'They Will Never Seem Boring'

“And my final advice is to try, every week or so, to learn something by heart. A surprising amount will remain in the memory, and more and more as you train it; and then, as you walk or work or sit in the subway, you will have something more than daily trivialities to occupy your mind.” 

One can’t imagine a university professor today making such a suggestion to anyone, let alone the public or even his own students. To make the advice seem even more exotic, consider that the speaker is a professor of classics at Columbia University who hosted a weekly radio show broadcast on Tuesday evenings at 9:05 p.m. on WQXR in New York City. His only stipulation from the station was that he confine himself to “books of a high standard or else open up some question of broad literary or social interest.”

 

Gilbert Highet’s show aired on hundreds of stations in the U.S. and Canada from 1952 to 1959 and was picked up by the Voice of America and BBC. Highet edited his radio talks into essays and published them in five volumes, including People, Places, and Books (1953), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954), The Powers of Poetry (1960), and Explorations (1971). I’ve been reading Talents and Geniuses: The Pleasures of Appreciation (1957). Highet’s tone is not dry and academic but conversational, man-to-man. It must have been a pleasure to hear him on the radio. There’s no hint of condescension. He flatters us by assuming we are interested and able to follow him and appreciate what he’s saying. The essay quoted above is “Permanent Books.” Highet (1906-78) was a “small-d” democrat, a Jeffersonian:  

 

“For civilized people, reading is an essential activity. Those who do not read, in the middle of a literate society, are in danger of making themselves into half-savages. Now, reading is of two different kinds. Some reading is temporary; some reading is what might be called permanent.”

 

The “temporary” sort includes newspapers, popular magazines, detective stories, “light romances,” etc. “These are like modern motorcars and modern buildings,” he writes, “constructed to look bright and shiny and smart, to be worn out quickly, and to be replaced by something brighter and shinier in a few months or years.”

 

Highet is probably best known for writing The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), though the book I remember most fondly is Poets in a Landscape (1957). In “Permanent Books” he states the obvious: some books never become obsolete and are “built to last,” as he puts it. He cites obvious candidates: Dante’s Commedia, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare, Rabelais and Cervantes. “These books and others like them can be read by an intelligent man,” he writes, “not once, but many, many times at different periods throughout his life; they will never seem boring; they will always give him some new intellectual and emotional experience; they are versatile companions and tireless teachers.”

 

Such books are not to be confined to the classroom or otherwise segregated from life. Often in his essay, I feel Highet is rather eerily describing my experience with reading and books. He lived in a happier, healthier world in which scholars could reasonably assume substantial numbers of common readers sought pleasure and “self-improvement” in the books they read, and that they would find it. He concludes:

 

“That is part of the answer to the question ‘Why does one study and teach Greek and Latin?’ It is because the best books are lasting books; many Greek and Latin books are lasting; and only such books are truly worth teaching for a lifetime, and studying for a lifetime.”