My History with The Great Conversation

The Great Conversation is the first book of the series The Great Books of the Western World.  You can find it in the reference section of most libraries.  To understand my relationship with this collection, a little personal history is required.  I was an Electronics Vocational student in high school that graduated in the bottom third of his class.  Not a great start, but I graduated.  I went on to enroll in an Electronics Engineering degree program.  I did great my first trimester, earning a 4.0.  This boosted my confidence and I went into the second trimester thinking this is easy.  Unfortunately, most of the first trimester was over what I had learned in two years of high school vocational studies.  The real challenge was just beginning and I did not have the discipline and study skills to succeed.  My grades quickly plummeted and I dropped out.

Shortly thereafter, I attended the Ohio State Fair and they had a booth selling the Encyclopedia Britannica.  Now this being 1982, Al Gore had not yet invented the internet and I did not have Wikipedia at my disposal.  With a little coaxing I was convinced to purchase the complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Great Books of the Western World, Webster’s three volume dictionary, and a set called The Annals of America.  You might say I was the proverbially Jack and the Beanstalk and I now had my magic beans.

I started out with book one, The Great Conversation.  I went on to read Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey.  At nineteen I thought The Great Conversation was really wordy and why couldn’t he just get to the point and tell what I needed to know.  Homer was much more interesting with the vivid descriptions of battle scenes and the Odyssey with Ulysses fantastic voyage.  The dictionaries saw a lot of use, so many words I did not know.  Eventually the books were set aside.

In my mid twenties I started again with The Great Conversation and made it through Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, and stopped somewhere in Plato.  It was a lot to absorb.  But, I now had a wife and was starting a family and reading and my quest for the secrets of the universe was put off for a number of years.  In the meantime, the books have travelled with me from coast to coast.  They have adorned my book cases and gathered dust.  They were occasionally brought out to be used mostly for scrabble look ups or crossword puzzle answers.  The kids referenced them for school projects.  But, overall they were just sitting there.

This brings us to a little over a year ago when I was approaching fifty and asking myself a lot of questions about who am I, what does my life mean?  It was time to water those magic beans again.  So, I again broke out the books and started at the beginning.  I reread the previously mentioned books, and finished Plato and added Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Virgil.  Now, you may be asking why did I keep starting over again?  Well, I am glad I did.  At each stage of my life I have appreciated the Conversation in a whole new light.  The concepts meant different things to the young man recently out of college, the father of four children, and now a grandfather.  Life has shown me a few things.  I have also learned that these great writers were just people like me asking questions and being part of the overall conversation of who we are.

I am not sure how far I will get this time, but I am really looking forward to reading them and pondering what they mean to me now.