The childhood books the West keeps returning to

Just as timeless Narnia or 1930s Corfu are somehow more real for me than my own childhood, so for our civilisation are what Yeats called the ‘monuments of unageing intellect’.

My grandmother’s house in 1963 has gone: it can’t be reached via any wardrobe, but Narnia still can.

During summer in England in 2024 I read a review of Sam Leith’s new book The Haunted Wood, about childhood reading.

Here were many old friends: The Jungle Book (“we be of one blood, ye and I”); The Wind in the Willows (“nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats”); Swallows and Amazons (“better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown”); Alice (“sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”); William Brown (ah, the immortal Violet Elizabeth Bott); Peter Pan (“second to the right, and then straight on till morning”); Potter (that’s Beatrix, not Harry); the Railway Children; Katy; and, of course, Narnia.

Ernest H Shephard’s illustration from the book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

I happened to read that review the day after visiting childhood haunts in Hampshire: the village I grew up in, the village school I went to, just at the time when I was first reading those books. So the places and the books were concurrent in my mind all over again, just as they had been so many years before.

I wonder if you’ve ever had this thought. It occurred to me, as I was transported back that weekend to the places and the books of my childhood, that my memories of John and Roger and Titty and Susan, Mole and Rat and Toad, Lucy and Edmund and Peter, Alice and the White Queen, Wendy and the Lost Boys, Katy and William, and the fictional worlds they inhabited, were every bit as real to me as the memories of the family and friends I had, and the places I lived in, in those far-off days.

Now you may say I’m only comparing memories. Obviously walking through those lanes four months ago brought back the physical reality of the past more vividly than re-reading a book ever could.

The fictional worlds of the books of my childhood were every bit as real to me as the memories of the family and friends I had.

But then, shortly afterwards, I also visited the magical dell in Headington where CS Lewis first thought of it all, and could almost feel Narnia’s immanent presence, like a vibration through the back of the wardrobe. Besides, my grandmother’s house in 1963 has gone: it can’t be reached via any wardrobe or platform 9¾. Narnia and Hogwarts still can. They aren’t “just memories”.

Anyway, it was never just a matter of memory. Gerald Durrell’s family and childhood on Corfu in the 1930s seemed just as real to me when I first read My Family and Other Animals in the 1960s, aged 12 (Durrell’s age in the book) as my own surroundings, sitting in the book room behind my mother’s classroom in the early mornings before I headed off to my own school. Wishing like Gerry I could be skipping my school years to wander through dappled olive groves in search of owls or geckos.

For many people the reality of everyday life is interleaved like this with the equivalent reality of books. Of course, to others this can seem like some kind of tragic escapist pathology. When my grandmother, a practical woman, caught me with my “head stuck in a book”, she would chase me out to play in the garden. Where of course I was Mowgli and the cat was Shere Khan.

But I’m sure many would agree with me that we might want to make it possible for young people to have memories and reading experiences such as these. That fostering or enabling of a high level of immersion in the alternative reality of books is a key part of what a classical liberal education is about. I’d venture to say that being abstracted like this from the quotidian, the commonplace, may present the young person with a more real reality: one that’s made partly by the reader in the act of reading; one that becomes ever more real each time they return to it. These books do something to us, change something in us, make us do something, that films, smartphones and computer games do not. Immersion in that alternative reality requires a level of imaginative and intellectual effort or engagement that, as cognitive science has shown, actually changes the structure of the brain, in ways that paradoxically make us better at understanding the reality of other human beings. Not just Peter and Wendy, Katy and William, Bilbo and Alice but our neighbour.

Books do something to us, change something in us.

Now of course those early books are disproportionately real for us. They partly created and partly re-create our own pasts, and in revisiting them we also revive and relive our early lives, our formative years. But the imaginative exercise, the disposing of the mind to patient attentiveness, that’s fostered by early reading, will train and shape it for a lifetime. By the time readers are into their later high school or early university years, on the verge of adulthood, the proliferating resistant reality around them will seek, demand and, if they are lucky or well-directed, find a greater and deeper correspondent reality in what they read. Now their companions may be not Potter or Lucy but Emma (Woodhouse or Bovary), Antigone, Pierre Bezukhov, Dorothea Brooke, Nostromo, Holden Caulfield, Virgil, Falstaff.

Nor is this only about fiction. The voices that speak to us in Descartes’ Meditations or Wittgenstein’s Investigations, to say nothing of the chorus in Plato’s Dialogues, all ask us to recognise a greater, deeper or truer intellectual reality than the everyday one we think we know. Likewise the scientists: Euclid’s Elements, Bacon’s Novum Organum, Newton’s Principia, Galileo’s New Sciences, Einstein’s Essay on Relativity. Or turning to history: even more vividly than in fiction we suffer with Nicias and the defeated Athenian army in that Sicilian quarry, in the tragic climax of Thucydides’ book, and looking back on the glad confident morning of Pericles’ funeral oration we mourn what happened to the world’s first great democracy. And then: what about Isaiah? Mark’s Gospel? 1 Corinthians?

Isn’t this just as true of music and art? Yes, of course: in some ways. I happened to hear Dvorak’s New World symphony on the radio the same week as reading that book review, for the first time for many years, and realised I had first heard it at the same age as reading Durrell – and the sense of exultation it filled me with was still the same as it was the first time. The same can be said of a visit I paid the week before to London’s National Gallery, revisiting Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, a Tobias and the Angel, a St Sebastian, a Crivelli: all of which I first saw at the age of 10 or 12.

But we are language-using animals, perhaps more definingly than anything else, and these classic books are linguistic constructs. Into their fabric perhaps more human experience is condensed than is possible with any other kind of artefact. They are permanent structures of thought that have outlived and even outgrown their creators, becoming more, not less, real as the centuries pass, because their reality has become visible to, more inhabited by, more people. These shared formative realities are the polar opposites of the ephemera, the epi-hemerai, “on or for the day”: those flickering shadows on the cave wall that Plato said we waste most of our lives looking at. Except now, as we all know, it’s not just a cave wall we all look at together but a little screen we stare at alone.

While, on the other hand, what can be said of childhood and later reading in each single life also can be said of the whole life of our civilisation. These books are the places all of the West has kept returning to, finding them, once again, in a strange way, more real than itself, a sort of parallel universe of hyper-lives, of “real presences” (to secularise a phrase of George Steiner’s). Just as timeless Narnia or 1930s Corfu are somehow more real for me than my own childhood because always still there, so for our civilisation are what Yeats called the “monuments of unageing intellect”. Except they’re not monuments but dynamos, full of electricity every time you touch them, every time you pass through the wardrobe.

To adapt what Lionel Trilling once said, we don’t just passively read these books, we actively enable them to read us, and we grow as they do that: more, we grow into a civilisation. By the time students have glimpsed that what they’re dealing with here isn’t just a random list of dead writers but a deeply connected 3000-year-old story, with its own distinctive and critical insights into science and democracy; goodness, virtue and justice; beauty and truth; human and divine love – by the time all that has happened, they’ll never be the same again.

I mean that quite literally. Their brains will have been physically changed, rewired, by the effort they have made; their capacity for paying attention to what it means to be human, to be a part of that particular conversation, will have been lifted up out of the trivial world of TikTok and Instagram and on to a higher level of thought that will be of incalculable benefit to them not just in their “real” lives but also in their careers, where they will be better at reading complex situations and institutions than their artificial-intelligence-driven, short attention span colleagues.

Remember Steve Jobs: Apple wouldn’t have happened without the humanities. Remember that reading, mass literacy, was the initial Reformation spark that brought us the first industrial revolution and all the immense gains in prosperity and wellbeing that followed. This kind of advanced reading capacity will be needed more than ever as we move into the fourth revolution, the ultra-digitised and globalised world of the future. The more we rely on AI the more we need HI, if only to remember who we are.

So on both the individual and world-historical scale that capacity for attending to human complexity that such reading uniquely develops is actually a moral capacity, an enlargement of moral vision in both individuals and their society. As such it is the direct contrary of that lazy and dangerous tendency we are now seeing everywhere: to categorise all human beings by just one or two of their views or attributes, their class or gender or race or tribe, or just a handful of their opinions, which is known as identity politics and is not a progressive force at all but the opposite, a completely regressive one. It is atavistic: a regression to a primitive tribal or quasi-tribal condition, dangerously turbocharged by social media, an imprisoning environment of coercive conformism that stifles, diminishes and trivialises human personality and genuine diversity.

Whereas on the contrary it’s not only minds that these books are forming but characters, from a Greek word for marks incised on wax by a writing implement. These books don’t just read us: they write us. Impressionable younger people will have been “in-formed”, permanently marked, by something more enduring and magnanimous, more profound and permanent, wiser and stronger and freer, than the ephemeral chorus they hear all around them.

This connection with something more real is not just moral, but spiritual. Remember John Milton’s immortal 1644 defence of free speech, Areopagitica: these books are “the precious life blood of master spirits”. They contain “a potency of life in them as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them”.

A classical education is an interactive absorption into a parallel world, inhabited by a host of spirits that are arguably more real, morally and spiritually richer and healthier, than so much of what young people, or indeed the rest of us, will encounter in everyday life. All this is on offer in the highly successful Ramsay Centre-funded courses at three Australian universities: as well as in the excellent Campion College degree.

More and more people in the US and Australia are realising that this “classical education” model is also entirely feasible in schools. But first we have to teach the teachers.

Simon Haines was founding chief executive at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. He is adjunct professor at the Australian Catholic University and a founding fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. This article is edited from a speech delivered at the Classical Liberal Education Seminar in Brisbane.