The Education of Anthony Barker

A good way to embarrass yourself at 77 (should you be so inclined) is to remember all the books you thought were great when you first read them. 

I am among the millions (I suppose) who admired The Fountainhead  when I was 17, and who gagged to recall it by the time I was 20. 

Some time later, I don’t remember exactly when, I was delighted by The Education of Henry Adams, surely the most smugly self-satisfied memoir ever written. Even to think about it, fifty years on, makes my skin crawl. But I went on to enjoy his even more wearisome bloviating about the the Cathedral of Notre Dame, ‘... the Virgin and the Dynamo.’  Maybe the lesson was: Americans should avoid the third generation of distinguished families with outsized notions of entitlement.  

On the other hand, books that I have not read in decades still shape my life—maybe for the best—although it is difficult to be sure. I read Tolstoy’s War and Peace three or four times—once in college (where we skipped over the Count’s brooding on the meaning of History)—and again in different translations since.  

When I first read it I thought it was so great there was no point in becoming a writer—between Shakespeare and Tolstoy (and maybe Faulkner) all the good stuff had already been written. I never did become a writer, although I have since regretted falling for such a feeble excuse. 

Still, War and Peace stands out for me as the impossible standard, even if not the end of world literature. 

Tolstoy himself surpassed it in Anna Karenin, a book I read in lieu of attending some of my graduate classes at the University of Chicago—thereby squandering my chance to become a professor of Political Science. I am grateful to Tolstoy for the thousands of blue books I have never had to correct. I wouldn’t have been much of a teacher—even tucked away (as I doubtless would have been) at some remote ‘liberal arts’ campus in central Ohio.

 

My obsessive reading of the Count also cost me the chance to govern Iraq. While I was at Chicago I took a seminar with Leo Strauss, never realizing that he would later be recognized as the mentor of the notorious ‘Neo-Cons’, the evil demons who invented the Iraq War for the younger Bush.

I don’t understand how that kindly old gent, dressed in a woolen suit with a woolen tie, could have been such a diabolical influence. I remember him droning on at great length about 17^th century political philosophy... but perhaps I didn’t attend regularly enough to ‘get the memo’. 

Had I paid better attention I might have been a Neo-Con myself, and left some footprints in the sands of time.