'The Whole Five Feet:' One year and 51 volumes in a young man's life

"The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death and Pretty Much Everything Else"

by Christopher R. Beha

Grove Press, 258 pp., $24

I'm not a big fan of memoirs. Despite the enormous popularity of the genre, most people's lives just aren't all that interesting.

We all go through some combination of birth, childhood, rough times, sickness, relationship angst, parenthood, old age and death; unless the writer has something unique to say about these common experiences, mining the details of your life for a book seems, well, tacky.

I do, however, relish tussling with Big Ideas, particularly the kind found in the "great books" of the Western canon. So Christopher Beha's book, which tells how he plowed through the Harvard Classics during one particularly turbulent year, posed a test: Would the intellectual content outweigh the memoirish navel-gazing? In the end it does, but it was close for a while.

Beha, now an editor at Harper's, was an adrift 27-year-old when, unemployed and girlfriend-less, he decided to give his life some structure by reading all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics — the hundred-year-old "five-foot shelf" of Great Books whose volumes of Homer, Milton and Tennyson can be found gathering dust in any decent used bookstore. (The Harvard Classics preceded "The Great Books of the Western World," a rival series produced by the Encyclopedia Britannica, by more than four decades).

Beha says he originally planned to write "a comedy about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the world ... in order to immerse himself in classic literature. By the end of this story, I thought, the young man might learn a few easy lessons, and we could all share some laughs along the way." That would have been precisely the kind of prefabricated, Oprah-ready memoir that would have set my teeth a-grinding.

Instead, Beha learns that the best literature doesn't shield us from the world but pushes us back out into it, albeit with fresh eyes. As he grapples with the death of his beloved grandmother, a debilitating bout with Lyme disease and other major and minor calamities, Beha finds that writers as diverse as Wordsworth, Pascal, Kant and Mill had been there before, and that the results of their struggles to find meaning in life could inform his own.

Rather than stuffing his head with quotes, trivia and random lines of poetry — the "Jeopardy!" version of an educated mind — Beha writes that "I was learning more about how to be in the world than I was any particular facts or figures."

There are still traces of the earlier, lesser book that Beha thought he'd be writing. We learn far more than we need to about his earlier decision, while he was being treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma, to bank his own sperm. Lengthy passages about the Beha family farm or his twin brother bog down the narrative. And the book overall has the loose, somewhat disjointed feel common to works that originated as blog postings.

In the end, Beha comes away with a deeper appreciation for literature's power to guide us through life than he ever got during his formal education. Emerson, he notes, said we should not only read Cicero, Locke and Bacon but remember that they were only "young men in libraries" when they wrote their famous books.

"We need the wisdom of those who came before, if only to teach us how eventually to do without it," Beha writes. "We need those young men in their libraries to remind us that we might achieve just as much as they did."