A Pilgrimage

I have embarked on a pilgrimage of sorts. Spurred on by a lot of things, including the American political climate, my own interests, and my thoughts on classical education, I have declared 2017 the Year of the Classics.

I went to the used bookstore and purchased 15 noteworthy tomes that sit on the bookcase by my bed, in two vertical stacks on the extra shelf space between the books already there and the edge. They haunt me, as I hoped they would. Three Four weeks in, it hasn’t shrunk as much as I had hoped.

Pilgrimages are slow. You take one step, then another.

The place to which I journey? I don’t know, exactly. The answers I have tried on don’t fit yet. That’s okay, though. There will be many forks in the road and each one will send me in a more defined direction.

And anyway, it’s more about the journey than the arriving.

As I go through my reading, first the fourteen books (plus three or four not pictured) in the blog heading above, then others, I hope to consider some questions:

• What are the classics, anyway?
• What is a classical education? What are the essentials? Where is the fence in this little plot of land?
• Can one attain a classical education in adulthood, and if so, what does that look like?
• How can the classics engage with the world we live in today?
• Is a classical education even relevant? What about diversity and global perspectives and all that?

I’ll also be reviewing the books I read, the first of which is Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower, and leave my thoughts on these “realms of gold” for fellow travelers.

Happy Voyaging,

Erin