In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher R.
Beha claims that he’s “never been one for the ‘take your medicine’
school of culture.” I’d respectfully disagree. Masochistically, he sets
out to read the Harvard Classics, 22,000 pages of classic literature,
over the course of a year. And while dealing with the death of a
beloved relative, a breakup, and his physical deterioration—as a
twentysomething he has hives, a knee ailment, cancer, and Lyme
disease—Beha’s reading becomes his medicine.
The Harvard Classics were the brainchild of Charles Eliot, president
of Harvard for 40 years. Published in 1909, the series of books was
designed to provide a higher education to anyone who had 15 minutes to
read at the end of the day. At the time, the vast majority of Americans
had not finished high school, and the books (nicknamed the “Five Foot
Shelf,” for the amount of space they took up on a bookshelf) were found
in a wide range of households. The series ran the gamut from Emerson to
Darwin to Cicero—works that, as Beha says, “one at least wanted
to have read.”
The Whole Five Feet is disarming. Beha’s utter humility and
unpretentious tone while describing an inherently academic and
potentially irrelevant goal—to read a jumble of old-timey books
and essays—puts the reader immediately at ease. Beha has a nice,
unaffected way of including his internal monologues and the lessons he
learns over the course of the year, as he struggles with his need to
connect with the past and get perspective on his life.
Nearly halfway into his experiment, Beha reads one of his favorite
novels, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Like Quixote, Beha is immersed
in a fantasy world of books, only to realize that while he may be a
sickly, romantic kid living in his parents’ basement, he’s actually
connecting with the past and, in turn, the world around him. “Cervantes
has faith in the power of books, for good or for ill, to send us back
into the world,” he says. What starts out as a mission to keep from
being lost, adrift and alone in his sickness, ends with Beha finding
solace. The Whole Five Feet reads like a charming college
syllabus, written by a warm-hearted professor, who through a mutual
love of books has inexplicably become one of your closest friends and
confidants.
Courtney, you’ve dismissed the Bible, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Cicero, “The Wealth of Nations,” “The Origin of Species,” the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution as “a jumble of old-timey books and essays,” the reading of which is “potentially irrelevant.” Are you listening to yourself?