Why should we read the classics? To slow down. And to appreciate our cultural and social diversity

Mark Twain called a classic a book which people praise but don’t read, while Italo Calvino remarked, “The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: “I’m rereading…” And so with the classics, we’ve either never read them or we’re constantly rereading them, which is to say we’re not really reading them at all! But as George Steiner observes, we don’t actually read a classic, it reads us. “Each time we engage with it, the classic will question us. It will challenge our resources of consciousness and intellect, of mind and body.” The classics exist in our present as invocations; we call upon them as if calling upon an ancient spirit or a wise old ancestor. But rather than ghosts of a forgotten era, the classics are perpetually reinvigorated by fresh translations and novel interpretations that speak directly to our lived present and common humanity.

What makes a classic a classic

But what exactly is a classic? Texts designated as classical are most often associated with notions of antiquity and literary sophistication, two qualities which classical Indian texts have in spades. The Vedas for example are considered one of the world’s oldest and most complex literary monuments, while texts on...

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