NERO WOLFE?	Ken Roberts of the The Great Books Index sent in a suggestion that we make Nero Wolfe an honorary member of the REDWOOD COUCH ORCHIDS. Knowing nothing of the famous detective I asked Ken to explain.
Why do I think Nero Wolfe would be an excellent honourary member of the Couch Orchids? Because he is well known as both an orchid cultivator (10,000 plants in the greenhouses on the roof of his N.Y. brownstone, and he spends 4 hours a day with them -- his concubines, more time than he spends detecting) and as a reader of serious books -- about 200 books a year. His three passions are orchids, reading, and eating, in that order. Detecting is only fourth priority. Wolfe solves crimes very well, but only when goaded into it by circumstance, a need for funds, or a debt of honour. As soon as possible he wraps up the case and returns to his books. And he almost never allows even the urgencies of the investigation to interfere with his scheduled orchid times or his meals. The honor is hereby granted with pleasure, and Nero Wolfe may attend our meetings whether they are held or not, with or without an invitation, physically or virtually, or otherwise, on condition that he invite us in return to one of his dinners and a tour of his greenhouses -- in real life, of course.
POPULAR CLASSICS?	A virtual visitor from a book group elsewhere in California sent a bit of praise and a question. The complete exchange follows.
A fine WWW page. Looks like you folks really have it together. How do we disseminate the Word? Your work is a great start. How do we get an appreciation for the classics into high schools? Is it possible? Community colleges? Through teachers, no doubt. Are we fighting a losing battle? Your work makes me think we are not. Thank you. My response: Thank you for your kind words. People like you find this site from time to time and send me their expression of amazement at the extent and depth of our reading. We amaze ourselves sometimes when we look at the complete list! While we are a relatively small group, our ages range from the 20s to the 70s. It is not only the aging who have an interest in the classics and in the foundations of our civilization. The emphasis, however, is on "small" group. What we do is not for everyone. Dick Stull (my radio interview partner from the group) and I led a "shared enquiry" class through the Humboldt State University extension last year. We lost one student per week; in our last class only one student showed up, giving us the ultimate teacher/student ratio of two to one! Of course it's possible that we were just not good enough. More likely is the fact that reading and discussing these works is hard work for most people though it is fun for us. I doubt that these books can be made part of a high school curriculum with any degree of success. Can you imagine 16-year-olds reading Kierkegaard? Why would they when their bodies are bursting with sexual energy and crying for physical expression? Only exceptional students, maybe one percent of a class, would feel any attraction to these "outdated" and "irrelevant" writings by "dead white males." That's not to say that they would not be interested in the underlying philosophical or ethical questions, only that they would rather have them presented in other media and in different formats. At any rate, that's my impression. The new films repackaging Shakespeare, for example, whatever one may think of them otherwise, go at least part way in the direction of broadening the audience. It is also not all that clear to me -- and this is a very personal opinion -- that missionary work is even appropriate here. By that I mean the effort to bring the great books to everyone out there. They are not for everyone and they never were. At the risk of being called elitist, I do believe that humans come in different shapes and flavors. Some of us are better at running and jumping while others are better disposed to gardening. Those who have the intellectual horsepower and the inclination will discover the rich veins that feed our culture when the time is right for them, and it won't be in school -- though it may be from a great teacher! And a further note from the visitor -- Thanks for your thoughtful response. We would be interested in your views on greater use of the Syntopicon as a way of exposing more people, young people if possible, to the Great Conversation. For example, start with Shakespeare which is accessible to many high school students if taught creatively, and work through the Syntopicon to other great authors/thinkers on relevent topics, ie Love, Good and Evil, Fate, etc. Quite an undertaking, I admit. Maybe a HS honors class. Somebody must be doing something like that someplace. I was a physics major, for example, but no prof ever suggested that we read Newton or Huygens or Einstein. Too bad. The Great Books set was published the year I entered theological seminary--in Chicago, no less--what a great adjunct to a theological education! What a great theological education, period. Anyway, I believe that the classics and a liberal education will become more popular again someday. If they don't, we're done for anyway. And my final response -- I feel honored by your interest in my views. I must tell you that I consider myself only a student, not an expert. So, if that's okay with you, I'll give you a short, rambling discussion that, even if it fails to answer your questions, may provoke new insights on your part. Worst case, it may upset your bile. Now then, I think the Syntopicon is a wonderful tool that would probably surprise most people in the educational establishment. Though I am an optimist in general, I see little silver lining around the educational cloud. The hearsay that comes my way tells me that schools are a kind of three-way war zone where students, teachers, and administrators have entirely different outlooks, different goals, and different plans. I know that criticizing an already overly criticized system is the easy thing to do and that if I'm not part of the solution I must be part of the problem. Maybe so. And I also have a strong feeling that a workable educational system for the young has yet to be invented for the kind of mass society we have become. There is too much to learn and not enough time to learn it. I have zero confidence in anyone's ability to convince large numbers of people to adopt school curricula that include heavy doses of the great books. Very short excerpts maybe; entire works no. The politics of the age will not allow it, nor will they allow the study of European works without equivalent representation from other cultures. One man one vote, you know. While I am not arguing against democracy, I do observe that the connection between greater democracy and lower standards needs no proof. The never-ending debate in one school district or another about the suitability of Mark Twain's work is just one example. What to do then? Here is my reality check. I do believe that the great books represent one part of the accumulated cultural treasure of our world (others being music and the other arts), and I don't put a rigid boundary around what might qualify as a great book. Books are easily available through conventional sources, and in libraries, and now on the Internet. If you want to go beyond that and wish your child to become versed in the great books, or at least in some of them, you do the same thing parents do if they want their children to learn a musical instrument or the practice of a religion. You send them to a special school or to a tutor. Or you start a group for similarly minded people. Don't expect school systems to provide anything beyond the bare basics. If they can't teach people to spell, how in the world are they going to teach them Aristotle and Dante? Your comment about the fact that none of your physics professors ever suggested reading the works of the great scientists is apropos. Your professors were not hired to assign such readings, nor were they rewarded for that sort of service. And yet, take a look at the writing of Lewis Thomas, M.D., or Stephen Jay Gould. They know their references and they can quote most appropriately from sources both scientific and literary. I'm willing to bet that they didn't learn that in school. More than likely they learned it at home, and later they continued to learn on their own just because they were interested. It's easy for a bright, interested teacher to teach bright, interested children who have bright, interested parents. Unfortunately, that tends to be the exception in a democratic mass society. I don't believe you can extrapolate from the exceptions to the general case. At any rate, I doubt that public schools in general have academic excellence as their goal. More important to them are questions of money and of filling out the right forms. And it doesn't take observant children very long to extract their own lessons from all this. Now try to teach the great books in such an environment. To turn Santayana on his head, even those who remember the past continue to make the same old mistakes more often than not. So, am I throwing up my hands? Not totally, because I also don't believe that a society like ours needs large numbers of people who are versed in the classics anymore than it needs large numbers of people who understand opera. A society that thrives on political soap opera and football metaphors, where 99.999% of the people don't know the first thing about economics and still manage to operate the most "successful" political entity in the world -- such a society can afford the luxury of entrusting the appreciation of the classics to a small cadre of specialists. We could compare ourselves to amateur astronomers, maybe, or amateur archeologists. Once in a while we make a new convert, and we celebrate that small victory for all its worth. Personally I would prefer to see fewer people whose lives include the great books because they are driven by their love for them than many people whose tastes are influenced by hateful memories of incompleted school assignments. On the other hand, you may be right. Perhaps the classics will become popular -- through the creative application of new media. If people can see it and hear it in their own preferred way, more than likely they'll buy it. I just don't see it on the horizon yet, and I also don't mean to put all my hope in technological "solutions." Lance Hardie This page is updated now and then.