Read Great Books for the Right Reasons

Commentary

Denzel Washington plays one of the greatest modern action heroes, a retired CIA assassin called Robert McCall, in the “Equalizer” films. Equal parts monk and hitman, McCall is introduced to us as a great reader. He has nearly finished a project inspired by his late wife: the 100 books to read before you die.

He has just cracked the cover of number 97, “The Old Man and the Sea.” Like the eponymous anti-hero, McCall is aging and in search of purpose, having lost his wife and left some kind of mysterious life behind, we know not yet what.

The next book on the list, “Don Quixote,” tells us exactly who he is: a knight living in a world in which chivalry is dead.

Strange to say, this Hollywood film gets almost everything right about why we should turn off the TV and pick up a “great” book.

I am ambivalent about the “great book” moniker. It feels pretentious and a bit like it is protesting too much. And so it is. “Great Books” was a label we attached to a remedial curriculum established in our universities in the post-war period, to address a felt loss of cultural memory that had taken root in the education system as a whole.

Cultural memory held little appeal in a world that now seemed to prize efficiency ahead of anything else. Once education became about producing economic units rather than citizens—to say nothing of well-rounded human beings—a hole opened up at the very heart of our civilization.

It was a hole that those who despised it were only too ready to fill: a class of intellectuals we now call cultural Marxists.

We are storytelling creatures, and these ideologues understood this much about human nature; they, at least, had a story to tell about the world, however insidious, in a way that a purely utilitarian outlook on the world did not. Human nature abhors a vacuum.

Conservatives countered with a limp-wristed appeal to “great books,” a polite way of defending Western civilization, with a smattering of non-Western greats thrown in for good measure: some aphorisms from Confucius, oriental tales of “The Arabian Nights,” and a bit of eastern religion from, say, the “Bhagavad Gita.” The moment the students of our post-modern friends started chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, western civ has got to go,” the end of the Great Books program was nigh.

When, at the behest of the ascendant priestly class, students accused those programs of being no more than the history of “dead, white men,” faculty who taught these great books had no counter punch; for all their supposed reading and sophistication, professors let Great Books go gentle into that good night. Beginning in the 90’s, courses that featured the Great Books were no longer mandatory in the nation’s great universities. If this is what greatness looks like, the place of Great Books in the dustbin of history was well earned, apparently having inspired only the protection of stewards, not kings; Denethors not Aragorns.

Denzel’s character, by contrast, is reading for the right reasons. McCall would not be cowed by the indignation of the resentful few.

The study of classical works is an exercise in self-knowledge. These works are your patrimony: They built the world you live in. By reading these books, you discover not only who you are, but learn something about others who have read them, too.

McCall wants to better know his dead wife and rediscover purpose in this last chapter of his life, after everything he had once known has been taken from him. Monks, like knights, are engaged in solitary work, but it is work undertaken for the sake of the community: to preserve, nurture, and defend the things others worked and fought to hand on before them.

The greatness of the books that last, that hold the attention of our best minds—but are not and should never be vouchsafed to a hermetically sealed private library—are, every last one of them, a homage and contribution to a conversation that started well before the authors put pen to paper. The debt of the great ones is the largest: Homer depended on centuries of oral storytelling, Dante on pagan literature and Christian theology, Shakespeare on all of the above.

The open secret of great books is that by reading one, you have read them all, or perhaps better to say those that remain unread are implicit—beckoning. The appetite to “run and find out,” as Kipling has it, expands after each reading, offering the kind of satisfaction that is at once full and growing, that experience of being eaten up head-to-toe with curiosity, just like that great knight of the big bungalow in the Segowlee cantonment, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi himself.

And for all the ink spilled, we learn from the greatest books that the best kept secrets of the human heart are those that words cannot tell. There is something ineffable about standing on the shoulders of giants who have recalled the tragic and comic tales that have shaped our humanity and the bottomless imagination that belongs to it.

Alighting on this elevated perch is our birthright, make no mistake. The brightness of the vision we enjoy there can—and will not—go dark, however much the enemies of true greatness may try to snuff it out.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.