nature of Hellenic civilization. And there is little doubt that the Greek poet Homer regards the Greeks' sacking of Troy as a loss to all of civilization.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are coming full circle--whether religious war and environmental degradation and the commodification of everything might lead to a similar situation for humankind, with only a thread of literary consciousness to remind us of this harder-won sense of honour.