We read classics because they reveal how little human nature actually changes our desires, fears, and moral puzzles just wear new clothes. They train the mind to think with nuance and the heart to feel with depth. A classic isn’t just old; it’s a book that keeps outsmarting time, still speaking to questions we haven’t stopped asking.
Fully agree. The classics are classics because they've survived through time, gotten past our collective attention deficits and sit here to be discussed: because they're relevant. They speak to the same issues and topics that we care about, the fundamentals of human behaviour.
I appreciate where you're coming from. But man, this stuff isn't light reading. Like I am doing the Aeneid because it was praised by Sean Berube. Man I have to sit down and power though it and it's still hard. They just burned down Troy and I've been on it like 2 weeks.lol.
Reading the classics is not about nostalgia but about recovering the full hierarchy of truth. As you write, modernity isolates fragments and calls them new, simply because modernity cannot see the whole but only the parts. The great works serve as a reference to keep the parts in right relation.
When meaning loses its higher reference, it fragments.
The classics remind us what a whole vision of reality looks like. They show us not just what to think but how things fit. Perhaps that’s why the classics feel so strangely alive today.
They restore the shape of the world that we lost when we stopped reading them.
History and literature are filled with examples of the human condition. "Read to live," as Flaubert counseled us, and recall the observation of Goethe, who wrote, "He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth."
We learn from others as we read, harvesting the crops of the seeds they planted, and applying them to our own times.
But more importantly, reading affords us the ability to learn about ourselves and how we grow over the course of our lives, as Clifton Fadiman — author of Lifetime Reading Plan and of the preface for Great Books of the Western World — pointed out:
“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”
Could not agree more with these sentiments. I am deeply grateful for this essay. Its three arguments feel like music to my ears as someone who has made a deliberate practice of reading and re-reading the classics over the past few decades. In an age that prizes novelty and immediacy, the classics give us ballast: they pull us out of the whirl of the present and into the richer currents of memory, conflict, and wisdom.
Chesterton’s point about avoiding being "merely modern" rings true. After all, without the depth and breadth of older voices, we risk fetishizing the fleeting. His warning about half-truths is equally piercing: so many modern extremes are built around an overemphasis on a single good, divorced from the network of other goods. The classics, in contrast, force us into tension, nuance, and perspective. And the reminder that "newness" is often just old ideas reshuffled is a humbling one. The more I read, the more I see that so much of what passes for originality has roots that stretch centuries deep.
In addition to a few non-fiction and new fiction books, I've read about twenty classics already this year, most of them by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Twain, and others who still speak with startling clarity to our age. Next up for me is a journey through the great Russian authors -- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev -- whose worlds promise to challenge and deepen my understanding even further. This essay captures precisely why such reading still matters, and why I keep returning to it.
Perhaps we first need to define "Classics" beyond a Western colonialist male construct.
The contributions of international literature to our understanding of the world and the inclusion of previously excluded female writers and diverse religious views would help to provide a more balanced understanding by accurately redefining the term, "Classics".
Every day I thank my lucky stars that I attended St. John's College in Annapolis, the so-called "Great Books School."
Not only did we cherish and debate the classics, but I believe my education there inoculated me against the inanities and absurdities of post-modern lit crit. (I got just a taste of the latter when I went to graduate school some 20 years after undergrad and couldn't wait to get out.)
Probably many people here already know about St. John's:
I did not finish the reading of Dostojewski's text yet.
It was puzzling to read it, first. But I see that the author wrestles with a problem he did not master - if he doesn't on the last 100 pages - since, in short, he must assume reason, rationality and understanding in communication, intersubjectivity to denounce and to attack it, and perceives the achievements of rational precision - science - as an enemy and obstacle for what he has in mind.
His obsession with social hierarchies and the polarity of its structure as he has internalized it turns against himself as it switches polarity to change the abjection of his social environment against himself, so that he alternatingly appears to himself as 'more developed' and as a nullity.
So far he doesn't succeed to control the conceptualization of the subject/object-relation he is entangled in.
On this I’ve recently started reading the ideas covered by a philosophy podcast, whose episodes are in approximately chronological order. It starts with pre-Socratic philosophy and works its way forward.
I read the book and then listen to the reflections and thoughts of the podcast host. Might be an exercise worth considering.
We read classics because they reveal how little human nature actually changes our desires, fears, and moral puzzles just wear new clothes. They train the mind to think with nuance and the heart to feel with depth. A classic isn’t just old; it’s a book that keeps outsmarting time, still speaking to questions we haven’t stopped asking.
Fully agree. The classics are classics because they've survived through time, gotten past our collective attention deficits and sit here to be discussed: because they're relevant. They speak to the same issues and topics that we care about, the fundamentals of human behaviour.
I appreciate where you're coming from. But man, this stuff isn't light reading. Like I am doing the Aeneid because it was praised by Sean Berube. Man I have to sit down and power though it and it's still hard. They just burned down Troy and I've been on it like 2 weeks.lol.
But this is exactly why it’s so healing in today's world...
Reading the classics is not about nostalgia but about recovering the full hierarchy of truth. As you write, modernity isolates fragments and calls them new, simply because modernity cannot see the whole but only the parts. The great works serve as a reference to keep the parts in right relation.
When meaning loses its higher reference, it fragments.
The classics remind us what a whole vision of reality looks like. They show us not just what to think but how things fit. Perhaps that’s why the classics feel so strangely alive today.
They restore the shape of the world that we lost when we stopped reading them.
History and literature are filled with examples of the human condition. "Read to live," as Flaubert counseled us, and recall the observation of Goethe, who wrote, "He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth."
We learn from others as we read, harvesting the crops of the seeds they planted, and applying them to our own times.
But more importantly, reading affords us the ability to learn about ourselves and how we grow over the course of our lives, as Clifton Fadiman — author of Lifetime Reading Plan and of the preface for Great Books of the Western World — pointed out:
“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”
What a fabulous essay - I shall be sharing (almost) as liberally as I share my books.
The example of Nietzsche and Shakespeare is golden. Exactly. I really appreciate this piece thank you.
This idea, apparently, was stated long ago. Great article.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Could not agree more with these sentiments. I am deeply grateful for this essay. Its three arguments feel like music to my ears as someone who has made a deliberate practice of reading and re-reading the classics over the past few decades. In an age that prizes novelty and immediacy, the classics give us ballast: they pull us out of the whirl of the present and into the richer currents of memory, conflict, and wisdom.
Chesterton’s point about avoiding being "merely modern" rings true. After all, without the depth and breadth of older voices, we risk fetishizing the fleeting. His warning about half-truths is equally piercing: so many modern extremes are built around an overemphasis on a single good, divorced from the network of other goods. The classics, in contrast, force us into tension, nuance, and perspective. And the reminder that "newness" is often just old ideas reshuffled is a humbling one. The more I read, the more I see that so much of what passes for originality has roots that stretch centuries deep.
In addition to a few non-fiction and new fiction books, I've read about twenty classics already this year, most of them by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Twain, and others who still speak with startling clarity to our age. Next up for me is a journey through the great Russian authors -- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev -- whose worlds promise to challenge and deepen my understanding even further. This essay captures precisely why such reading still matters, and why I keep returning to it.
Thank you.
Perhaps we first need to define "Classics" beyond a Western colonialist male construct.
The contributions of international literature to our understanding of the world and the inclusion of previously excluded female writers and diverse religious views would help to provide a more balanced understanding by accurately redefining the term, "Classics".
Every day I thank my lucky stars that I attended St. John's College in Annapolis, the so-called "Great Books School."
Not only did we cherish and debate the classics, but I believe my education there inoculated me against the inanities and absurdities of post-modern lit crit. (I got just a taste of the latter when I went to graduate school some 20 years after undergrad and couldn't wait to get out.)
Probably many people here already know about St. John's:
https://www.sjc.edu
Because as the Bible and other holy books say
THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
Right now I’m reading Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” (after watching “The Gilded Age”). Enjoying it very much.
I did not finish the reading of Dostojewski's text yet.
It was puzzling to read it, first. But I see that the author wrestles with a problem he did not master - if he doesn't on the last 100 pages - since, in short, he must assume reason, rationality and understanding in communication, intersubjectivity to denounce and to attack it, and perceives the achievements of rational precision - science - as an enemy and obstacle for what he has in mind.
His obsession with social hierarchies and the polarity of its structure as he has internalized it turns against himself as it switches polarity to change the abjection of his social environment against himself, so that he alternatingly appears to himself as 'more developed' and as a nullity.
So far he doesn't succeed to control the conceptualization of the subject/object-relation he is entangled in.
Questions: Is there a chronological order to what you are reading and is there a list of the “Great Books” you are reading? How were they selected?
On this I’ve recently started reading the ideas covered by a philosophy podcast, whose episodes are in approximately chronological order. It starts with pre-Socratic philosophy and works its way forward.
I read the book and then listen to the reflections and thoughts of the podcast host. Might be an exercise worth considering.
Here’s a link to the podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Shpxw7dPoxRJCdfFXTWLE?si=Yy9D4xi_S3qmEbSIDXBRFQ
(FYI this is not my podcast and some obscure way of promoting my work :) )
Another excellent post!