The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;

If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fiber your blood. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;

Missing me one place, search another;

I stop somewhere,waiting for you.

CHAPTER FOUR

The One Hundred “Best” Books for an Education

IF I WERERICH I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young.

I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a rosary. I would have my library spacious and dark and cool, safe from alien sights and sounds, with slender casements opening on quiet fields, voluptuous chairs inviting communion and reverie, shaded lamps illuminating sanctuaries here and there, and every inch of the walls concealed with the mental heritage of our race. And there at any hour my hand or spirit would welcome my friends, if their souls were hungry and their hands were clean. In the center of that temple of my books I would gather the One Hundred Best of all the educative literature in the world.

I picture to myself a massive redwood table, worked out in loving detail by the artists who carved the wood for King Henry’s chapel at Westminster Abbey (I must be an old reactionary, for I abominate the hard materials that make our concrete homes and iron beds and desks today, and I find something organically responsive to my affection in everything made of wood). Along the center of the table would stand a glass case protecting and yet revealing my One Hundred Best. I picture my friends treated comfortably there, occasional hours of every week, passing from volume to volume with loving leisureliness.

Will you sit down with me? Perhaps you are a college graduate, and are ready, then, to begin your education. Perhaps you have never had a chance to go to college, and have never considered what else our children learn there except the latest morals. They might learn many fine things if they came to it old enough, but our youngsters take so long to grow up in these complex days that they are too immature, when they enter college, to absorb or understand the treasures offered them there so lavishly. If you have studied with life rather than with courses, it may be as well; the rough tutelage of reality has ripened you into some readiness to know great men. Here at this spacious table you will prepare yourself for membership in the International of the Mind; you will be friends with Plato and Leonardo, with Bacon and Montaigne; and when you have passed through that goodly company you will be fit for the fellowship of the finest leaders of your time and place.

Can you spare an hour a day? Or, if some days are too crowded with life and duty to give you leisure for these subtler things, can you atone for such bookless evenings by an extra hour or two on those Sunday mornings when the endless newspaper consumes you to no end? Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.

But let us understand each other: you must not expect any material gain from this intimacy with great men. Some lucre may flow incidentally in later years from the maturity and background that you will win, but these dividends, like those of the insurance companies, are not in any way guaranteed. Indeed, you will be “losing time” from your profession or your business; if you long for millions you had better lay aside this map of the City of God, and keep your nose to the earth. And there will be blocks along the line: occasionally you will come to an obscure or lengthy book, a bad upgrade, and all your strength will have to be subpoenaed to your task. Remember that we are not making a list of the absolutely best one hundred books, no list merely of the masterpieces of belles lettres; we are choosing those volumes that will do most to make a man educated.