The Story Begins Here

The Harvard Classic

When I graduated from Western with a degree in business, I felt sad that my formal career as a student (as far as I could determine at the moment) was over. The four years of university that I had longed for since I knew what university was, were done. Those years were vital to me in many ways: the friends I made, the knowledge I learned, the music I played and the boy I met who became my husband. And when it was all over, I felt that I’d skipped over part of the “education” that one should get in university: the arts. I had never taken a university-level English, philosophy or history course. To fix this gap, I decided to ask my parents for a set of books called the Harvard Classics as a graduation present. Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University, was known to say that a liberal education could be gained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from books that would fit on a 5-foot shelf. Thus, the Harvard Classics were born. The set contains those topics I felt my university experience was lacking and more I didn’t even consider. I found a gorgeous broken set of volumes from the 1910 and 1914 printings in a used book store and took ownership of them. They looked exquisite on my bookshelf. But for the next 3.5 years, they were only there for decoration. I did not make any headway in my liberal education.

But some force has inspired me to change all that. A switch has been flicked on and I’m ready to begin my liberal education. But what a big task it is. The set has 51 volumes and each volume has about 500 pages. All together, I’m looking at a book that’s 25,500 pages long. It’s a big undertaking. So, in order to make it manageable, I’m going to divide my goal up into 10-page increments. That isn’t too much to ask of myself: 10 pages a day.

If I read 10 pages a day that will become 3,650 pages per year which means that I will finish the Harvard Classics within six to seven years. Wow. That’s not as long as I thought it’d take.

So, let’s begin!