“To study literature is to study what people thought, did, believed, suffered for, and argued about in the past. This is history.” ~Susan Wise Bauer [emphasis added]

Alongside The Project, I’ll be reading Bauer’s The History of… series in parallel.  Bauer writes the chapters themselves within each book in chronological order, and so my goal is to try to read the chapters that correspond with the publishing dates of the project list. For example, The Iliad and The Odyssey are dated to around 800 BCE. That means I’d like to read up to chapter 49 in The History of the Ancient World by the time I finish those two books, which would bring me up to the period 800-720 BCE.

Obviously I won’t be able to remember everything, but the idea is that I’ll be able to see current events with their historical contexts in mind. Take the middle east for example. Warring over Jerusalem has been going on for thousands of years! And yet how many of us can look at the headlines, read the articles, and truly have a deeper understanding of what’s going on and why? Being a more informed citizen of the world helps make us more involved and capable of better voting decisions.

“When you read the morning news, you may find out that a suicide bomber has just devastated a restaurant on the West Bank. This is information – a collection of facts…but in order to be enlightened about the suicide bomber, you must read seriously: history, theology, politics, propaganda, editorials. The causes of such desperate actions cannot be made clear to you through a picture and a moving headline while you eat your toast. These things must be expressed with precise and evocative words, assembled into complex, difficult sentences. To be enlightened – to be wise – you must wrestle with the sentences. Technology can do a great deal to make information gathering easier, but it can do little to simplify the gathering of wisdom….Reading alone allows us to reach out beyond the restrictions of time and space, to take part in the ‘Great Conversation’ of ideas that began in ancient times and has continued unbroken to the present.” ~Susan Wise Bauer [emphasis added]