My 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities—The Final Installment!

Last year, I made a huge promise. I said that readers could get a comprehensive education in the humanities in just one year—and I’d show how it’s done.

We could cover everything—fiction, philosophy, music, religion, painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, and all the rest. We would go back to the beginning, and encompass the entire world.

I offered to share all this in a 52 week plan. Even more important, I promised that I’d make it manageable—with no more than 250 pages of reading per week.

Was that even possible?

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I hesitated before announcing this to the world. Before going live, I worked carefully over my week-by-week plan—making sure I covered all the essentials.

I was excited by the results. Yes, this could be done!

I came up with a realistic plan. And it was all there—Plato, Dante, Confucius, Aristotle, the Tao, Shakespeare, Sappho, the Egyptian Book of the Dead….all the way up to the leading thinkers, writers, and creative artists of modern times.

Today I deliver the final installment in my program. Below you will find the work plan for weeks 40-52.

Here are links to everything:

• My Lifetime Reading Plan

• How I Take Notes

• Immersive Humanities Program: Weeks 1-13

• Immersive Humanities Program: Weeks 14-26

• Immersive Humanities Program: Weeks 27-39

• Immersive Humanities Program: Weeks 40-52 (below)

This has been an amazing ride—but the final weeks will be especially wild. We are covering a wide range of material, some of it very challenging. So buckle up!

By the way, be forewarned that some of this stuff is controversial. As we start reading works from the last 100 years, there’s less consensus—so I expect disputes and arguments over the titles chosen.

But as always, I give preference to works that will help you deal with the issues of your life and times, and fortify you with wisdom and gravitas. I’ve thought long and hard about these things, and nothing in this program is included unless I have total confidence it delivers the goods.

So there’s plenty here that will shake, rattle, and roll your world, no matter what your starting point or perspective.

WEEK 40
Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The Grand Inquisitor” (from The Brothers Karamazov)
Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil
Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich

This week we’re digging deep into tough choices and moral dilemmas—with the help of three of the most probing minds of the 19th century.

I wish we had time to tackle The Brothers Karamazov in its entirety—it’s one of my top five all-time books. But “The Grand Inquisitor”—a short stand-alone section from that novel—will grab your attention. It’s like a Platonic dialogue, updated for contemporary life, and designed to provoke even the most complacent reader.

The same is true about The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is the most riveting book about end-of-live issues you are ever likely to encounter. It’s much shorter than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and his other big books, but is every bit a masterpiece. Even more, it forces readers to consider their real priorities and values.

Finally, we need to wrestle with Nietzsche, who wants to topple the entire moral code of Western society. If this doesn’t stir up discussion at the reading group, nothing will.

Musical listening: Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony 5; Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Concerto 3; Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto 3.

Art: Bauhaus.

WEEK 41
Henry James: The Spoils of Poynton
Marcel Proust: The “Overture” to Swann’s Way

Fiction doesn’t get any deeper or more profound than this—so get ready for long, complex sentences and full immersion into the psychological crises of the modern world. This is what the gold standard in novel-writing looks like, infused with a sophistication and beauty that has inspired readers (and writers) for the last hundred years.

We will only grapple with the opening of Proust’s masterpiece—focusing on the section called “Overture” in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s highly recommended translation. (It corresponds roughly to the first 50 pages of “Combray” in other translations.) But this extract is filled with prose fireworks, and includes the most famous scene in Proust’s entire oeuvre, namely the author’s encounter with the madeleine.

The Henry James short novel assigned here, The Spoils of Poynton, is less well known. But this is an entry point into the glorious prose style of James’s later years that doesn’t involve reading a huge, dense novel. (By the way, I love those three big books—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl—but they’re too massive given our page-count constrains here.) The Spoils of Poynton also recommends itself as a poignant romance that eerily anticipates relationships in our current disconnected day.

Don’t be discouraged if you find these texts challenging. Everybody does.

Musical listening: Mahler: Symphonies 2, 5, 9.

Art: Henri Matisse...