Back when I was starting this blog, I wrote a short book review of How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. In that post, I mentioned that my first attempt to read the book was in 2009, but I wasn’t ready for it. Then, in 2013, I gave it another try and was able to read the whole book. I learned a lot about the four different levels of reading: Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical, and Syntopical.

Fast-forward to this year. In late August, I wrote a piece titled “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Books,” which was selected as “Freshly Pressed” by the WordPress Staff. At the end of that post, I mentioned that I was thinking about enrolling in the University of Chicago Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. After attending their information session, I decided to enroll, starting with their Introduction to the Basic Program: How to Read Classic Texts. It’s a four-week course that meets online on Tuesdays for three hours, and the first session starts tonight.

From the course description, I knew that the main text was How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, and I was already excited because, aside from already having the book, the course would give me another chance to really dig into it. But what really surprised me were the other texts that the group would be discussing.

The reading assignment for today was the first five chapters of How to Read a Book, an essay by French philosopher Michel de Montaigne titled On the Cannibals, and Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden, a short story written by American short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty.

Over the following three weeks, the group will continue reading How to Read a Book, but we will also discuss Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, Meditations by Descartes, The Death of God by Nietzsche, On Suicide by Durkheim, The Scholar by Weber, Ode to a Grecian Urn by Keats, Ode to a Pair of Socks by Neruda, Brief by Chekhov, and Idiots First by Malamud.

After reading the list, I was horrified at first. I thought, “That’s a lot of reading.” But after completing today’s reading assignment, I’m at ease.

First, rereading the first five chapters of How to Read a Book and writing notes was awesome. Because the program uses the Socratic Method, I want to be prepared for the discussion.

The first five chapters are really an introduction. They lay out the foundation for engaging in serious reading by walking readers through the different reading levels, from Elementary, where children learn the ABCs, through ages 13–15, when students should have the skills and maturity to do high school work, to the last level, Syntopical reading. This is the highest level, where a reader should be able to do comparative reading using many books in order to develop an analysis of a particular subject. Most importantly, the authors emphasize that reading is a lifelong journey and that we continue to improve over time.

Here are three quotes that made my day:

“We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less will satisfy the needs of the world that is coming.” (p. 30)

“Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it…is by writing in it.” (p. 49)

“Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author… marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.” (p. 49)

Then came the essay by Montaigne, On the Cannibals, written in 1580. He is basically arguing that what we call “barbarians” and “savages” is based on our worldview rather than reason.

“Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have not other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything! Those ‘savages’ are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit which we have artificially perverted and misled from the common order which we ought to call savage.”¹

After reading this, what happened to Native Americans after the arrival of foreigners came to mind.

Lastly, I read Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden, written by Eudora Welty in 1940, which examines racism in the United States. The story is about a disabled African American man named Lee Roy who was forced to play the role of a Native American woman in a circus. The people in charge painted Lee Roy red and dressed him as a woman, forcing the character to behave as a savage and eat live chickens on the circus stage.

The story includes two white men. One of them, Steve, was part of the circus and witnessed the abuse of Lee Roy but did nothing. Feeling remorse, he asked an older white man, Max, to help him find the African American man so they could compensate him and apologize. They found Lee Roy, and Steve began to describe the abuse and how badly he felt to Max, oblivious to the fact that the man he was talking about was standing right in front of him.

At the end, Steve didn’t have any money to give Lee Roy, so Max gave him what he had in his pocket, and they left Roy’s house. To me, it was essentially a story about the self-serving guilt of white participants who try to ease their own consciences without offering justice or empathy to the victim. The story not only shows racism toward African Americans but also toward Native Americans, whom the white men portrayed as savages.

Such incredible reads—ones that I probably would never have encountered if it weren’t for this University of Chicago Basic Program. I’m really looking forward to tonight’s discussion, the next three weeks, and, hopefully, the next four years if I have a chance to enroll in the rest of the program in the winter.

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1. Montaigne, Michel. Essays: A Selection. Tr. Screech. P. 82, Penguin Classics. ↩︎

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