The 100 Best Books for an Education

William James (Will) Durant anticipated Buzzfeed by the better part of a century. In his heyday, Dr. Durant penned splendid listicles such as The Ten Greatest Thinkers, The Ten Greatest Poets, and 12 Vital Dates in World History. These and other articles were eventually compiled in his famous work, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, which included within its embrace that listicle to beat all listicles: The 100 Best Books for an Education. Allow me to take you on a an updated odyssey through these dusty, glass-encased tomes. Let's go.


THE 100 BEST BOOKS FOR AN EDUCATION

While Dr. Durant hums his prologue paragraphs, describing his library-as-temple, complete with rosary beads and votive candles, yea verily, ordaining his books as deities, let me give you this link to the infamous list, as you will need it to navigate the sequel. I suggest you print it out and have it handy. (The List can be found at many URLs, but not many are printer-friendly.)

By then Dr. Durant should be about finished with his prolonged prostration before his gilded book-gods and will be prepared to commence. He tells you and me:

Perhaps you are a college graduate and now ready to begin your education. Step right up! Just give me seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you! In four years you will be as well educated as any Doctor of Philosophy in the land.

Well, you think you can improve me, Dr. Durant? Let's put that to the test. What's that you say? I can't expect any material gain for my effort? Hmm. This driver carries no cash. Better mind what I'm getting into.

Oh, I see. We're not choosing the "best" books; just the one's that make us the most "educated." Blech. So, that's an hour a day, seven hours a week, you want from me. You better make this worth my while mister.


THE PREREQUISITES

I am now officially enrolled in Durant's Academy. First he tells me I must prepare myself with a background in Astronomy, Anatomy, and Physiology, at the expense of setting aside all reading of wit and wisdom, which must be saved for later. We must control our impulsive American selves and realize it is for our own good. We must prepare ourselves for the subtleties of a culturally superior Europe.

First, we must know the current scientific description of the world, so we can understand our place inside it. You know, is my universe really an atom in a molecule in the mitochondria in a cell in the thumbnail of a giant in a greater Cosmos? What have you been reading/smoking? Correctives, if not herbal remedies, are in order.

We want to begin at the beginning, with the ancient strata and the seminal amoeba. We want it in logical order and in full perspective and no, we can't pull up to the drive-thru and get it to go. We must suffer for it. We must apply ourselves, and acquire some astronomical and biological background, to provide a little modesty and backdrop to the human race. Thus, my first book is Thomson, The Outline of Science: A Plain Story Simply Told (four volumes!)

Say, I interrupt, why can't I choose my own volumes on Science? Must I use your suggestions? Maybe Glenn Beck or The Family Research Council  has better ideas for me.

Stupid American.

We must understand ourselves; that is, our inner blooming, buzzing confusion. Therefore, I shall set myself to the Principles of Psychology. Until I have absorbed William James (#4),  I need not do my mind harm with the ensuing epidemics of empirical studies or clinical practice in psychology. Clendening (#2) and Kellogg (#3) will tend to my physical well-being. Kellogg! That fake?! Wasn't he was the Dr. Oz of his day?

We are admonished to read actively, not passively. I wonder if that excludes Audio Books? If I disagree with an author, I am under orders to read on anyway, even though that's not the American Way. Toleration of differences, he instructs us, is the mark of a Gentleman. Hah! Nobody's called me a gentleman since I opened the car door for my maternal grandmother when I was ten.

Anyhoo, I've got my Map of the World taped up on the broad wall of my War Room in the basement, and I am ready to do battle against ignorance, to understand the whole landscape of human action, and suffer through the many wounds that will be inflicted on my person by dry histories and tours of battle fields, genealogies of Greek and Roman gods, the fibs of Herodotus, the proto-English of Chaucer, the gift of Gibbon that won't stop giving, the groveling of Machiavelli, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Oxford History of Music (which is a last minute switcharoo, because now he says the book he put on his list isn't good enough.)

Dr. Durant confesses that the inaugural books on The List could be just a tad oppressive, and taunts us with coming attractions, such as Plutarch (#16) and Poe (#91). Even skipping just slightly ahead to #10 and #11 can provide welcome relief from #5. Our Professor has the questionable habit of referring to his texts by number; hence the advice to keep a printout handy.

We will get the full compass of human history from H.G. Wells's Outline of History (#5). But first, a few finger-wags are in order. He advises us on dictionaries; viz., don't use heavy ones if you have pencil-thin arms; but I think us homo smartphoniems can safely bypass this prescription, as we can get our look-um-up-words-gizmos from the app store. I imagine he wouldn't object; and even if he would, who cares? He's dead.

Through Wells, we understand our history, from paleolithic slime, to political slime/ And all the things great and small that bridge them in time. By the way, that's my poem, not Durant's, copyright M.W. Thomas 2015.

Once fourteen chapters of Wells are out of the way, Sumner's Folkways (#6) will school us in sociology. Dr. Durant describes this sequel as an "enticing dessert," which, I'm sorry, makes me question his sanity.

Frazer's Golden Bough (#7) takes us on the journey from Superstition, through Religion, to Philosophy. The implication is that there are distinctions among those things. For that discovery, the Brits made him a Knight of the Realm.

At this point, Dr. Durant introduces us to the idea of a 'topical' sentence. What?! Does he think we didn't learn that in college? At least he uses the notion to invite us to skip over paragraphs we're not interested in. Now that is swell of him. I wonder if the math teacher at this outfit has the same pedagogical philosophy.

Once we have dispensed with Wells, Sumner, and Frazer, we break for a party with God (#10). Then, the remainder of The List that ensues is arranged historically, as he now he explains. It puts everything in its proper place and we can understand the origin and significance of a thing. It also allow us to alternate the ponderous with lightness and entertainment. It will be "an aid to digestion." Dr. Durant, by the way, frequently alludes to "digestion." He seems to be concerned with his, and our, alimentary free-flow. There are frequent encounters with digestion and dyspepsia with our teacher. Sometimes this gets a little too personal and I feel like the woman whose companion has asked her to sleep with him on the first date.

We finally witness a tiny nod to the East and will be exposed to some of the radical right-wing politics of Confucius in The Wisdom of China (#9). We will also hear rumors of Lao-Tse and Mencius therein.

China gets short shrift in the Country of Professor Durant's Mind. In fact, no part of Asia warrants much of a presence on our syllabus. There is but this one work on his list about China, which is penned by a westerner, with the singularly unusual name of Brian Brown.

And now it is time for our first class. From the valley of the Yellow River of which we have just taken our leave, and from the blood-soaked battle fields of the Old Testament, which we recently visited, we now sail across into the Aegean and make landfall on the Greek Isles.


THE GREEKS

All of the ancient Greeks, it appears, were above above-average, which makes life difficult for a list-maker. We rely on two volumes of Professor Bury (#13) to untangle things for us and distinguish the truly great thinkers from the truly, truly great thinkers. Then Gilbert Murray (#17) will lay before us some of the most enduring literature we know. We will even read some of it for ourselves!

Bow your head, for here comes the parade of geniuses. Herodotus the Fibber (#14). Thucydides the Born-Classic (#15). Plutarch the Biographer (#16) [not Greek, but is timely here.] Homer the Multiple (#18, #19). Aeschylus the Mighty (#20) . Sophocles the Gentle (#21). Euripides the Human (#22). Read 'em and weep. And laugh.

Dr. Durant goes on to state the irrefutable. Periclean Greece is the greatest period of European philosophy. Laertius (#23) passes along the stories of Socrates the Suicide and of Plato the University President. Of Democritus the Laughing Philosopher and of Aristotle the Really-Really-Smart-But-Boring-As-Hell Philosopher. Of Zeno the Stoic and of Epicurus the Curious, But Not Epicurean.

Socrates is more myth than man, and his role in philosophy is as a sort of classical muppet. The late fifth century B.C.E. Plato and the fourth century B.C.E. Aristotle make an interesting contrast. Plato was a prolific author and wrote vividly and boldly about the greatest themes that bothered humanity. Aristotle wrote lecture notes which were craftily pieced together after the fact under misleading titles. But he did endow science and philosophy with its language, and he had an unreasonable influence on the Scholastic Philosophers of the Middle Ages. He also married the richest chick in Greece. *Fist bump*.

Yes, we shall learn how Hippocrates became the Father of Medicine and the author of the Hippocratic Oath. And how Archimedes solved the theorems of engineering in his bathtub. How 'bout that Parthenon! And those marble sculptures? O to be Greek! Not now though.

To understand these Greeks, Professor Durant declares, would in itself be a sufficient education. No wonder I shall receive no material gain from this course work, classmate! Now we have completed 26 books and I suppose have been promoted from Freshmen to Sophomores at Professor Durant's Academy.


THE ROMANS

Sad to say, the Romans do not teach us so much, or so that is Professor Durant's opinion. They gave us social order and politics, but they fumbled around too much with laws and wars, and finally rotted from within from corruption and slavery and were ultimately overrun by "barbarians." But along the way they did idle things like build roads and aqueducts and sewers and trifling stuff like that, as far away as the British Isles. There were the great statesmen of classical Rome, about whom Plutarch again may enlighten us.

But they also bequeathed to us #27, #28, and #28 on the List of 100. They are Lucretius and Virgil and Marcus Aurelius. It is generous of Dr. Durant to give them mention. Edward Gibbon tells the sad tale of Rome's ruin in The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (#30), whose titanic six volumes would occupy the full length of the average Joe's bookshelf. What did you just say, Professor? The pages are purple? I must have the student edition. In my copy, the pages are vaguely eggshell colored.

It's heavy reading. Fortunately, there have been a lot of Hollywood movies made from it.


THE DARK AGES

Gibbon also tells of the "infancy" of Northern Europe and the beginnings of the Papacy, a.k.a., The Middle Ages. Evidently, after so many volumes he couldn't brake the momentum of the history train. He takes us all the way through the conversion of Constantine to the rise of Charlemagne. I guess you could call this bonus material. The Rise and Fall is a good value for your dollar.

Also therein are the Adventures of Mohammed and the spread of Islam westward across North Africa and into Spain, and in the other direction, across Arabia into Baghdad and beyond into Persia and India. Eventually, Islam had a colossal empire of its own, which was called a 'caliphate' in their lingo. By the way, you can learn all of this on Wikipedia, which is available even in Texas.

The Turks eventually poured boiling oil over all of that. In the interim, Maimonides and Omar (#31) attest to how the Jews and the Persians prospered under this, shall we say, First Arab Spring.

The Arabs famously gave us zero. No, seriously. Before the Arabs, there was no placeholder for a null addend as in 23+30=?, so European merchants found this to be a very vexing arithmetical problem to solve with pencil and paper. The Arabs set it right, and brought on further wonders of mathematics, astronomy, engineering, philosophy, literature, history, and more, much of it rescued from classical oblivion and translated from the Greek. After the fall of Rome, the Mediterranean states had squandered their own inheritance.

We should have learned in Williams (#12) the full honor roll of Muslim scientific achievement in the Middle Ages. But don't forget the great architecture of Islam either. The Alhambra. The Taj Mahal. If you can't go there, you can see them in one of Professor Durant's books. Too bad you have to read Frazer first; but those are the rules.

From the lectern, the Professor tells us that Dante and Chaucer sum up the age. The first has been translated into English. The second, alas, has not. This quarter is going to be a rough one.

Dante has a reputation for bringing splendor and dignity to barbaric torture and mind-bending evil. That's one neat parlor trick. It may have had something to do with his innumerable psychoses (read Moore to get the scoop (#32).) But this is an equal opportunity list. Yes, we can learn from crazy people too. Dante won't be the last time we squat compliantly at the feet of lunatics.

Chaucer is a riot, if you can get someone to translate his "English" for you. Although his pilgrims are on a mission with the most pious of aims, they are a bawdy lot indeed. It reminds me of a joke. Why do you always take two Baptist friends fishing with you? So they won't drink all of your beer! Speaking of beer, you'll need a few if you still intend to slog your way through Adams's Mont St. Michel and Chartres (#36). I bought the Cliff's Notes and fast-forwarded to Chaucer, if you can take a hint.

Adams, in whatever form you ingest him, tells us what we need to know of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the great sanctuaries where he thought his great thoughts. "Here Gothic is made to speak English," says the Professor. Even Americans can understand it. Whatever. Just be thankful the Summa theologica is not on our reading list. I'll bet Dr. Durant hasn't read it either. I'm not sure anybody's read it for two hundred years. Most people just go by what somebody says about it who did read it.

Now we encounter the next "unappreciated glory": #36 Taine's History of English Literature. It sucks to be me. "As scholarly in preparation and as brilliant in exposition as can be found this side of Gibbon." Professor, I have an idea. Why don't we just read some English literature?

To be fair, in his introductory phlegm, Dr. Durant never did disallow freestyle reading. He's not the task master I feared. Still, icy encomiums like "scholarly" and "exposition" don't exactly send me racing to amazon.com to contribute to the royalties for good Mr. Adams's estate. And given the Professor's hoary recommendation, I wonder if the fellow even procreated. Still, he apparently had savoir faire, as being French, he had the unmitigated Gaul to explain their literature to the English.

Finally, it's time to listen to the "masculine melancholy music of the Middle Ages." Oh boy! I'm amped up for this! And how 'bout them Gregorian chants! Cecil Gray (#37) is an imperfect guide because he is too brief. Then why is he on The List? Instead, lets read the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Oxford History of Music! "Life without music," said Nietzsche, "would be a mistake." All the more reason not to read the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Oxford History of Music. Reading about music is not music. Hence, it would be a mistake to read the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Oxford History of Music. QED. (I cheated and read Euclid over the summer, which is another deviation from the list.)


THE RENAISSANCE

Now we arrive at the Italian Renaissance. Hooray! Read Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (#38). Do not read seven volumes of John Addington Symonds (also #38) if you want to do anything else before you die. Burckhardt will personally introduce us to the Medici of Florence, patrons of the arts and all-around rich assholes. In Rome we will explore the Vatican with Julius II and Leo X and watch them apply the grotesque wealth of the Church to the nourishment of fresco and sculpture and child sexual abuse.

Vasari (#40) will acquaint us with the artists: Botticelli, Bruno, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michaelangelo, to name a few favorites.

Machiavelli (#41, #42) expounds on the attributes of the perfect Prince to ingratiate himself to Cesar Borgia. Copernicus, Vesalius, and Gilbert lay the cornerstones of modern science.

But Martin Luther, in the Stern Frowny North, doesn't like what's goin' on down there. He calls for the return of the Church (which at the time means all of European culture and society) to darkness and ignorance. France and Italy, he declares, must straighten up and become what will later be called Texas and Alabama. The Germanic princes must separate themselves from all this frolicky popery-dopery. Thus, a multitude of European states are established and we see the emergence of nationalism as the new normal. We see Europe begin its move from Reformation to Revolution. Patriotism replaces Piety. Every European society dabbled with its own renaissance. Ironically, Luther set in motion a rebellion against institutions that ultimately defeated his own fundamentalist aims, although it did loosen the Pope's stranglehold on power, at least in the non-Latin states. Read All About It in Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation (#43).


THE ELIZABETHAN AGE AND THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

It is now our Junior year and the giants stomp over literary fields seeded with now modern English and French bon mots (e.g., #44). Dr. Durant gives us Montaigne (#46), whose essays exist, I think, to remind me that I do not know how to write. Also in France, we have the irreverent Rabelais (#45). In Spain, Cervantes (#47) writes Don Quixote, which is regarded as the first modern novel (and is still, in my estimation, one of the best novels ever written.)

Which brings us to Shakespeare, the butcher's son (#48). So much has been written about Shakespeare, that I wouldn't be surprised if that weren't the subject of a listicle somewhere (such as, which TV theme songs can you sing his sonnets too?) This London playwright has had his authorship and even his very existence called into questioned.  I'll accept it as a given that somebody wrote King Lear and, for convenience, I'll call that somebody Shakespeare.

Even that Debbie-Downer Spengler (#100) spoke of Shakespeare with enthusiasm, although in my generation it had, for a while, become fashionable in some circles to trash his plays as hack-jobs. Because they were in a certain sense hack-jobs. That is partly why they are so charming and memorable. Shakespeare was a writer, producer, and director. He had to keep a production company staging performances. He wrote to deadlines, which in his early career were imposed by the need for food and shelter (he was later reputed to have become fairly well-to-do.) He wrote quickly and undertook no revisions. He used bold Anglo-Saxon words. He borrowed from French and German when it suited him. And he just made up words when he felt like it. He would have been a great blogger.

The Renaissance collapses in the seventeenth century and Europe enters a time of conflict. The Thirty Years War made a wreck out of Germany, while the Puritan Reformation made a wreck out of English literature. But things were not so bad elsewhere. Richelieu strengthened the social and governmental order in France and set the table for Louis XIV.

That prepared a fine sheet of paper for the acid pen of Voltaire (#56), who writes the most brilliant satire the world has ever read. La Rochefoucauld (#49) outs the backstabbing frenemies lurking in France's salons.  Moliere (#50) ridicules everything in sight. Pascal (who doesn't rate the list, but is in the Professor's lecture) stays out of the fray and occupies himself with mathematics and the probability of burning in hell.

Across the channel, Bacon (#51) and Milton (#52)  are humorless, but raise English prose to its highest level of attainment thus far. And Milton writes what Professor Durant calls 'tolerable verse.' In other words, skip it. Hobbes (#53), Locke, and Spinoza (#54)  wrestled with philosophy for philosophers, although they held little sway over the broader trajectory of human thought. (Locke did have a later influence on the American founding fathers.) In Germany, Leibniz also concocted a philosophy, but was better known for getting into quarrel with Isaac Newton and the Bacon-inspired Royal Society over priority in the discovery of the calculus.

Galileo and Harvey had the temerity to have an actual look-see at our inner and outer worlds and overthrow medieval doctrine about the universe and the human body. It was the era of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle. In painting, many stars are born: Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyke. El Grecco, and Valesquez, to name just a handful.

Did you know that Bach had twenty children? Man, playing the organ must have really tweaked the ladies back in those days. I bet all the guys wanted to be organ players. The Mass in B-Minor is the first peak in modern western music. The second awaits Beethoven.


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Credit Haydn with developing the symphony, which will fill the concert halls of the eighteenth century with greatest music ever heard. Mozart created such subtleties of sound it is as if music has just been invented anew. Like never before, music stood on its own terms, not in the service of religion, or stories, or sound pictures, but as an accepted evolving event in time and tone, and it was appreciated by all regardless of education, even as abstract as it really was. It was a miracle, if you think about it.

The eighteenth century was alive with discovery in science, mathematics, and philosophy. Political theorizing had never been more penetrating of thought, nor more exposed to rigorous examination. The age was boiling over with the revolutionary spirit.  It truly must have been an interesting time to live. Sainte-Beuve (#55) can give us a taste of it; perhaps, if we use our imaginations, we can live vicariously in that time though his Portraits.

Aside from the mischief in Colonial America, most of the revolutionary action is going on in France. Carlyle (#59) has two volumes on it. And now guess who turns up again? Taine! Remember him? This time he's minding his own goddam French business in his Origins of Contemporary France (#58). By the way, Taine, Homer, and Aristotle are the only entrants to make The List twice. I just thought I'd point that out for you in case you find yourself playing trivia with Ken Jennings someday.

Not since Plutarch and Vasari had there been a biographer of note such as Boswell (#60). Voltaire was flourishing. Gibbon and Burke labored on their great undertakings. The novelists Fielding (#61), Sterne (#62), and Swift (#53) were in the front lines of literature in England. Adam Smith (#66) wrote his great economic lies, which Karl Marx would later challenge with his great economic lies. Mary Wollstonecraft penned her Vindication of the Rights of Women (#65).

Let the revolution begin! Off with their heads! Truth shall replace power. Beauty shall be smashed for the greater good! Social order will be shoved aside, so that justice for the common man can instead take its place. Occupy Paris!


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND THE VICTORIAN AGE

Science and the Industrial Revolution remake the world.  Robinson (#8, remember?) tells the story. The Industrial Revolution changed everything. It changed the rules. It changed our morals and our politics. It changed where and how we lived. It changed our underwear.

The seventeenth century taught us physics and mechanics. The eighteenth century taught us their exploitation. The nineteenth century was upended with revolutions in geology and biology and was, in Durant's humble opinion "poor in sculpture" and littered with "dubious experiments in painting," but in music "it out-sang every other epoch in history." I couldn't agree more with this last opinion, which is indeed irrefutable. Now we finally have Beethoven, who could hear his own work even though he was deaf as a doorknob. Never was a symphony orchestra so masterfully, well, orchestrated. I would not want to choose between him and Mozart, however.

Most of our composers seem sad and unstable, and good candidates for Prozac, which they would have consumed in plenty I'm sure, if it had existed then. Why did the melancholy Schubert leave so many unpublished manuscripts in his attic? Brahms, in love with Schubert's wife, knotted himself up like a glad bag twist tie and tortured himself with his own sweet music. Wagner the charlatan tricked himself into believing he was a genius. "His music is better than it sounds," Mark Twain famously said. Chopin was deserted by George Sand. Mendelssohn was happier we are told: he was too much of a simpleton to perceive his misery. What about Rossini, who preferred making spaghetti over making music? Or Liszt, who drank himself happy?

In Russia, naturally, it can only be so much the worse, particularly if you run dry of vodka. Mussorgsky sings of death. Tchaikovsky does him one better and drinks a chalice of poison.

These are the reputations of The Composers as re-enforced by my high brow education. Or is it just mean slander against these great men who are responsible for a full 1.4% of music sales today?

Our nineteenth century philosophers are just as dysfunctional. It began with Schopenhauer, who had his miserable roots folded in four places. It ended with Nietzsche, who savored the tragedy of life, but couldn't bear the thought of ever having to live it over again. The only sound man in the pantheon of nineteenth century genius, says Dr. Durant, is Goethe, who differed from Shelley by "growing up." Read Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (#70) and "treat yourself to a week's company with a mature mind." The Professor also recommends going VFR direct to Faust (#69), but with a caveat. Don't even let Brandes (#68), we are advised, lure you into Part 2, which is a "senile hodgepodge of nonsense." Thanks for the heads-up, Doc.

Weirdly, the only mind that Dr. Durant will place next to Goethe's is Napoleon's. Turn the floor over to his biographer, Ludwig (#67). The Professor then propels us toward Taine again, but I've had quite enough of that fellow, thank you.

Keats (#72) is clearly our Professor's favorite poet, as he has also made clear in another of his famous listicles: The Ten Greatest Poets. Don't believe me? I quote: "They are the finest poems in the language." There. I told you so.

Heine (#71) is included, although for us Anglo-Saxophones, he is apparently lost in translation. Tennyson gets a mention too, and is even admitted to The List, but is given wide berth from Keats at #79. Dr. Durant passes over Mallory and comes quickly to Balzac. Pere Goriot is #75 on our reading list.

"Miss not Madame Bovary," he commands, Oh! but I do miss her so! Flaubert is #75. We seem to be going more or less in order again now. (Dr. Durant then drifts into a conspiracy theory involving a publishing house at this juncture, but I will avoid the subject out of circumspection.)

We're reading a lot of fiction in our last semester at Durant Academy. Hugo (#77), Anatole France (#78), the serial offender Dickens (#80), Thackeray (#81), Turgenev (#82), Dostoyevski (#83), Tolstoy (#84), and Ibsen (#85 Peer Gynt - "the greatest poem since Faust.") I am winded! I had to skip Thanksgiving with the family to read 1700 pages of War and Peace. Boy,were they pissed! Seven hours a week my ass.

At last, Dr. Durant announces, we may come home to America. Does my list slight the good ole USA? he asks rhetorically. Goddam right it does. But remember our youth! he protests. We just fell off the turnip truck. There has not been sufficient time or cultivation for America to produce anything of worth.

I give him the evil eye and sing God Bless America.

The Professor relents, and allows that Walt Whitman (#94) may one of the smaller giants of literature. That's more like it, I say, packing away my switchblade.

Still, Dr. Durant has a point. Thoreau (#93) is a flake. He pretty much just wants to protest against being made to bathe and tuck his shirt in. Emerson is just as empty-headed. There is little more to him than Thoreau, except that he dresses more respectably. But sometimes we must force feed ourselves the rubbish to be properly informed of the material past. Dr. Durant suggests we spend a week with Emerson (#92); that is, as I interpret it, just seven painful hours. I spend more time watching the clock than scanning the pages.

Then the Professor strays into a dangerous neighborhood again. Poe is overrated! Excuse me? You heard me. He's hack writer with melodious and spookish lines. Your point being? He just appeals to the bourgeois love of mystery stories. Let's leave my booze out of this. Didn't he have a really sad life? Ah, you've touched on a great point, he says. We call him a great artist, when all we really mean is that his biography is compelling. We're glad to suffer with him. It always easier to love the weak more than the strong because the strong do not need our love, and we prefer to point to their flaws.

So ghost stories and mysteries are junk reading and we only like Poe because we feel sorry for him. What calumny! I demand that you put Poe on your list! Oh! There he is. Poe is #91.

Let's move on. I'm ready to graduate from this ridiculous school.


THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

And now we arrive at the generator of our own century, which alas, Dr. Durant didn't live to see (he died in 1981.) The twentieth century is the Age of Electricity and Gotterdammerung. When you get your education, you will know that means. Until then, choke on it.

It is the age of insane wars. An age of change so rapid, no one can keep pace with it. Henry Adams (#98) has tried to document the madness of the time. Does Bergson (#99) know an escape route? Ellis (#97) offers the reminder that we are no mere automatons, and that there is a behavioral helper for a Bergson-like solution. Spengler (#100) will have it that Western Civilization is in its death throes, and the cause of death is nothing more or less than the natural life-cycle of a super-organism.  There are few philosophers who hold this book in any esteem, and you may treat its turn as senior skip day.

And there, history abruptly ends, circa 1930.


Well, we have reached the end of our list, and have earned enough credits to receive our diplomas. I will sign your yearbook if you will sign mine. Remember, the profit in this odyssey is elusive, and this sort of erudition is not known to impress the girls. There was never any good reason to do it.

Except this: we now know what human kind is capable of, and what human kind may be capable of. Perhaps that should give us cause for hope.

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