Okay, that was an unusual day: flag football, volleyball, cross country, JV football, altar server training, readathon, men's club meeting, teen Bible study. Thank goodness our parish, the high school, and the elementary school are all on the same block about 15 minutes from our house. And homework was light last night. Usually we only have three or four trips to school. If we had lived on base, 30 minutes away, we would have just said no to these events. But I'm glad the kids can participate in these things - as long as nights like that don't happen often. And I'm intentionally staying out of commitments for myself right now. No Bible study or book club for me.
Since I'm not working, I need to watch that I don't let my days slip away in a haze of reading internet news or random shopping. How to use these hours? I have a lot of project ideas: a garden plot, finish a photo book, use up some fabric I bought in Guam for skirts for the girls, organize photos and books.
Getting to the topic: I'm still working on unpacking boxes that came out of storage in Mississippi, where we left some things when we went to Guam, thinking our accommodations would be limited. Yesterday I unpacked my Harvard Classics set. One of the 50 is missing. Volume 2. It may yet show up, but as I was obsessing over finding it so much that I went to the computer to see if I can buy one (yes, for less than $10), I realized that if I'm going to hold on to these things, I should at least read them. (I have way too many books for our space here but if I'm going to store books in boxes and not read them, I shouldn't hoard them, right?)
Maybe the publishers knew that most people would buy these books to make a nice decoration for their living room, but I'm sure the editor Dr. Charles Eliot hoped that most of the purchasers would read them. Let me check... Ah Wikipedia! Eliot thought people could be liberally educated by reading just 15 minutes a day. (For how many years?) Obviously, the publication of the set was a commercial venture and over 350,000 sets were sold, which is pretty successful. The collection is subtitled "The Five Foot Shelf of Books," a moniker which seems to indicate it should occupy shelf space instead of a bedside table or the back of the toilet, where a lot of my current reads are stored (right now: Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation.)
I inherited my set from my grandmother who was given them by a friend. Sadly, the day I brought them home was a hot day in July in Indiana. I had stopped to buy some sweet Hoosier wine on the way home from my grandmother's and left a couple bottles in the back of the car with my boxes of books. When I returned to the car to unload my acquisitions, the wine had expanded in the heat, popped its cork and drenched a few volumes. So several of my books have interesting wine stains. I was worried they would emerged moldy and stuck together from storage, but other than some warping from being stuffed in a box, they seem to be in relatively fine shape. They do seem a little stiff in the spines, but perhaps that's because they haven't been read.
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| I don't have one five foot shelf, so the books are crammed onto two shelves |
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| Poor Robert Burns - his volume is wine soaked. |
Granted, I have skimmed through some of the volumes of poetry, and I've read some of the works in other editions in college. But maybe I need to set myself the project of reading them. There's a book by Christopher Beha, The Whole Five Feet, about a year spent reading them. He figured 60 pages a day to get through the 22,000 pages. Doable. But some of the volumes seem a little dull. (Farraday and Kelvin?)
Some other thoughts on "The Five Foot Shelf":
- from Adam Kirsch at Harvard Magazine - a commentary on how the selection of works for the collection provide insight to the thoughts of Eliot on education, on the idealism of the period, and the limitations of such a collection (first published in 1910):
In his introduction to the series, dated March 10, 1910, Eliot made it clear that the Harvard Classics were intended not as a museum display-case of the "world’s best books," but as a portable university. While the volumes are numbered in no particular order, he suggested that they could be approached as a set of six courses: "The History of Civilization," "Religion and Philosophy," "Education," "Science," "Politics," and "Criticism of Literature and the Fine Arts." But in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is "Progress"—progress in each of these departments and in the moral quality of the human race as a whole. Eliot’s introduction expresses complete faith in the "intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization," "the upward tendency of the human race."- A brief blog post revisting some of these ideas: http://www.dreliotsfivefeet.com/p/harvard-classics.html
- A funny clip from a 1911 New York Times about Dr. Eliot refusing to buy the set.
- An interesting critique of Christopher Beha's book The Whole Five Feet by a guy spending the year reading Shakespeare. Questions what it means to be educated if Beha contends that after the year of reading, his life hasn't changed. Takes up Italo Calvino's "Why Read the Classics?" as an antidote:
Calvino is showing us that reading the classics is something we do because it’s good, not because it’s good for us; we do it because we’re human. The corollary is that education isn’t schooling, not something you pay to go through, collect a piece of paper, and have done with; it is another name for the social process we call living.-And a blog series from someone else setting out to read and blog about the books.
More fun to be had on the internet reading about people reading than reading! So in between driving perhaps I should tuck a volume in my bag to read snippets while waiting between kid deliveries and pick ups. Of course the easier answer would be to read them on the nook or iphone - the complete set is to be found for free around the internet: at Project Gutenberg, Bartleby, and elsewhere (a 90 day reading plan based on reading an hour a day). But the reality is I will probably skim a couple of volumes and then move on to something else. Distractions are everywhere...
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| "Visions of Order" - a distant dream |
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| ...because here is our garage. And there are more books piled on or falling off shelves elsewhere in the house. We got rid of a shelf when we left Guam, and have no built in shelves, and don't have room for the old melamine shelves. Shelf building - another project. |
