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.
It’s the Great Conversation. Plato’s Republic is about trying to nail down the definition of justice - we’re STILL doing that in 2025 ! The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was vilified for selling her own work … and prominent men ( and some women ) are saying that today too ( women need to stay home and have children and not work for pay ) . On and on ….
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.
This isn’t a popular opinion : don’t torture yourself. Professor Susan Wise Bauer , who wrote A Well Educated Mind , writes about just that . She says her bête noir is Moby Dick - she just can’t get through it and she’s been trying for 18 years .
I find it impossible to read through a classic as a stand alone work in a vacuum . They aren’t about the story line ( though some can be appreciated for just the beauty and mastery of the language - the Aenid is not one of those LOL ) I do a lot of prep work before I start a classic . They bring history with them and add to the Great Conversation .
If you are finding you have no interest in how this laid out the core “values “ of Rome or that the density is just a turn off - Move on . There are plenty of other ways to learn all this that are enjoyable.
I'm 67 now. Two Engineering degrees and then realized I missed a whole educational world call The Liberal Arts, and set about in my 30s and 40s to remedy that. I'm glad I did it then because now I just do not have the focus and intensity to really dissect and appreciate the works. I appreciate people like The Culturist who share the insights they get when working through an opus. I really appreciate Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn's ATW because both are so well read and have retained it, whereas I've most certainly forgotten many key insights over the decades.
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.”
Absolutely! That has happened to me with many books, such as On the Road and Catcher in the Rye: Every reread (every few years or so) changes...or rather it stays the same and EYE change!
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.
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.
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:
So am I! Although as I said, I had to put up with a bit of it later.
For the record, I went to grad school at Johns Hopkins University, specifically The Writing Seminars (for non-fiction).
The single best class I took there was actually an undergrad class, for which I had to get special permission from the administration, because technically grad students were required to take only graduate-level classes. It was a course on Renaissance art taught by one of the premiere scholars in the field, Charles Dempsey, and it was SUPERB. Thank god for it. It got me through my time there.
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".
This captures Chesterton’s genius perfectly. His instinct that the “modern” error is not ignorance of ideas but their isolation from context. The classics don’t make us nostalgic; they restore proportion. Reading them teaches the same discipline as Lonergan’s method; to hold multiple insights in tension until they converge into understanding. What we call progress often turns out to be a fragment that has forgotten the whole.
Thank you for this essay! I made sure to save this one this morning and come back to it, and I’m glad I did
While I largely agree with the points and the broader sentiment of the importance of reading the classics, a few questions did pop up in my mind: Were the classics not just modern at the time they were made? If classics better place and represent modern half-truths, and time goes on longer and longer, is there some sort of stopping point, and therefore a hierarchy, to which we should follow to find and digest these better represented truths?
Good point. But I would argue: They were written BEFORE AI/smart phones/the internet and during eras when writing was still powerful and important. Storytelling which was universal and stemming from the earliest of times. There's something more honest and sacred, I think, about writing from Athens in 500 BC versus the latest "TikTok" novel today.
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.
Yes!!!!!
Exactly. Universality.
THIS !!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s the Great Conversation. Plato’s Republic is about trying to nail down the definition of justice - we’re STILL doing that in 2025 ! The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was vilified for selling her own work … and prominent men ( and some women ) are saying that today too ( women need to stay home and have children and not work for pay ) . On and on ….
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...
This isn’t a popular opinion : don’t torture yourself. Professor Susan Wise Bauer , who wrote A Well Educated Mind , writes about just that . She says her bête noir is Moby Dick - she just can’t get through it and she’s been trying for 18 years .
I find it impossible to read through a classic as a stand alone work in a vacuum . They aren’t about the story line ( though some can be appreciated for just the beauty and mastery of the language - the Aenid is not one of those LOL ) I do a lot of prep work before I start a classic . They bring history with them and add to the Great Conversation .
If you are finding you have no interest in how this laid out the core “values “ of Rome or that the density is just a turn off - Move on . There are plenty of other ways to learn all this that are enjoyable.
I'm 67 now. Two Engineering degrees and then realized I missed a whole educational world call The Liberal Arts, and set about in my 30s and 40s to remedy that. I'm glad I did it then because now I just do not have the focus and intensity to really dissect and appreciate the works. I appreciate people like The Culturist who share the insights they get when working through an opus. I really appreciate Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn's ATW because both are so well read and have retained it, whereas I've most certainly forgotten many key insights over the decades.
Right on, Tom.
It gets easier
Good, solid, SLOW reading is excellent :)
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.”
Absolutely! That has happened to me with many books, such as On the Road and Catcher in the Rye: Every reread (every few years or so) changes...or rather it stays the same and EYE change!
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
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.
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.
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.
The beauty of the language is incomparable. Plus they are like mini time machines.
Yes. The classics are crucial because they are fundamentally universal. We have lost that in contemporary writing.
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
Thanks for the intel
I'm glad you escaped the post-modern Lit Crit!
So am I! Although as I said, I had to put up with a bit of it later.
For the record, I went to grad school at Johns Hopkins University, specifically The Writing Seminars (for non-fiction).
The single best class I took there was actually an undergrad class, for which I had to get special permission from the administration, because technically grad students were required to take only graduate-level classes. It was a course on Renaissance art taught by one of the premiere scholars in the field, Charles Dempsey, and it was SUPERB. Thank god for it. It got me through my time there.
Because as the Bible and other holy books say
THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
I read classics for the beautiful and lost vocabulary
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".
Classics show us the full picture and help spot half-truths, love this perspective.
This captures Chesterton’s genius perfectly. His instinct that the “modern” error is not ignorance of ideas but their isolation from context. The classics don’t make us nostalgic; they restore proportion. Reading them teaches the same discipline as Lonergan’s method; to hold multiple insights in tension until they converge into understanding. What we call progress often turns out to be a fragment that has forgotten the whole.
So true. Universality. Historical and social context. History from 30,000 feet.
Thank you for this essay! I made sure to save this one this morning and come back to it, and I’m glad I did
While I largely agree with the points and the broader sentiment of the importance of reading the classics, a few questions did pop up in my mind: Were the classics not just modern at the time they were made? If classics better place and represent modern half-truths, and time goes on longer and longer, is there some sort of stopping point, and therefore a hierarchy, to which we should follow to find and digest these better represented truths?
Good point. But I would argue: They were written BEFORE AI/smart phones/the internet and during eras when writing was still powerful and important. Storytelling which was universal and stemming from the earliest of times. There's something more honest and sacred, I think, about writing from Athens in 500 BC versus the latest "TikTok" novel today.
I recommend Robert Fagle's translations for Homer, the Oresteia, and the Aeneid.