Above the columns of Butler Library at Columbia University, inscribed in the stone frieze, you read permanent testimony that some writers are in fact important: Homer, Virgil, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Spinoza, Aquinas … These names are representative of importance, they are not a limiting “list” as relativists sneer. Butler Library stands across a series of geometrical terraces and walks from Charles Follen McKim’s Low Library, which dominates the whole scene with its ten Ionic columns and low dome inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. The Columbia campus, designed integrally by McKim, Mead & White, represents architecturally a permanent defiance of the also permanent Scythians and Philistines. And you can argue that this campus is more convincing architecturally than the neo-Gothic of Princeton and Yale or the neo-Georgian of Harvard and Dartmouth.

To my college junior’s gaze, no professor was more in harmony with what all this represented than Mark Van Doren. His principal course in 1950–51 was called “The Narrative Art,” which extended through the academic year and in which we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, Genesis and Exodus, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, The Castle, and The Trial. My fellow students in the course had had the benefit of the year-long freshman course Humanities I–II, still required at Columbia, which begins in the Fall with the Iliad and ends in the Spring with a modern novel, often Crime and Punishment.