The Great Books

This morning, my wife found me lying on the couch in the living room, drinking a cup of tea and staring off into space. “What are you doing?” she asked, innocently enough. “Working,” I said, without turning my head. “Oh,” she responded, my answer apparently sufficient to satisfy her passing curiosity, and she moved on to other business, leaving me to my thoughts.

In fact, I had been contemplating the series of books on the shelf across from the couch that my brother-in-law had recently asked if we would be willing to hold on to while he was in the midst of a move to new living quarters. The books were the complete collection of the Great Books of the Western World series, 54 volumes in all, beautifully leather-bound, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., and covering seemingly every important writer and thinker one could imagine, from Homer to Herodotus, Shakespeare to Karl Marx, Galileo to Freud. 

The books had originally belonged to my wife’s father, had been passed on to her brother, and appeared now, temporarily at least, on our shelves. They were quite impressive both visually and in their incredible scope, and reminded me of the set of encyclopedias my own family had had in the den of our own house when I was a child.

I remember sitting on the floor in front of the bookshelf where we kept the encyclopedias, marked as they were alphabetically, A-F and such, my mind spinning through the letters and the associated topics they represented: Agriculture, Baboon, Cabbage, Cabal, Daddy longlegs, Early anti-colonial resistance in Africa, and so on, a whirling miasma of information, sucked up into a vortex like a tornado where cows and pigs swirled together next to toasters and personal grooming items, and set down suddenly in the orderly pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Just looking at the volumes made me feel smarter, lined up and sequential as they were.

I remember using the volumes to help with my homework and I often got distracted from the topic at hand by some other more esoteric tidbit that seemed to pop off the page and capture my attention.

Lying on the couch was a similar experience. Where would one start? How to distinguish between Ptolemy, Copernicus, or Kepler? Would it be better to start with Euclid or Dante? Soon my brother-in-law would retrieve his books, taking with him this current opportunity for higher learning that had unexpectedly presented itself.

As I contemplated these questions, I remembered a previous attempt I had made in my drinking years to expand my literary horizons and upgrade my knowledge base through the acquisition of a set of rather inexpensive books that had been advertised by a publisher in a “book of the month” type format, whereby you would subscribe to the series and receive a different book each month. All went well for a while, until I received the bill. I decided not to pay it, and eventually, after a number of dunning notices, all of which I ignored, the books stopped coming. Nevertheless, I kept the first three volumes I had already received—the complete works of Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling, and Guy de Maupassant—telling myself it was only fair since the overall quality of the printing had not been as impressive as I had been led to believe by the publisher’s advertising.

It was something I had always felt bad about, the kind of selfishness that permeated my drinking. 

Lying on the couch, I wondered where I might turn for solace. Thomas Aquinas? Dostoevsky? William James? 

More likely the answers would be contained in a volume not represented on the same part of my bookshelf as the Great Books, the section that contained the large variety of recovery books I had collected over the years. 

Getting up from the couch, I pulled down a dog-eared volume from a far corner of the shelf: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the book in which a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous tells how members recover and how the society functions, a great book, indeed. Turning to the chapter on Step Eight, which states, “Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all,” I began to read.

My wife walked back through the living room on her way to the kitchen. “Still working?” she asked.

Without looking up, I nodded.