Reflections on Reading The Story of Civilization

This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.

Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall.

I’ve wanted to read these books since I inherited them from my Grandmother more than twenty-five years ago. I made a few attempts but never got past the first hundred pages. I was too busy or preoccupied with other things to devote the time and focus.

This time was different. First, as a recent retiree, I have the energy to dedicate to a project like this. Second, I approached the reading like a real project. I mapped out the volumes and page counts and calculated that if I read just thirty pages a night, I could read the entire series in a little over a year. I stuck with it, and the little bit of reading every night soon became a habit.

I didn’t finish the books in a year like I planned. The reading stretched out to almost two years. On average, I read just under fifteen pages a day. Yet, it’s striking to see how a little bit of reading each day can add up.

In terms of consistent effort, I’d place the reading of these books on par with the work I put in to earn my MBA degree twenty-five years ago. That two-year program helped me professionally and monetarily; these Durant books changed me in perhaps an even more profound way.

Last year, I wrote about the personal reasons I wanted to read these books. In this post, I’m sharing some reflections on the benefits I’ve taken away from this monumental reading assignment.

Before we get to that, I have some quibbles. While Durant is a masterful storyteller and sometimes poet, the writing feels necessarily dated at times. The focus is too heavily weighted towards Western civilization and Europe. Durant’s interest in the sexual proclivities of historical figures surprised me at first, given the time this was written, but later became tedious. The extended descriptions of famous art and architecture were well-written, but there are easier and better ways to study those now. I found myself skimming a lot of those sections.

Criticisms aside, the Story of Civilization is truly a masterpiece of history. After thinking back on this multi-year reading journey, I’ll group the value I’ve received in three areas:

1. The Past Explained

Before Durant, my knowledge of world history stemmed from high school classes and isolated deep dives into specific events and people. My internal timeline of when and where things happened over the eons was a mixed-up jumble.

The Story of Civilization corrected all that. It starts at the very beginning with a patient professor chatting beside you the entire way. It’s the same wise voice describing the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt as the Goths invading Rome, the dark ages of inquisitions and crusades, a spark then roaring fire of the Renaissance, the return to science and reason, before ending with Napoleon stewing in exile in St. Helena. It’s one continuous story with no gaps or omissions.

These books exposed me to every notable event and person in our shared history. Not just the Kings and Queens, but the composers, the artists, and the philosophers; the writers and scientists and architects; the prophets, the saints, and the heretics. It is not just about major events or people but also insights into the economies, the everyday life of peasants and the middle classes, their religious beliefs, their customs and morals, and their ideas on family and community.

By reading these books in a relatively short time span and taking hundreds and hundreds of notes, I now have a well-calibrated compass of the when, what, and why of human history. I’m able to draw from this knowledge with most everything else I read. I can place the context of practically any historical figure or event in reading that my eyes might have glossed over before now. This has made my post-Durant reading life a much richer experience.

2. Perspective on Humanity

Taking in the entire written history of civilization definitely gives you a new perspective on human nature. It’s not good. Reading example after example of the corrupting effect of power held by the few over the many is depressing. Or how organized religions are both awful and necessary to the stability of civilization. Or how freedom and equality seem like natural feel-good bedfellows but are, in truth, mortal enemies. Or how the rich get richer and richer until the poor rise up. Or how democracy as a form of government rarely lasts.

A sorry spectacle of generals climbing over slain rivals to power, to be slain in their turn; of pomp and luxury, eye-gouging and nosecutting, incense and piety and treachery; of emperor and patriarch unscrupulously struggling to determine whether the empire should be ruled by might or myth, by sword or word.¹

History provides a needed perspective to help us navigate turmoil and uncertainty. Study enough past civilizations, their rise and their fall, and you can’t help but see consistent patterns and inflection points in the world around us. No one can truly predict the future, but surely our shared history is a powerful guide, given how consistently the past repeats itself.

In so many ways, history shows what a privilege it is to be alive during this time of democracy and relative peace. Our past is riddled with countless atrocities, warfare and pointless bloodshed, inquisitions, dictatorships, and crazed emperors. Yet, witnessing so many civilizations fail over the millennia, we must acknowledge this current peace and tranquility will not, cannot last.

That said, there’s room for optimism. For every hundred tyrants, there’s a philosopher or scientist or artist whose gifts to humanity have pushed us forward as a society. Here’s Durant:

Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair. ²

3. The Meaning of Life

During the height of my working life and career, I dreamed of one day retiring to my little book-lined study to read and think through the mysteries of life. I’m not religious. I studied philosophy in college and maintained an avid interest in Stoic thinking, but I never had the proper time to bear down on the crux of the problem: why are we here? What is the meaning of all this?

I hoped one day to find the answers buried in the pages of my many books.

I didn’t realize when I started reading The Story of Civilization that Durant was a seeker of these same questions. With every spiritual movement, every religion, every saint, every philosopher, he was there by my side, poking and probing for the answers to questions that bothered us both.

Did Durant help me find what I was looking for? Did I discover the true meaning of life? Not exactly. Maybe the answers I seek can’t be found in a book. And yet, I did find comfort in the parallels between the we-are-all-one views of the ancient Upanishads, repeated and examined so logically by Lucretius and unearthed once more by the 18th-century free-thinking Deists.

You often hear that ancient philosophers conversed with one another over the centuries, adding to, refuting, and affirming each other like some modern-day Reddit thread. Durant’s moderation of these thinkers throughout the books made that conversation come alive in ways I would have surely missed had I studied this piecemeal. I came here for history but found insight in philosophy. I am wiser for Durant’s company.

What does it matter by what road each man seeks the truth? By no one road can men come to the understanding of so great a mystery.
— Symmachus ³

A Personal Legacy

My Grandfather gave my Grandmother the first six volumes of The Story of Civilization as a Christmas gift in 1959. He passed away five years later, the year before I was born, so I never got the chance to meet him. As a widow, my Grandmother read these books carefully, as proven by her many cryptic scribbles in the margins. I knew her as a devout Presbyterian, but her underlining and exclamation marks show that, like Durant, she also questioned her religion, faith, and life’s true purpose. She donated most of the books from her large family library when she downsized to a senior living apartment. She kept the Durant books and just a few others. She cherished these books.

I wish I had realized she didn’t own the complete set. I would have bought them for her. I ended up buying the remaining five books on eBay. Her marginalia ends after six volumes; mine continues.

Maybe in thirty or forty years, my daughter will pull one of these well-loved books down from her shelves and flip through the yellowed pages, scanning all the scribbles and vertical lines and exclamation points in the margins, stopping to puzzle over why a particular sentence or paragraph was marked. You can tell much about a person from what they write in books. Maybe that is legacy enough. Or, maybe, when the time is right, she will decide to embark on the same voyage as her father and great-grandmother, walking along amiably with Durant and two silent pilgrims.

Reading Advice

The physical books that make up The Story of Civilization are long out of print, but you can sometimes find a nice set collecting dust in a used bookstore. eBay usually has sets for sale in the $100-$200 range, which is considerably cheaper than the cost of an MBA.

You can buy the complete set on Kindle, but I don’t recommend it. The file size caused my Kindle to lock up, though the individual books work fine. When I traveled, I left the hefty physical books at home and read on Kindle instead. Amazon has periodic sales of various books within the series for as low as $2 each, and I ended up buying most of them that way.

You can buy or borrow audiobook versions on Libby. I listened to parts of the series on walks and drives but found them more challenging to follow than in print.

My advice is to buy the set in hardback. Put the books on your shelf. Let them marinate. Pick up a volume and thumb through it every once in a while. And when you’re ready, go easy. Read a little every day. Harvest the time you might have wasted on social media. Savor the writing and the story. Write notes in the margins. Reflect on what you’ve learned. You might be amazed at the distance you’ll travel.

Have you read The Story of Civilization or have plans to read it? Let me know in the comment section below.

1. Will Durant, The Age of Faith, page 428. ↩
2. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, page 657. ↩
3. Will Durant, The Age of Faith, page 35. ↩