The Third Decade

I’ve been at this classic reading program now for about twenty years. Sometime in the early nineties, I was reading something by C. S. Lewis in which he mentioned Orlando Furioso, and I suddenly went under the wave of all my frustration about my high school and college and the poor education in letters that they offered me. Then just a moment later, I realized that I could either stay frustrated or start reading, and decided to educate myself. Soon after, I read the Iliad and Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, and some other classics. Sometime in 1994, I purchased my used set of Britannica Great Books, and in January of 1996, I started the ten-year plan outlined in volume I of that set. It took me eleven years to get through that plan (I got stuck on City of God one year, and I don’t know why), and in 2007, I started the Second Decade, the plan that drives this blog. Now I’m in the sixth year of that plan and looking forward to year 7.

I look back on the last twenty years, and I have to say that it’s worked. I’ve certainly read all the things I thought in the early nineties that I should have read, and a lot of it has stuck. I don’t usually get lost when I read or hear about classic literature, I can compare historical philosophies, I pray and read the Bible with more depth knowing some traditional theology, and I have a much better understanding of ethics – even if I very humanly fail on a regular basis to put my understanding to good use.

But I started thinking this summer: what do I do when I finish this plan? I love The Plan; can I go back to reading without a schedule? I have a sense of accomplishment now; do I keep reading thorny philosophy and continue to try to learn new things or rest satisfied that the hard reading is past? I’ll be retiring from my current job in a couple of years; what will my next job be like, and will I have more time to read or less? I’ll be fifty-seven years old when I finish this current plan; will I live longer than my dad and his dad and have enough time to get through another ten years?

I don’t know all the answers to those questions. But they kept rolling through my mind, and I had to come up with something. So this summer I drew up a plan for a Third Decade. I have four years and three months to change my mind, but for now I’ve made some decisions. (1): I think a plan for retirement should probably have an air of reward about it; no more Nietzsche or Hegel or Peirce. Almost everything on the new list is something I think I’ll have fun reading. Not that my idea of fun is like most people’s; Aquinas will still be there, for instance. And that leads me to (2): I need to keep reading some of my favorite prolific authors and try to get a sense of completion on some of their works. So I’ve included a plan for continuing with William James, Aquinas, and Augustine. Also I decided to try to finish Durant’s eleven-volume History of Civilization; I counted up the pages just a couple of weeks ago and found that I needed to read 380 pages a year instead of 250 in order to get to the end (yikes!), so I revised that part of the current plan. And that leaves (3): After fifty years, I finally learned the joys of rereading, and I want to return to some of my favorite books and authors from an earlier time. That means lots of Asimov, Dumas, Verne, Stevenson, Kenneth Roberts, Dickens of course, and – a guilty pleasure nowhere near “great literature” – Edgar Rice Burroughs.

There’s a lot more to this third reading plan, some serious and some silly. But I very recently finished up the new schedule for the next fifteen years of Durant, so it’s been on my mind, and I wanted to leave a brief preview here on the blog. Is it wrong to bring back the past?  “There is no frigate like a book,” and I’m ready for adventure.

No Frigate Like a Book

“There is no frigate like a book,” said Emily Dickinson, “to take us lands away.” I’m not sure how Dickinson really knew this; since she barely left her room except through her imagination, she didn’t have the experience to make the comparison. I’ve traveled a lot both by physical conveyance and by the printed page, and I have to say that nothing beats the real thing. But the best books do bring us very close to the real experience, and especially when they take us to a land away that we have no chance of visiting in person, we all sense the exhilarating voyage of discovery that Dickinson had in mind.

But then, how did Patrick O’Brian know how to write such vivid depictions of life aboard a sailing ship? As far as nineteenth-century naval experience goes, O’Brian was as homebound as Dickinson. And yet he pulled it off, time after time. This morning I read a chapter from The Thirteen-Gun Salute, the thirteenth offering in the Aubrey-Maturin series, in which nothing seemed to happen. Jack Aubrey’s Surprise spotted a prize ship, chased her, and lost her, accomplishing nothing by this distraction from the actual mission. When I finished the chapter, I wondered for a moment why O’Brian had led me through the episode. Would the prize ship come back into the story? Would the delay cause other problems for the heroes? My next thought, though, reminded me that no matter what the answers to those questions would prove to be, O’Brian had taken me on an adventure I would never have the opportunity to experience first-hand.

I was there in the Irish Sea. I saw the dim, blue expanse of first light, when the eyes unable to distinguish sky from sea perceive only undifferentiated distance. I felt the frustration of a crew regretting the lack of wind and felt the sweeping oars in my hands, their handles smoothed by thousands of rotations in sailors’ calloused palms. I tasted the salt water splashing over the rail and the fresh rainwater that poured down during a gale. During the fastest part of the chase, I heard the hum of the lines and the gentle whipping of the edges of the sails, the shouts of information from the lookout on the masthead, and the work songs of the Sethians. And I smelled the coffee, the fish, even Dr. Maturin’s surgical instruments.

There is no frigate like a book. So what can surpass a good frigate of a book about frigates?