great books
Aug. 11th, 2026 03:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI'm reading Mike O'Connor's memoir Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe, and it's killing me -- his itinerant, brilliant, con-man father buys the family a set of the Great Books of the Western World, hanging on to them long after everything else the family has is lost. My god. The lump rises to my throat. Should I laugh or cry?
"Almost everything was gone except that fifty-four volume Great Books of Western Civilization, with the genuine veneer bookcase and the unique guide."
Well do I know that set! We all received one for Christmas, one year in the late 90s -- my family and each of the cousins' families. Great-Uncle Jerome had sold them, and had overstock to gift. My dad was so chuffed. They took up a whole bookcase in the living room.
Dad read several volumes over the next years, while I was in high school. Thucydides. Herodotus. I read the Donne volume, and the Shakespeare, the print tiny, the paper onion-thin.
When I was looking at colleges, it was my dad's idea that I apply to St. John's College, and pursue their Great Books program. I did my other college visits with mom, but dad and I went, just the two of us, by Amtrack train, to check out the scene in Annapolis. He thrilled to it.
When I left home for the first time, again on the train, I took the necessary texts from the Great Books set with me. It would save me money on books, and I felt like a real scholar, with my matched set of texts. We ultimately couldn't afford a second year at St. John's for me, and I was becoming troubled as I unearthed political connections to neo-conservative power, anyway. But that was my start, out in the world on my own.
(I've also recently finished reading Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field, who was a little older than I in those years; it chronicles, from an almost-insider position, how the Straussian mentality embraced by US Great Books programs has become embedded in some of the worst atrocities of our political world. It's like reading dispatches from a war I deserted from.
I can still see the enchantment of the deep reading, the arcane decoding of secret hermaneutics, the dream of being part of the Elect that understand the Truth behind the Noble Lies. If Harvey Mansfield hadn't brought his lecture "On Manliness" to my campus, that first year, as I was burgeoning into feminism and reading De Beauvoir and Atwood in my spare time, I might not have fled so precipitously. Perhaps I owe him my back-handed thanks!)
Dad had the Dante volume on his bedside when he died last year. It was packed up for me, along with everything else, including the family library. But I said that I didn't want the rest of the Great Books. In the subjects that I was interested in, the matched set didn't provide the depth, or, indeed, the academic recency, that I would have wanted; otherwise, the subjects that didn't interest me would just take up dead shelf space.
I shelved the Dante volume with other relics of my father: journals, old date-books chronicling when he observed the first birds and beasts of each calendar year, and his other arcana, new-age self-published self-help books crammed with elaborate testimonials and charts and promotional offers. My father, the old hippie, about as far from a neocon as a person can get: a dyed-in-the-wool old socialist, from a family that remembered McCarthy as the greatest enemy. My grandparents' effects included reams of Maoist pamphlets along with ancient transcendental meditation newsletters. It's why I could never entirely blame dad for his Russophilia, even though I couldn't share it in the age of Putin. Dad came by those beliefs every bit as honestly as he did his certainty that world flood myths must testify to some lost Atlantis. These are my ancestral inheritances.
Real academic families, ones that are well-heeled, upper-class, and stable, don't have book sets like that. I didn't know that as a kid; I'd never met those sorts of people before, or seen how they lived.
I now understand the Great Books as an artifact of aspiring broke-ass autodidacts. People who would have non-neurotypical diagnoses in these later days, but who were just odd guys back then. Without mom, I don't know if dad would have ever figured out how to make money. But he'd sit with those thin-paged books, carefully reading, slowly contemplating, in a way that I have to honor.
Dad dropped out of college a semester away from graduation, claiming boredom. I wonder if I suffered from the same disease, when I just about broke myself on grad school, trying to pursue a naive vision of cloistered pursuit of capital-T truth, instead of sensibly building a career, networking, repackaging my material, pursuing ideas that were trendy, or at least saleable. But I've always been his daughter, at the bottom of it.
"Almost everything was gone except that fifty-four volume Great Books of Western Civilization, with the genuine veneer bookcase and the unique guide."
Well do I know that set! We all received one for Christmas, one year in the late 90s -- my family and each of the cousins' families. Great-Uncle Jerome had sold them, and had overstock to gift. My dad was so chuffed. They took up a whole bookcase in the living room.
Dad read several volumes over the next years, while I was in high school. Thucydides. Herodotus. I read the Donne volume, and the Shakespeare, the print tiny, the paper onion-thin.
When I was looking at colleges, it was my dad's idea that I apply to St. John's College, and pursue their Great Books program. I did my other college visits with mom, but dad and I went, just the two of us, by Amtrack train, to check out the scene in Annapolis. He thrilled to it.
When I left home for the first time, again on the train, I took the necessary texts from the Great Books set with me. It would save me money on books, and I felt like a real scholar, with my matched set of texts. We ultimately couldn't afford a second year at St. John's for me, and I was becoming troubled as I unearthed political connections to neo-conservative power, anyway. But that was my start, out in the world on my own.
(I've also recently finished reading Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field, who was a little older than I in those years; it chronicles, from an almost-insider position, how the Straussian mentality embraced by US Great Books programs has become embedded in some of the worst atrocities of our political world. It's like reading dispatches from a war I deserted from.
I can still see the enchantment of the deep reading, the arcane decoding of secret hermaneutics, the dream of being part of the Elect that understand the Truth behind the Noble Lies. If Harvey Mansfield hadn't brought his lecture "On Manliness" to my campus, that first year, as I was burgeoning into feminism and reading De Beauvoir and Atwood in my spare time, I might not have fled so precipitously. Perhaps I owe him my back-handed thanks!)
Dad had the Dante volume on his bedside when he died last year. It was packed up for me, along with everything else, including the family library. But I said that I didn't want the rest of the Great Books. In the subjects that I was interested in, the matched set didn't provide the depth, or, indeed, the academic recency, that I would have wanted; otherwise, the subjects that didn't interest me would just take up dead shelf space.
I shelved the Dante volume with other relics of my father: journals, old date-books chronicling when he observed the first birds and beasts of each calendar year, and his other arcana, new-age self-published self-help books crammed with elaborate testimonials and charts and promotional offers. My father, the old hippie, about as far from a neocon as a person can get: a dyed-in-the-wool old socialist, from a family that remembered McCarthy as the greatest enemy. My grandparents' effects included reams of Maoist pamphlets along with ancient transcendental meditation newsletters. It's why I could never entirely blame dad for his Russophilia, even though I couldn't share it in the age of Putin. Dad came by those beliefs every bit as honestly as he did his certainty that world flood myths must testify to some lost Atlantis. These are my ancestral inheritances.
Real academic families, ones that are well-heeled, upper-class, and stable, don't have book sets like that. I didn't know that as a kid; I'd never met those sorts of people before, or seen how they lived.
I now understand the Great Books as an artifact of aspiring broke-ass autodidacts. People who would have non-neurotypical diagnoses in these later days, but who were just odd guys back then. Without mom, I don't know if dad would have ever figured out how to make money. But he'd sit with those thin-paged books, carefully reading, slowly contemplating, in a way that I have to honor.
Dad dropped out of college a semester away from graduation, claiming boredom. I wonder if I suffered from the same disease, when I just about broke myself on grad school, trying to pursue a naive vision of cloistered pursuit of capital-T truth, instead of sensibly building a career, networking, repackaging my material, pursuing ideas that were trendy, or at least saleable. But I've always been his daughter, at the bottom of it.
no subject
Date: 2026-08-12 11:04 pm (UTC)Which suddenly reminded me that my dad never went to college though never made a fuss about it, so I forgot.