After a long break, the Humanities lectures of Quinn and Senior have just caught up with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales of the 14th century (scroll down here). The cycle of recorded lectures I commissioned in the late 1980s is now nearly complete. Only the bard of Stratford is still waiting in the wings. With him, we will have completed this abbreviated Great Books journey, modeled on the famous Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970s.
Pilgrimage, after all, is what life is all about. On Earth, we are never entirely at home, and we are reminded of this not only by Chaucer’s pilgrim conclusion to the agitated Middle Ages, but even more as Shakespeare shakes us with the impending challenges and perils of modernity. In very different ways, both of them assure us that all of us, at whatever stage of our trajectory, must keep moving.
