So what would it take to be a cultured person?

Narrow it down: what reading would turn somebody into a cultured person?

Even further: What should you have read by the time you are 25 to be a cultured 25-year-old? And then 30? And then 40? And maybe by 50 you really are cultured, because you’ve read the list for the 25, the 30, the 40, and you’re still going.

But this all excludes music, and painting, and history, and language, and all the arts and sciences, that make somebody a cultured person.

A cultured person knows how to say junta.

A cultured person knows how to use the word zeitgeist, and ennui, and Weltschmerz, and Schadenfreude, and hubris.

A cultured person knows something about Mao’s little red book.

A cultured person has listened to Bach’s St Matthew Passion, if only on CD.

But those are only examples, minutiae in a vast wash of culture.

Back to reading. Reading is fundamental. Too bad it is not fundamental to get out of high school. Too bad it is not fundamental to get into college. Too bad it’s not fundamental to even graduate college.

College is to accelerate becoming a cultured person. Unfortunately, there is so much emphasis on skill, on specialization, that culture is not something that is transmitted, or acquired, in college anymore, in general. Even the college professors are culturally illiterate, specialized, like insects.

So the problem with making a list of books that a cultured person should have read, is reading itself. Reading is going to be a lost art for the masses before long. They will communicate with signology, with txtmsgging and I/M-ing language. b4 u no it thy wll nt b rding n e mor.

Reading will be the Sibboleth of the future. It has been a sifter in the past, and will be in the future. Look at those peoples who either had no written record that was sacred and kept as a core, as an anchor to their language, as opposed to those who did. One great example is the Mulekites. They had no scriptures, and in fact, nothing of significance in writing, when they left the Old Country and came to the New World. After generations, they were illiterate; and their oral language suffered from not having a written language. And their culture was only the culture of the rising and the immediate past generation; they could not claim any classics, any scripture, any great writing as a foundation to their language or their culture.

Saul Bellow asked, “Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” The Zulus, in fact, had no written language, and therefore no rich heritage of literature. Their culture was their immediate survival, accompanied by the traditions that were passed along from generation to generation. But who’s to say that three generations back, the traditions weren’t slightly different? There’s no written, no reliable, account. And where is the art of literature for the Zulus? Where is the psychology, the theology, the sociology, the history, the allegory, the morality, the humanity that literature is? To read Tolstoy’s War and Peace is to see a vision, to be transported into the hearts and minds of humans, of people, of a nation, of a civilization; it is to live another life in a capsule—and another, and another. Where is that for the Zulus? They have no literature.

And then there were the followers of Alma, and Mosiah, who had a cherished tradition of the written word—they had scriptures. They had the mind and will of the Lord, the voice of the Lord, unchanging, available, immutable, to guide them not only in theology, in spirituality, in congregations of faith, but also to serve as the touchstone for all writing, and all language.

Look at the English speaking world, with its King James Bible. It has been the guiding voice for language since 1611. All of Western civilization revolves around the Bible, and the English world comes out of the KJV in its literature.

The time will come when only the elite, the intelligentsia, will be able to read actual English, and only the faithful will be able to read scriptures. Look at the difficulty people have with the KJV right now, and its Elizabethan English. We are changing now as much in our language, away from Bible language, in one year, as it took a hundred years to change before the Great War.

Soon only certain people will want to read, or be able to read. It will be a separator.