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July 22, 2011

Why the classics?

When I started publishing the classics, for I could not afford to publish the great writers of today, I started with the I Ching. Some use it today as a fortune-telling device, throwing yarrow sticks or Chinese coins (yeah, I bought coins to try it) to see which figures might apply to my quest/question. But on careful reading, it became obvious to me that a lot of cultural assumptions were built into every entry — relationship of husband to wife, man to lord, parent to child. In general, how to be a good person whether fortunes were bad or good — that was how I read it.

This concept, repeated over and over again in the I Ching text, of the good man, the upright man, rang false for me. The good, the upright — that was fitting into my scheme of creating a humanist library. But “man” — did these ethical guidelines only apply to men? Was that a humanist teaching?

The conundrum came with bringing this to readers in the United States of today, an egalitarian society. Should I treat the text as a sacred relic of what people once thought? And what was the point of that, for modern readers? What was the basis of “the classics” anyway? Mortimer Adler, as I recall, pinpointed the idea of the classics in education as an outgrowth of the First World War, a way to justify the world we were trying to save from the Germans. This modern conception of the classics was to replace the traditional Greek and Latin basis of a liberal education, as Greek dropped away, then Latin — and the sciences somehow didn’t seem capable of “humanizing” young people into the culture.

“Literature” had been my study in college, and as I took each course unquestioningly, there was the nagging feeling that I was missing something, I read some pieces with enjoyment, perhaps learning of people and places and times without actually going there or meeting them. Other periods, such as the 18th century, didn’t seem to resonate with my reality. Why was I studying them? Why were they considered essential to getting my degree? For that matter, what would my degree represent, aside from a lot of reading and analyzing?

Having spent 6 years in a poetry press and running a litmag, I had acquired a post-college education in readability and originality. After reading hundreds of submissions to the magazine, I began to recognize how much of our lives are spent echoing ideas and phrases from those around us, and how valuable, and rare, it was to find someone who spoke with their own unique individual voice. Let me be clear: these few individuals were not “better” at writing —sometimes they were downright awkward — but they were genuine.

And when I turned my attention to the classics, many of whom I’d been forced to study in college, for the first time I saw that each of them was a freak, not representative of their time but standing out because they were quirky and comfortable in their peculiarities. Each one was speaking from a solid inner voice, not trying to be different but striving to be honest.

OK, so I had a clue about what to look for. How to make the classics come alive, instead of being the dreary assignments for class, that would be my challenge. My mission, as I saw it, was to be true to the authors but also to be true to the readers, whom I pictured as early college, not yet ground up into packaged degree candidates, fresh enough to be open to new ideas.

The texts I chose had to matter, to effect a change, however slight, toward a better life. “Better life,” that was my interpretation of being a humanist — not relying on a deity or outside force but only on my, or our, own human efforts.

Sappho was an early choice. Homer did epics, others did odes to athletes, Greek plays evoked the interplay of gods and humans, but Sappho was one clear human voice, vulnerable and revealing, with pieces that might appear in any modern poetry anthology. If she didn’t invent lyric poetry, she clearly established that genre as an important element in human life.

The Apology of Socrates, Plato’s eyewitness version, gives us as close a glimpse as we will get, before Plato turned old Soc into a character to illustrate Plato’s more rationalized philosophy.

Milton’s Areopagitica brought to bear his enormous, sometimes ponderous, Latin and Greek learning to promote a very modern idea, freedom of the press, on which our modern world depends. His unique vision down the corridors of time made pertinent the historical dimension of our lives, that these issues came up before and will come up again.

And so forth in my choice of projects to bring to life. Those were my primary guidelines for Bandanna Books. If you want to see the current list, go to the Bandanna Books Catalog, which I have decided to call “Two-Hour Reads” (twohourrreads.com)

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