Harvard Classics: Week Three

Well, a business trip broke my rhythm with this, and also, having to do it every single day was becoming a bit of a grind, anyway. So, I've decided I will proceed with reading them all in order, but I have no aspirations to finish it within a year.

Jan 15: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, pp. 943-953. I'd oft heard of this, but never read any of it. It certainly has it's own eerie beauty! Though I wonder whether this rhyming translation really keeps the original spirit of it...

Jan 16: Aesop's Fables, pp. 31-43. I'd read many of these before, but this one I think was new to me:

The Old Man and Death

An old labourer, bent double with age and toil, was gathering sticks in a forest.  At last he grew so tired and hopeless that he threw down the bundle of sticks, and cried out: "I cannot bear this life any longer.  Ah, I wish Death would only come and take me!"  As he spoke, Death, a grisly skeleton, appeared and said to him: "What wouldst thou, Mortal?  I heard thee call me."  "Please, sir," replied the woodcutter, "would you kindly help me to lift this faggot of sticks on to my shoulder?"

Jan. 17: Franklin's Autobiography, pp. 5-15. Personal stories from Franklin. The tone of the book is very personal, since he was writing it to his son.

Jan 18: The Frogs, pp. 439-449. I read Aristophanes' The Clouds in 9th grade, and thought it was great fun. This is fun, too -- a lot of farce involving greek gods. I'd like to find a more modern translation, so I might understand it better.

Jan 19: The Poetic Principle, pp. 371-380. This is an essay by Edgar Allen Poe about what makes for good poetry. He has surprising views on the length that poems should be -- he talks a bit about interest curve, and points out that short poems are often forgotten, and long poems become tiresome.

Jan 20: Eve of St. Agnes, pp. 883-893. This was a poem by Keats that was hard for me to grasp at times, but it has moments of imagery that are incredibly real and powerful.

Jan 21: Andersen's Tales, pp. 301-310. I had never read this story, entitled The Emperor and the Nightingale. It's incredible! It's about robots, and what it means to be alive -- it has an unearthly quality that takes it out of time -- the nightingale represents everything that I desire to be.

Harvard Classics: Week Two

I made it this far! Here is what the second week had to offer:

Jan 8: The Book of Job, pp. 71-87. This marks the third time I've read this. The first was in Mr. Brady's class in 11th grade, the second was from an audiobook. It is a fascinating and thought provoking story -- I love the casual chats between God and Satan -- that happens nowhere else in the bible. But I always wonder if the arguments need to be so long and complicated? I guess if they weren't, it wouldn't have so many layers of meaning. I could read this a hundred more times, and get something new out each time.

Jan 9: Sir Francis Drake Revived, pp. 135-145. Whoa! Now this is a pirate story! Told by a sailor who actually sailed with Drake! I ached to make a videogame about this!

Jan 10: The Bacchae, pp. 368-372. This is my first time reading any Euripides at all. A king versus a god in contest of seduction! This reading is just enough to be intriguing... but I think I would benefit from a more modern translation.

Jan 11: The Federalist, pp 199-207. These are some of the Federalist papers, penned by Alexander Hamilton and friends. They were written between the time the Constitution was proposed, and when it was voted on, and they were persuasive arguments as to why it was a good idea. It's weird to think that there was debate about this. Why don't we have newspaper columns like this anymore?

Jan 12: On Taste, pp. 11-26. Edmund Burke makes arguments about the nature of "good taste." It was pretty dry and straightforward, but what fascinates me is the longer reading that follows: On the Sublime and Beautiful, where he tries to describe all the things that humans find pleasing. Just his talk alone about how "all beautiful things are smooth" was enough to get my mind turning. I hope I can read it soon!

Jan 13: Inquiry on Inequality, pp. 215-228. This is the first time I've read Rousseau. It felt like a very long winded way to explain that men want to be free and equal.

Jan 14: The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, pp. 60-65. This is basically "the first written constitution as a permanent limitation on governmental power, known in history." I liked how simple and straightforward it was, and how weird the spelling.

Well, two weeks down, and I'm into my third!

Harvard Classics: Week One

I found a complete set of the 1930 Harvard Classics at a library book sale maybe five years ago for $50. It has long been known as the "five foot shelf of books", and I figured, hey, I've got a five foot shelf that could use some books on it. Turns out the fifty volumes are really six feet long!

The origin of the Harvard Classics is kind of interesting. The president of Harvard University stated in a speech that the elements of a liberal education were available to anyone who would read for fifteen minutes a day from the right five-foot shelf of books. A book publisher approached him with a proposal -- if he could name the books, they'd publish them as a set. And they did a really nice job. The books are well-chosen, despite some strong biases, and are well edited, and pleasant to hold and read.

Now, at first, I was all bold, planning to read them from beginning to end. I stalled out in volume one (Benjamin Franklin's autobiography). However, one cool aspect of the Harvard Classics -- it comes with a "devotional"... that is, a suggestion for fifteen minutes (or so) of reading for each day of the year. I tried to do this in 2007, but got distracted and stopped. But 2009 is my year! So, I figured I would report on my daily reading at the end of each week as a way to help keep me honest. If you are interested in reading them, they are actually in the public domain now, so you can download them from several sources. Without further ado, my first week of reading:

Jan 1: Franklin's Autobiography, pp. 79-85. Hearing Ben Franklin talk in the first person is always interesting. In this section he describes his method of monitoring his virtues my making a chart of them on a whiteboard (made of ivory! He uses red ink for permanent lines, and pencil for things that are erasable). Instead of trying to be virtuous in all ways at once, he focuses on one of each of 13 virtues each week, in an attempt to change his habits gradually. This lets him cycle through all 13 virtues four times each year. I'm reading the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People now, and it is interesting to see the connections from that to this.

Jan 2: Milton's Poems, pp. 7-18. These poems are interesting because he wrote them between the ages of 16 and 19. I was fascinated that I could so easily see such a difference between his poetic ability in this short span of age -- they were both amazing, but there was so much more depth and complexity in the college age poems.

Jan 3: On Friendship by Cicero, pp. 16-26. Nice to hear someone analyze friendship, I guess, but though the structure is like Plato, it felt much more long-winded.

Jan 4: Grimm's Fairy Tales, pp. 83-90. This is the well known story of The Fisherman and his Wife, where the wife makes greedier and greedier wishes, finally wishing to be like God. In the past, I had always assumed that the fish was punishing her for overreaching at the end, but reading it again, I wondered if this was a deeper statement about the nature of God:

"Well, what does she want, then?" said the Flounder. "Alas," said he, "she wants to be like unto God." "Go to her, and you will find her back again in the dirty hovel." And there they are living still at this very time.

Jan 5: Byron and Goethe, pp. 377-396. This is an essay by Mazzini about similarities and differences between two great writers. It was gorgeous writing, and though some of it was lost on me, the end passage will stay with me:

Certain travellers of the eleventh century relate that they saw at Teneriffe a prodigiously lofty tree, which, from its immense extent of foliage, collected all the vapors of the atmosphere; to discharge them, when its branches were shaken, in a shower of pure and refreshing water. Genius is like this tree, and the mission of criticism whould be to shake the branches. At the present day it more resembles a savage striving to hew down the noble tree to the roots.

Jan 6: Virgil's Aeneid, pp. 109-127. This was the part with Hector's ghost. The translation was in rhyme, and pretty hard for me to follow. I wonder how I would do with a different translation?

Jan 7: The Thousand and One Nights, pp. 5-13. This is the beginning part, setting up the story of Scheherazade. Part of the fun of the thousand and one nights is all the sex and gore, and this lame bowdlerized version is like drinking a virgin daquiri.

I wonder if I can keep this up for 51 more weeks?