The free home school curriculum at Ambleside Online is full of great books carefully selected. It will be years before my children get to many of them, but that hasn't stopped me from perusing a few. One in particular caught my eye recently; John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. I knew Ruskin was a Victorian art critic, but had no idea what this particular work was about. It turned out to be two lectures published in 1865. The first lecture, Of King's Treasuries, was about reading great books.
In beautiful imagery, Ruskin speaks of great books as a way for anyone to enter into the aristocracy of the great leaders, statesmen, thinkers, and saints - an entrance right into the King's treasuries. All that is needed is a "true desire to be taught by them, and to enter into their thoughts. To enter into thiers, observe; not to find your own expressed by them. If the person who wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not read it; if he be, he will think differently from you in many respects."
Then he describes how to do this, using the image of an Australian miner: "..the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at the author's meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need the sharpest, finest chiseling, and patient fusing, before you can gain one grain of metal."
Ruskin then goes on to demonstrate his methods with examples from the Bible and Milton, wrapping it all up with a rant (there is no other way to describe it) about his own age and its inability to read well.
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