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Volume 50:

Introduction, Reader's Guide, Index

The penultimate volume of the Classics contains Charles Eliot's introduction, a Reader's Guide, and an impressively comprehensive index. The introduction is just 12 pages, and I'd read it many times before I started reading the Classics. In fact, it was reading these few pages that made me want to take on the Shelf in the first place, so it was exciting to return to it now that I'm finishing this project up. But I was more interested in the Reader's Guide, which though also quite short I hadn't really looked at before.

There's something a little perverse about reading a guide to something as vast as the Classics after you've finished reading the thing itself. The order of the volumes was often baffling, achronological, with little continuity of theme or form. The guide leads the reader chronologically through various topics (history, religion and philosophy, education, science, politics, voyages and travels, and criticism of literature and the fine arts) and literary forms (drama, biography and letters, essays, narrative poetry and prose fiction, and poems, songs and choruses, hymns and songs) to be found in the Classics. A brief summary of each provides a context for the works listed, as well as offering a minimal sense of what the reader can expect:

With Kant and his successors philosophy becomes more a professional subject, and with an increase in depth and subtlety it loses in breadth of appeal to the world at large. Yet the treatises mentioned in this list will yield to the reader who cares to apply his mind an idea of a view of ethics of immense possibilities for influence over his thought and contact.

All of this would be extremely useful for a reader looking to pick and choose his way through the Shelf. But I was glad I held out. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster famously discouraged chronological criticisms of novels, saying that one should read as if all the novelists are at work together in a circular room. This is precisely how it felt while I was reading this year. Week by week, I jumped from Augustine to Aeschylus, from Vergil to Cervantes, and the literary tradition came to feel like a vast space through which I was moving almost at random, mapping it out as I went. The process wouldn't have been nearly as exciting if I'd studied the atlas before setting out.


--CRB, December 28, 2007

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