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Therieb reads from his "Forbidden Shelf..."

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It's just after noon on a cold day in Riga. I'm home alone for a few hours before starting the slog into town to do my bit of English teaching. The newspapers have been read, the dishes are clean, time to take a book off my forbidden shelf and read.

Everyone has a forbidden shelf. That's the shelf of books that you claim to have read but haven't. While everyone may have such a shelf, I belong to the type of person whose forbidden shelves are sagging under the weight of books they are supposed to have read. Why is my forbidden shelf so large? People who hold pretentions of an intellectual life tend to have enough forbidden books to occupy many forbidden shelves. There's the fiction that every educated person should read that I haven't. There are all of those books from college that I just didn't have time to read before class (you can spot these because the spines of the books are pristine and uncreased). I feel I have a forbidden library. Where does this pretention come from? Well, I guess I've always wanted to appear smart, and a lot of these books would help take me there, but where to find the time to actually read them?

I have often thought what it would be like to be a classically educated person. What would it be like to be truly well read? To be able to read Latin and Greek? To play music and understand math? By American standards, my education is first rate, but judging by the standards of even 100 years ago, I am very poorly prepared to engage in any of the investigations of life and art that I feel are so important to living a happy life. Yes, I speak French and German, but significant gaps remain in my knowledge compared with the authors and thinkers that I hold in high esteem. I'm not talking about intelligence, it's clear I don't measure up to my idols in that department, but rather in preparation.

What do I mean by a classical education exactly? I mean training in philosophy, Latin and Greek, modern languages, mathematics, music, art, and science. This is the same type of education that most nineteenth- and early twentieth- century writers received. These are the authors I like to read. Not that every one of them could excel in all of these categories. I'm sure not everyone could play music well, but they could read music, and probably could pound out a few tunes on the piano if the occasion called for it. Not all of them were fluent in all of the important languages, but they could read, write a letter, and communicate with their peers in French, German, and English. What these fellows, and also many women had was the basic equipment to lead an intellectual life. They could read the classics, they could follow scientific developments, and they had more to say about developments in art than “I could do that.”

Speaking for myself, there are a lot of things from the above list that I can't do. My ability to calculate numbers stops at simple algebra. I have a rudimentary knowledge of biology, but none of physics or chemistry. I read neither Latin nor Greek. I don't play an instrument. I also haven't read as much literature, history, philosophy, or poetry as an educated person. How would my life be different if I had these tools in my cranial toolbox? I feel sure that I would not see a financial benefit. Years and years of extra schooling have taught me not to expect riches from knowledge, in fact, I'm beginning to suspect the opposite is true. Since I don't teach for a living, I don't have any professional obligation to be well-informed. I would expect, however, that I would simply enjoy life more. Wouldn't it be satisfying to go to an exhibition of Chinese art and be able to say something more than “it's pretty”, or join a conversation about a piece of music you just heard armed with something a little more interesting than “I didn't like it?” Wouldn't it be nice not to rely on translations?! Of course they are always useful, but I also like to make up my own mind about the meaning of a book I'm reading, rather than clinging to the translation as a drowning man clings to a raft. And wouldn't it be nice to finally crack some of those books on the forbidden shelf and really find out why they were important to begin with. It turns out many of them are actually quite pleasurable, when you aren't reading ahead of a deadline.

Of course times have changed since the writers I most admire were educated. Science is more complicated and more specialized. The humanities shuns big theories for detailed studies. We are told that it's not enough to understand your own culture, you have to understand (and celebrate) all of them. Outlets for information have burgeoned. I can keep up with the news, write this letter, and view pornography all at the same time on my computer. Choices must be made. But all of these new wellsprings of information also offer some striking opportunities. The most important of these for me at the moment are digital libraries, which allow me to read many of the books on my forbidden shelf on my computer for free. Such sites as books.google.com and wikisource.org have been digitizing books for many years, taking advantage of the hundred-year expiration of copyright protection. Given that most of the books on my forbidden shelf are at least one hundred years old, digital books are a wonderful solution. The books are free and they don't take up space. I currently live in a two room apartment, so constructing my library of leather bound “great books” Harold Bloom style will have to wait.

There are also some real disadvantages of reading this way. The obvious one is dealing with the cumbersome task of scrolling through digital documents rather than flipping pages. While digitized books are not a new phenomenon, little progress has been made toward creating a format that makes them manageable while being read, much less a pleasure to read. There is a second, more worrisome problem, however: the problem of authenticity. While I am a great fan of Wikisource, the site's operators allow most anyone to upload texts into the library, with little or no information about the provenance of the data. Furthermore, users have the ability to edit texts that have become a part of the library. So am I actually reading The Prelude, or a so-called “mash up” of Wordsworth and what some college kid thinks always should have been in the poem? Are these just excerpts? There's really no way to know. The Google people solve this problem by providing actual scanned pages from books, so I'm more comfortable about the authenticity of their pages, but Google is very cagey about only providing excerpts without warning, and missing pages, especially in compilations, turn up everywhere.

Beyond allowing myself time to read, there is the question of procuring instruction in all those subjects that weren't on offer in the Salt Lake City School District where I grew up. Currently, my energy needs to be focused on the Latvian language, but I can see a time in the not too distant future when I may be free to study math, Greek, and Latin, and possibly take up a musical instrument. Close friends of mine have heard me talk about a sort of language camp vacation, and I'd like to advertise the idea here to a wider audience. The idea is simple: a small group of people interested in learning a certain subject rent a big comfortable house somewhere inviting for two to three months. We advertise for a graduate student with teaching experience in our subject to come live with us for free and teach us two to three hours a day. We would pay this person's transportation costs and give them a stipend. We would learn for three hours or so in the morning and then the rest of the day would be ours to do homework, walk in the woods, swim in the sea, and eat. Our teacher could join us or spend the rest of his time suffering over his dissertation. Ideally, the location would mirror the subject matter (learning Greek on Rhodes, anyone?) but more likely we would have to choose a location that is a lot cheaper. I have yet to run the numbers on such an experiment, but I bet with five or six people it's really doable. I am aching to find out.

What I'm arguing for here is permanent Paideia, that Greek form of education where everyone comes together to educate each other in the arts and humanities. Fellow alumni of my fine college will recall a brief, two-week period of special classes in January which bore the name, and I'm trying to recreate the same thing, with a little less sickly sweet smoke. I'm able to do some of this on my own with my computer and the library here in Riga, but the real work of learning languages, math, science, and music lies before me. If you're thinking that the key ingredient in making this plan come together is money, I think you're wrong. For me, the biggest issue is time. I live in poverty, counting every centime, but I have at least four hours each day to read and write. If I'm smart, I can even save enough for vacations or the type of instruction that I described above. The challenge is finding five other people with whom I can become classically educated. Not everyone has chosen to eschew all worldly goods for the opportunity to become learned.

So I sit and wait. Perhaps I'll have to pursue instruction on my own. I feel certain that I will be happier and smarter when I can pick my way through Aristophanes in Greek. Is anyone out there with me?