That's a weird music video. I don't think I've seen it before.
This week's usual reflection/review post will be up in the next couple days, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect and celebrate making it half way through the year (technically July 1st due to the leap year) without missing any days! I think there was one day where the post technically went up at like 12:05 the next morning, but I read the selection the day before, so it counts.
Success Kid: All of today's image will be vintage memes. (Wikipedia)
How's the project going?
I think pretty well. I'm still doing it, I'm still mostly enjoying it, and I'm still learning things. I don't really know (short of getting a fabulously lucrative book deal out of this blog that I don't advertise at all) it could be going substantially better.
What've I learned:
I've said this a number of times before, but the biggest things I've learned from T5FSOB and the reading plan is that anyone with a little gumption can learn this stuff, and that something doesn't have to be a directly marketable skill or whatever to have value. I've alluded to not loving my college experience before, but I don't think I've ever spelled out how completely opposite those two statements are from how college was for me.
The biggest lesson most of my professors wanted to impart to us is that we were stupid. Their goal was to fail as many of us as possible, and we were fools for even trying. Whether that was because we belonged to whatever group they hated for some reason (black, gay, man, atheist, vaccinated, etc.) or simply because most people were idiots who couldn't hope to learn anything. Especially philosophy. Philosophy is even harder. According to the prof it was literally impossible for anyone under the age of thirty, and even then you had to be a genius to even scratch the surface. Then he would wander out of class to get high in his office.
The second thing we learned was that nothing they taught mattered. According to them, we'd learn more in the first week on the job than we did in all our classes combined. Thus, they were free spend most of class ranting about things like how we needed to get into more fistfights while bigfoot hunting (clearly advanced concepts in a geology class) or telling us how everything we learned last semester was wrong (because that professor was clearly an idiot, unlike the obvious genius teaching the current class). I'm pretty sure if I just spent all my class hours skimming related Wikipedia articles, I'd probably have learned more.
How I think my "Geology" prof viewed himself. (Joke Battles Wiki)
Now, I am technically over thirty, but I'm pretty sure I could've handled most or all of the texts in T5FSOB 10 years ago and some of the things I've learned do have some value. Not in the super concrete, "this is how you x" sense, but I do think they're helping me to better understand myself and the world around me. Also, people really like listening to me talk about it (in real life, although at least one or two of you seem to enjoy reading about it too). That really surprised me. I thought I'd mostly get a mix of, "Wow, old books, what a fucking nerd," and "Wow, old books, what a fucking Nazi," but it's actually been a great conversation starter at parties and stuff.
And it really makes me feel better to know that so much of what we're grappling with in the world today, and that I'm concerned or curious or struggling with personally is stuff people were trying to figure out one or two hundred or a thousand years ago. Sometimes, they have good answers. Sometimes, they don't. When they do, awesome! I can use what they wrote, continue to read larger sections or later related works, and have some good ideas for myself. When they don't, it's reassuring that we've been working on it for however long, the world hasn't ended since we haven't figured it out, and the world is (mostly/probably) a better place than it was back then anyway.
It's 2024, and we still don't know exactly what it means to be human. But we have some cool ideas, and we're not dead.
I'm excited to keep going and read the rest of the year's selections. I'm excited to go back and reread full versions of the ones I liked. I'm excited to look for other stuff from later in history, or from cultures that Eliot didn't really include.
And I think that's really the one thing I want to criticize, as I have a ton of times before. It's not entirely clear who wrote the 15 Minutes a Day (which I will start calling 15MAD to go with T5FSOB) reading guide. It's presented as though it was done by Eliot, but he makes it clear he worked with any number of people, particularly on the supporting materials for T5FSOB. If you look around online, some people claim it was done entirely by a Collier employee to help them sell the collections. Either way, some of it is whack. Some people like to cast aside the whole enterprise and say the only worthwhile way to study the classics is to meticulously go over them page by page, taking copious notes, and months to read a book. Nah. You can get a lot out of your 15 Minutes a Day and some minimal snarky note taking. But there are some real questionable ones over the weeks. We'll leave aside my unending hatred of BUUUURNNNNS, but what's up with reading a novel all out of order (The Betrothed), or overlapping sections of the same book (Darwin and Herodotus), or hacking through an introduction and stopping right before things get interesting (More). So yeah, that's my one criticism for the project. I think 90% of the texts are worthy for inclusion in a most important books list, but the parts that are in the guide are questionable.
At the end of the day, here's what I keep coming back to. There's all kinds of cool stuff to know out there, I'll never learn it all, but anyone that wants can learn and use a lot of it. And if you try, you can be smart and moral, even if you're the guy sitting next to me in band wearing a pro wrestling t-shirt, which leads to the entire lesson being about how evil pro wrestlers are instead of trombones.
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