For 45 years, since my last year of high school, I’ve been inspired by the idea of the Great Conversation. I suppose it began when Mortimer Adler asked me, in How to Read a Book, wouldn’t I like to attend a university in which Plato lectured on philosophy, Shakespeare on poetry, and so on; and if so, all I had to do was learn how to read the Great Books. I pursued this ideal for many years until finally, in 1989, I became a trainer for the Great Books Foundation.

Over the last 20 years I have led book groups in bookstores, churches, libraries, and for a year in a maximum security prison. For four-and-a-half years my wife and I co-led a Great Books group in a mental hospital. Eleven years ago we started a group in a bookstore that continues to this day with an average attendance of about 15 people each month. For about 18 months we had a Henry James Club that existed as an adjunct to the main group, and now, similarly, we have a Novels Group. You can, by the way, see a list of what we’ve discussed and what we plan to discuss during the coming year at http://geocities.com/gbgnv.

How does a book make it onto our list? I don’t have a clear opinion of what makes a book great, and I find discussions of what should be in the “canon” tedious—though I suppose this must make up at least a part of the Great Conversation—but I think I’ve developed over the years a sense of what makes a book “worthy” or “worthwhile,” that is, worth the time and attention of my group. As a consequence every one of my monthly group’s discussions is lively and meaningful, or at least a solid exchange of ideas among members.

Everyone, of course, has preferences as to whom he wants to “converse” with. For me, staples in the Great Conversation are Plato, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Henry James, John Dewey, three mystery writers (Agatha Christie, Tony Hillerman, and Jane Langton), and any number of writers about psychology and psychotherapy, including Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, Heinz Kohut, Sigmund Freud, and others. (I worked for 10 years as a therapist at a community mental health center.) As a young man I spent hours immersed in the Bible and other religious literature. On the other hand, at the top of my “Writers I Hope to Never Read Again” list are Nietzsche and Kant. Obviously others who join in the Great Conversation will have different lists. Part of the fun is getting opinions on who to talk to.

What is the point of the Great Conversation? Why do you engage in it? What is its value? Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote a small book on the subject, which I haven’t read for a while. (It’s somewhere on the shelves of the Great Books Foundation.) A single sentence that inspires me comes from Matthew Arnold, quoted by Henry James in The Art of Fiction: “[Criticism’s] business is simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and, by its turn, making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” This “miracle of dialogue” (to use the title of a book by Reuel Howe which has inspired me since I first read it in the ‘60s) seems to me the best way for us to fulfill the excellence of being human—Plato’s virtue or arête.