The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
The Harvard Classics are a collection of classics selected by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot. They were first published in 1909 with the goal of bringing a liberal education to the common man. The common man in those days must have been much more intellectual than his modern equivalent because the series sold widely. Perhaps many of those books were never opened, but their presence in American homes was symbolic of a shared idea of what a “classic” was and a consensus about what it meant to be an educated person.
Christopher Beha devoted a year to reading all 21,000 pages of the Harvard Classics. “The Whole Five Feet” is his memoir of that year. He hints that his plan was to write a comic memoir. Indeed, I expected this to be an entertaining but lightweight book like “The Know-It-All” or “The Year of Living Biblically“. Instead, the loss of a beloved aunt, illness, and the fact that he was educating himself just as Eliot had intended 100 years ago resulted in a more serious and personal memoir about his year that’s more Thoreau than Thurber. With regard to the works themselves, Beha’s comments are thoughtful and interesting. While he does reflect on the relevance of the works today compared to their role in decades past, he doesn’t sentimentally lament an imaginary golden age where everyone could quote classics and every barroom was full of amateur scholars.
