Okay, that was an unusual day: flag football, volleyball, cross country, JV football, altar server training, readathon, men's club meeting, teen Bible study. Thank goodness our parish, the high school, and the elementary school are all on the same block about 15 minutes from our house. And homework was light last night. Usually we only have three or four trips to school. If we had lived on base, 30 minutes away, we would have just said no to these events. But I'm glad the kids can participate in these things - as long as nights like that don't happen often. And I'm intentionally staying out of commitments for myself right now. No Bible study or book club for me.
Since I'm not working, I need to watch that I don't let my days slip away in a haze of reading internet news or random shopping. How to use these hours? I have a lot of project ideas: a garden plot, finish a photo book, use up some fabric I bought in Guam for skirts for the girls, organize photos and books.
Getting to the topic: I'm still working on unpacking boxes that came out of storage in Mississippi, where we left some things when we went to Guam, thinking our accommodations would be limited. Yesterday I unpacked my Harvard Classics set. One of the 50 is missing. Volume 2. It may yet show up, but as I was obsessing over finding it so much that I went to the computer to see if I can buy one (yes, for less than $10), I realized that if I'm going to hold on to these things, I should at least read them. (I have way too many books for our space here but if I'm going to store books in boxes and not read them, I shouldn't hoard them, right?)
Maybe the publishers knew that most people would buy these books to make a nice decoration for their living room, but I'm sure the editor Dr. Charles Eliot hoped that most of the purchasers would read them. Let me check... Ah Wikipedia! Eliot thought people could be liberally educated by reading just 15 minutes a day. (For how many years?) Obviously, the publication of the set was a commercial venture and over 350,000 sets were sold, which is pretty successful. The collection is subtitled "The Five Foot Shelf of Books," a moniker which seems to indicate it should occupy shelf space instead of a bedside table or the back of the toilet, where a lot of my current reads are stored (right now: Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation.)
I inherited my set from my grandmother who was given them by a friend. Sadly, the day I brought them home was a hot day in July in Indiana. I had stopped to buy some sweet Hoosier wine on the way home from my grandmother's and left a couple bottles in the back of the car with my boxes of books. When I returned to the car to unload my acquisitions, the wine had expanded in the heat, popped its cork and drenched a few volumes. So several of my books have interesting wine stains. I was worried they would emerged moldy and stuck together from storage, but other than some warping from being stuffed in a box, they seem to be in relatively fine shape. They do seem a little stiff in the spines, but perhaps that's because they haven't been read.
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| I don't have one five foot shelf, so the books are crammed onto two shelves |
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| Poor Robert Burns - his volume is wine soaked. |
Granted, I have skimmed through some of the volumes of poetry, and I've read some of the works in other editions in college. But maybe I need to set myself the project of reading them. There's a book by Christopher Beha, The Whole Five Feet, about a year spent reading them. He figured 60 pages a day to get through the 22,000 pages. Doable. But some of the volumes seem a little dull. (Farraday and Kelvin?)
Some other thoughts on "The Five Foot Shelf":
- from Adam Kirsch at Harvard Magazine - a commentary on how the selection of works for the collection provide insight to the thoughts of Eliot on education, on the idealism of the period, and the limitations of such a collection (first published in 1910):
In his introduction to the series, dated March 10, 1910, Eliot made it clear that the Harvard Classics were intended not as a museum display-case of the "world’s best books," but as a portable university. While the volumes are numbered in no particular order, he suggested that they could be approached as a set of six courses: "The History of Civilization," "Religion and Philosophy," "Education," "Science," "Politics," and "Criticism of Literature and the Fine Arts." But in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is "Progress"—progress in each of these departments and in the moral quality of the human race as a whole. Eliot’s introduction expresses complete faith in the "intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization," "the upward tendency of the human race."- A brief blog post revisting some of these ideas: http://www.dreliotsfivefeet.com/p/harvard-classics.html
- A funny clip from a 1911 New York Times about Dr. Eliot refusing to buy the set.
- An interesting critique of Christopher Beha's book The Whole Five Feet by a guy spending the year reading Shakespeare. Questions what it means to be educated if Beha contends that after the year of reading, his life hasn't changed. Takes up Italo Calvino's "Why Read the Classics?" as an antidote:
Calvino is showing us that reading the classics is something we do because it’s good, not because it’s good for us; we do it because we’re human. The corollary is that education isn’t schooling, not something you pay to go through, collect a piece of paper, and have done with; it is another name for the social process we call living.-And a blog series from someone else setting out to read and blog about the books.
More fun to be had on the internet reading about people reading than reading! So in between driving perhaps I should tuck a volume in my bag to read snippets while waiting between kid deliveries and pick ups. Of course the easier answer would be to read them on the nook or iphone - the complete set is to be found for free around the internet: at Project Gutenberg, Bartleby, and elsewhere (a 90 day reading plan based on reading an hour a day). But the reality is I will probably skim a couple of volumes and then move on to something else. Distractions are everywhere...
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| "Visions of Order" - a distant dream |
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| ...because here is our garage. And there are more books piled on or falling off shelves elsewhere in the house. We got rid of a shelf when we left Guam, and have no built in shelves, and don't have room for the old melamine shelves. Shelf building - another project. |
4 comments:
+JMJ+
You're not alone, Emily. Sometimes I'd rather read about other people's reading than do proper reading of my own!
These days, I'm a huge fan of social reading activities, so if my family already had a Five Foot Shelf and I could find someone willing to do the ninety-day reading plan with me, I'd be all over it!
On a similar note, have you heard about Julian Baggini's controversial act of Bibliocide?
NOOOOO! Not a book burning!
Actually,that's a great article. Thanks for the link. I do remember using our World Book encyclopedias briefly (country reports) and we liked to look at the body parts pictures - although maybe those were in medical dictionaries belonging to my mother, who was a nurse. But no one in my family wanted those books when my parents moved. Baggini makes some great points - especially about reassessing the value of the written word in the era of the unedited internet and about the willingness of parents to shell out cash (myself included) in attempts to buy their children an education.
However, as you mention, a social reading project is usually more fulfilling (and able to be fulfilled) so that may be part of the price of education - buying fellow readers.
Lots to think about. A good read.
How sweet that your distractions from reading as much as you like are shown as two pictures of books to be sorted! Maybe your distractions from distractions will result in more reading after all.
I appreciate your musings about the Harvard Collection, a set I hadn't heard of, and also about what constitutes an education. Love that line, we read not because it's good for us, but because it's good.
I am reminded of a set of Great Books that was in my husband's house while he was growing up, and rarely if ever used. When his parents offered them to us I jumped at the chance to have all of that Good Stuff here - and I did use some of the books in our homeschooling curriculum, though they arrived a little late for that.
Eventually my husband told me he wanted to get that bookcase out of the house because all it meant to him was oldness in a bad sense; he personally had never engaged with those writers.
I read a good essay once vaguely on this topic, "I Entertain an Agent Unawares" by David Grayson. I just pulled the anthology it is in off the shelf and see that the books the agent is selling aren't the main point, but what I'd remembered is that the man the bookseller is trying to sell them to has known and loved the contents for so long that he says, "No, I already own these [poems, etc]," meaning, he had taken them into his soul.
That's a great line. I should take it to heart myself.
Perhaps I need to remember that I don't have to take Cicero's line "A room without books is like a body without a soul" as decorating advice!
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