"The Great Books" by Don Gerz
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” - Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Inhaling the classics and drinking the Great Books,
I am always on the lookout for answers as
I uncover them and find still more questions:
Who is the true self?
What are the different forms of reality?
What is good and beautiful?
What kind of process is God?
What are the products of will, knowledge,
wisdom, enlightenment, vision,
and so much more?
What is my purpose in life?
After years of reading and study,
I divine ideas as questions yield
to answers that meander through
the golden fields of philosophers and
flow down the rivers of the intellect
into my thirsty mind and out of my leaky pen.
And I cannot stop writing.
A naysayer once proclaimed
that reality is nothing more
than knotted and severed
strings of feelings,
and that we cannot fully grasp
the world as well as he captures it,
as though all that is unfolds
in and to him alone.
Too many are like that solipsist, but the
wise are not beguiled by feeble sensation.
Instead, they propose possibilities while
nihilists circle like vultures
that never fly far from the safety
of their unexamined lives
while fixated on what they project.
And I wonder what they think,
those who gawk from rotten boughs,
consuming instead of mirroring
the lives of those who swap
comfort for the pain of growth?
There are two types who read the classics:
Those who skim and then ignore them and
those who allow themselves to be read by them.
The first settles for the surfaces of realities as they
wobble on leafless limbs of empty existence.
The second type ponders questions posed by
the Great Books as they crash through the walls
of sensation into the vestibule of Heaven’s library.
