My education has lots of gaps. “Youth is wasted on the young” is an apt cliché: I wasted lots of opportunities as a young person. After graduation, I committed to ongoing learning. Alas, it’s been scattered and undirected. This year, I’m doing something about it: immersing myself in stuff that’s stood the test of time: “the classics.”
Why the classics? And why now? The best way to understand the present and shape the future is by studying what’s come before. Longevity is an essential quality filter. You might not learn about language models from Marcus Aurelius, Jesus, or Lao Tzu, but they have lots to say about human nature – especially your own.
But it’s not easy. Current stuff beckons – and there’s more coming out faster every day. It’s also packaged to be more attractive. As a result, we ignore older, more substantial works. While we’ve never had better access to our culture’s deeper layers, getting there requires extra effort in a world overrun with epistemic baubles.
So how do you do it? You eat the elephant one bite at a time. I have a precedent here: in 2009, I read the Bible cover to cover by following a one-day-at-a-time reading list. It wasn’t easy, but I got the satisfaction of experiencing firsthand my culture’s primary text.
But the Bible is a bounded work; “the classics” aren’t. Several lifetimes wouldn’t suffice to cover them all. (It’s not even possible to define “all” in this context.) I’ve looked for years for an authoritative list. Harold Bloom’s Western canon is an example, but that can’t be tackled in a year. I also obviously excludes non-Western texts.
Ted Gioia provided the nudge I needed. He’s sharing a 52-week humanities course that consists of selected readings and suggestions for audio and visual works. I’ve followed Gioia’s work for a while and find him a trustworthy source. He’s well-read and his suggestions so far seem solid. (He’s shared three of four parts of the list.)
That said, I’ll change things up once in a while. Gioia’s list includes some works I already know. Some I’ll revisit, but I might swap others when the time comes. Also, these won’t be my exclusive readings this year: I must also make time for work-related stuff. I aim to devote around half an hour per day to this project plus a bit more on weekends for reflection and sharing.
What kind of sharing? I plan to write weekly posts here to track what I learn. I expect learning will happen on two levels:
- The material itself
- The learning process
While the project’s focus is improving my grasp of the material, I also aim to become a better learner. I wrote a book on how (and why) to build a personal knowledge repository. This project is an opportunity to share how that works in practice – and hopefully, why it’s relevant in the 21st century.
I’m especially excited to enlist AI in the process. It’d be easier to study the classics with a tutor, but hiring someone is impractical. I’ve experimented with using AI in this capacity at a smaller scale. This is an opportunity to take those experiments to another level.
There’s never been a better time to do this. Not only does current tech make such a project feasible; most of the works are readily available (many for free!) on the internet. Gioia’s list makes it doable in a reasonable timeframe. I hope you follow along; sign up to my newsletter for updates. Let’s do this!