Smart Classics

Three Not-So-Musty Must-Reads

Over the past six years in this column, I have presented and discussed many old books from many different times and places, and in each case I have striven to show the enduring relevance of these books for our own time. I've enjoyed immensely the opportunity to showcase authors and books and ideas I regard as instructive and important, but I have to confess that the selection process that lies behind each column has not always been an easy one.

There are scores, even hundreds, of books that I think are truly great books, books that have educated and transformed me and that I want to write about, yet have not been able to. Strangely, it often happens that while a book may be overflowing with insight and wisdom, no idea from it strikes me as translatable into the focus of a column. So for every book I've actually written about, many other books, every bit as good, have been considered, then set aside. Yet I want the readers to know about these books. I've long wondered what to do about this problem, and finally a solution has occurred to me: Why not highlight several of these works in an "omnibus" column, not attempting to derive a detailed contemporary lesson from any of them, but instead describing their virtues in a more general way?

Here, then, is a short list of books, related to the broader concerns of Salvo, none of which (I think) you will regret reading, and some of which may end up on your own list of all-time favorites.

Homer, The Iliad

The Iliad is close to the oldest, and certainly among the greatest, of the great books of Western civilization. Originally in Greek, this epic poem has been rendered into many prose and poetic versions. I'm partial to the verse translation of Richmond Lattimore.

One of the key sources of Greek mythology, and arguably the forerunner of Greek tragedy, the Iliad is one of the most stirring tales of wartime heroism, yet at the same time the first great Western work of anti-war literature. The glory of war and the cost of war are shown here with compelling force. The people of the story—Achilleus, Agamemnon, Hektor, -Andromache, Priam, Odysseus, and so many others—are presented with a depth that guarantees their careers as continuing characters in future Western literature. The arrogance of Achilleus, the nobility of Hektor, and the ruthless wiliness of Odysseus are all vividly portrayed.

There are thrilling scenes of personal combat, but also scenes of touching compassion; one would have to be almost inhuman not to be moved when King Priam comes as a suppliant to Achilleus for the body of his slain son Hektor. The discussion about the relationship between Zeus and Fate contains some of the deepest probings in Western religious thought. There is even comic relief, often in the form of the machinations of the Olympian gods. The book must be read only when one is in the mood for a long epic, but in that frame of mind, it's not to be missed.

Simone Weil, Waiting on God

It is perhaps ironic that a woman whose Christian theology constantly verges on unorthodoxy (or at least questionable orthodoxy) produced one of the great classics of twentieth-century spirituality and religious thought. Waiting on God has been a perennial favorite among Christian readers, Catholic and Protestant alike. French by nationality, Jewish by ethnic origin, Christian by vocation, Platonist by philosophical temperament, mystic by religious experience, philosophy teacher and factory worker by occupation, Weil produced hundreds of pages of notes on religious and spiritual themes, most of which were not published until after her death during World War II. Much of her writing is in short bits, reminiscent of the Pensé es of Pascal. This book, however, features a number of her longer, more sustained pieces, and some of them are quite powerful, including "Forms of the Implicit Love of God," and "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies."

Weil can be maddening in her personal intellectual pride and in her seeming relish for suffering as a means to spirituality, yet her writing is filled with religious and theological expressions of captivating beauty. She has the self-critical and introspective intensity of Kierkegaard, yet seems less gloomy and more affirming of the good in the world. In her theological speculations, she is sometimes less academically disciplined than C. S. Lewis, one of my favorite Christian authors, but at the same time her presentation of Christian life smells less of the Oxford study, and engages one at the gut level more than Lewis does. I find it impossible to agree with her on everything, yet find it necessary to take her seriously even where I most disagree. Certainly I have never seen her particular blend of mysticism, philosophy, poetry, spirituality, and social activism elsewhere. She is a truly original Christian voice, and I think every Christian should read at least one of her works.

Edwin Abbott, Flatland

This is a Victorian classic of imaginative fiction. Imagine that you are a Square, living in a two-dimensional world, Flatland, where virtually everything and everybody is a two-dimensional figure of some kind. Your sight enables you to look only along the plane of your world, and all the people you encounter can be perceived only as lines, approaching and receding from you. What would happen if, in such a world, you had a three-dimensional visitor, a Sphere? Given that the Sphere can only intersect your world on a single plane, how much of him could you see? And if he told you he was from the world of Spaceland, a world that, in addition to north and south, and east and west, had a third dimension of "up and down," would you believe him? Would you even be able to comprehend such a world?

And what if you, a Square, were transported to a one-dimensional world, Lineland, in which everyone was merely a point on a line? Even if you lined up one of your edges to coincide with the line of Lineland, the Lineland people could see only a single point on your body, the point on the corner of your body in front of them. Would you have any hope of persuading those inhabitants that your two-dimensional world, your plane of Flatland, really existed, and that you had traveled from there?

These are the intellectual problems faced by the characters in this story, a tale laced with gentle satire about Victorian mores, but with a serious point about the tendency of human minds to be restricted in thought by their parochial assumptions about what can and cannot exist. The work originally helped to prepare a popular audience to grasp the then-emerging notion of a four-dimensional world—the world of space-time—but the idea has applications beyond mathematics and physics. Aren't people of all eras constrained in vision by their assumptions about reality? For example, aren't many psychologists constrained by materialism when they insist on interpreting the mind as a mere epiphenomenon of the body? Flatland, in a very amusing way, helps to shake us out of our smug assumptions that we know what is real and what is possible or impossible. And for the geometrically challenged, it comes with diagrams! This short little masterpiece shows how wit and playfulness can be made vehicles of serious thought.