Into a schedule already replete to overflowing like a cup carefully filled, I tentatively decant another drop, adding just enough to rise above the rim and hoping neither the cup, nor my hold on it, will give way.

I’m waiting, with growing impatience, for the twin boxes that are carrying my (now, my) set of Harvard Classics to arrive in the college mailroom sometime in the next two weeks. Although I’m not entirely sure what impulse has impelled me in this direction–to read (or even to buy) a more than hundred-year old anthology of the Western literary canon–but somehow it seems like a logical, and maybe even a necessary, next step on this path I find myself on.

My goal may well be a bit arbitrary: to read the fifty volumes of the 1909 anthology (and the one volume of accompanying lectures) of literature over the coming months.These works–which range widely through western tradition–from Michael Faraday to Walt Whitman to Homer to Hippocrates to Sir Walter Raleigh and more, have been arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and, as is nearly always problematic in literary historiography, nearly exclusively European or North American and male.

Although it may not quite suffice, Harvard President Charles Eliot and Professor William Neilson worked from within a set of cultural assumptions, perspectives, and imperatives a bit different from our somewhat more enlightened twenty-first century view of what constitutes “literature.”

My goal (both here and in my own process of reading) is not really to critique the choices Eliot and Neilson made as I make my own way page by page through these cultural touchstones from Benjamin Franklin’s 1818 Autobiography (Volume 1) to the millenium-old Icelandic Völsungasaga (Volume 49).

Instead, I hope to read them with an eye toward their relevance today–and in particular, how these apparently timeless and universal texts are relevant in my own daily experience of being intentionally rooted in place.

I’ve read some of these works before–and indeed know some, like Dante’s Commedia or Whitman’s poems, quite well–but some are entirely new to me, having hovered just beneath the surface of my own college and graduate and professional careers. I am looking forward to reading through these more than 20,000 pages in a way that might offer a shift in perspective however slight–a way to see each moment in perhaps a more enduring light.

A tall order?

Maybe.

We’ll see where these first steps take me.