Our Oriental Heritage – Jamie Todd Rubin

This post is part of my weekly series, Shelf-Life. Each episode is about a particular book on my bookshelves. For more information see my introductory post. To read other episodes in this series, see the Shelf-Life Index page.

My grandfather got me my well-worn edition of Our Oriental Heritage back in April 1999, from a used bookstore in Nyack, New York. Our Oriental Heritage was the first volume in what historian Will Durant thought would be a 5-volume survey of civilization called THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION. It was published in 1935. I first heard of the book while reading the first volume of Isaac Asimov's autobiography In Memory Yet Green, probably sometime in 1995.

The book my grandfather sent me was a 1954 edition and nineteeth printing of the book. It arrived without a dust jacket, making it one of three books in the series that I own without a dust jacket. I don't mind this. I tend to hang the jackets in the coat closet when I read the book. I want them to be comfortable and stay a while. It arrived with the aroma of 45 years of use and used bookstores. It is a smell that, like the first sweetness of spring, makes the olfactory sense a delightful one. Unlike spring, however, the aroma doesn't fade but grows richer with time.

This book, as a physical object, is sumptuous. It has generous margins, as if Durant and Simon & Schuster were inviting readers to mark up the text, converse with Durant, or ancient writers, philosophers, warriors. I made heavy use of this precious commodity, and I wish more books allowed for this, but today we optimize for maximum text with minimum paper.

I particularly enjoy large books. There is nothing like sitting down to start a 1,000-page book, knowing that you have this long journey ahead. Patience is required. It doesn't always cooperate. I first attempted to read Our Oriental Heritage on May 4, 1999¹, probably soon after it arrived in the mail from my grandfather. But I didn't finish it. I didn't actually return to the book and read the whole thing through until nearly ten years later. In the meantime, I read the second volume in Durant's STORY OF CIVILIZATION series, The Life of Greece and that is probably where I fell in love with Durant's writing.

With this series, and with this first book as trial, Durant was attempting to write what he called an “integral history.” As he wrote in the preface to Our Oriental Heritage:

I have long felt that the usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections–economic history, political history, religious history, the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, the history of music, the history of art–does injustice to the unity of human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as literally, synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation's culture, institutions, adventures, and ways.

So “integral” as in integrating all parts of history into the whole narrative. Or even in the calculus sense as the area under the curve, encompassing everthing there. This intrigued me.

Moreover, Durant's style of historiography was like nothing I'd ever encountered before. He was writing history as literature. Prior to Durant, history for me, while always interesting, was little more than dates and names, winners and losers, risings and fallings. There was a lot of this in Durant's book, but he used it to paint a picture. In Durant's hands, history became a force that bound the dates and names and events and creations together.

His classic style put his theses at the end paragraphs, rather than the beginnings, often in clever or ironic ways:

Man differs from beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.

Or, for instance, while discussing pregnancy in some culture, tells the story of how a woman becomes pregnant through a ghost, and concludes:

It is a delightful story, which must have proved a great convenience in the embarrassing aftermath of generosity; it would be still more delightful if it had been invented for anthropologists as well as for husbands.

Or, when writing of the toilers of Babylonia:

Part of the country was still wild and dangerous; snakes wandered in the thick grasses, and the kings of Babylonia and Assyria made it their royal sport to hunt in hand-to-hand conflict the lions that prowled in the woods, posed placidly for artists, but fled timidly at the nearer approach of men. Civilization is an occasional and temporary interruption of the jungle².

This first volume covers ancient civilizations to the death of Alexander as well as the history of India, China, and Japan from their beginnings to the present. Even at a thousand pages, the book was necessarily general, especially when considering the integral history style and the scope it covered. As I read through subsequent volumes, I noted that each had a smaller scope and a more detailed view of its subject. The Life of Greece was tightly focused around Greek civilization. The next volume, Caesar and Christ tightened its focus on to the Roman civilization and the birth of Christianity. With each volume, the scope narrowed, and grew more detailed, throwing Durant's original plan of five volumes out the window. Ultimately, the series concluded with 11 volumes. The eleventh and final book, The Age of Napoleon centered around the French Revolution and Napoleon.

It wasn't obvious at first, but Our Oriental Heritage was a zoomed-out look of the birth and initial growth of civilization. Each book zoomed in more and more. There was a greater resolution with each book. We began with a fifty thousand foot view of human civilization and concluded with a book that centered around a single man.

This richness of history has captivated me. It is literature that, when in capable hands, can tell the story of civilization as Durant did; or it can tell the story of a single person or thing, for instance as John McPhee did in his book Oranges. This latter is a short book that tells the history of the fruit from every possible angle, from origins to how it ends up in a glass of juice with breakfast.

Over the years, it has made me wonder: if the Drake equation is right, and there are millions of advanced civilizations scattered throughout the universe, some of the millions of years old, what would their histories look like? Our Oriental Heritage goes back 6,000 years to the birth of civilization. Imagine going back millions of years of rich history. Imagine the alien myths that arose 900,000 years earlier, the foundational texts, the literature, the love stories, the birth of science in a manner completely different from our own, the art, the philosophy, all of it from a broad overview, down to the story of one pivotal being.

When asked what my “desert island” book would be, I cheat a little, and answer “Will and Ariel Durant's STORY OF CIVILIZATION.” I mean, of course, the whole story, all 11 volumes. With 6,000 years of predecessors, with 6,000 years of literature, art, history, science, philosophy, one could never feel alone on a desert island.

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