Posted by Geoffrey Clarfield
It’s back to school! Good luck to all the parents and students. I hope this year that everyone reads many great books and learns a ton. In the spirit of the return of young scholars to their classrooms and libraries, I offer a new essay series exploring books, education, and the life of the mind. Enjoy!Last summer, Canada’s anthropologist at large Geoffrey Clarfield contributed an eleven-part essay series to this newsletter called My Non-Woke Personal Library and Its Saving Virtues. It explored the books in his home library. Books he had collected and “convened with” over a period of several decades; the artefacts of an intellectual life well lived. Geoffrey had originally sent me a much shorter essay but I liked it so much I asked him to delve deeper into his bookshelves and expand his essay into a series. Geoffrey delivered in grand fashion! Readers who haven’t yet are invited to enjoy the whole series found in the Woke Watch Canada archive. Start with Part One then follow the link at the end of the essay to get to the next part, then repeat until you finish the series at part eleven.
I love this kind of thing. A couple years previous I read American-New Zealand emeritus professor, the late Jim Flynn’s book The Torchlight List: Around the World
in 200 Books. It was inspired by his uncle who had not been formally educated but instead read books by torchlight on a ship during World War I – the idea being that in place of a standard education, one could develop one’s mind by disciplined and voluminous reading of the right kind of books. As a result of professor Flynn’s uncle’s habit of regular nightly reading, “he was one of six enlisted men who passed an exam to qualify for officer’s training.”
The Torchlight List is a compendium of literary recommendations compiled and expanded from book lists professor Flynn used to hand out to his students. It was a work born of necessity. He had noticed an alarming trend: “At universities in both America and New Zealand, universities such as Wisconsin State, Maryland, Cornell, Canterbury, and Otago…fewer and fewer students read great works of literature.” The issue was not contained to students as professor Flynn also noticed that most of his professorial colleagues, “no longer read outside the professional literature.” This led him to quip, “Thus, if you read great books, as my uncle Ed did by torchlight, you will know more than many university professors.”
What makes The Torchlight List so great is not just the book titles suggested as worth reading, but professor Flynn’s commentary about them.
Professor Flynn describes the world of reading as a “magic realm,” which is “far more wonderful than the world of work and entertainment.” He offers five books as a starting point, at least two of which “will move you to tears and awaken emotions beyond anything pop culture can do.” Those titles are:
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Slave.
- Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
- Erich Maria Remarque, Spark of Life.
- Calder Willingham, End as a Man.
I liked Torchlight List so much that I purchased and read the sequel, The New Torchlight List: In Search of the Best Modern Authors, which presented professor Flynn’s modern literature recommendations and commentary. Admittedly I got more out of the first Torchlight List as it dealt with great and classic works of significance, many of them timelessly so. However, I do intend to return to the modern list eventually as I generally feel like I have not read enough contemporary literature.
The New Torchlight List was the result of a six-year reading odyssey undertaken by professor Flynn in order to discover “contemporary classics.”
Professor Flynn employs a useful convention throughout The New Torchlight List, giving a single star to a book he feels “is a worthwhile read,” and double stars for a book he is “confident…will become a classic.” Many titles received no stars. . .”And David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), “was the only book I did not read to the end.”
Keep your eye’s peeled for my next essay on books, education, and the life of the mind.
Read it all here. My Non-Woke Personal Library and Its Saving Virtues was re-posted at the New English Review here and here and inbetween.
