Great Books for Great Thoughts by Tomichan Matheikal

Great Books for Great Thoughts by Tomichan Matheikal is a collection of a brief summary of 26 classics arranged in alphabetical order with his personal observations & reflections for each of them.

What is a Classic?

The book starts with George Bernard Shaw’s first commercial success, Arms and the Man. It’s a play divided into three Acts.

I read the First Act of the Play while studying in school. It was a part of our NCERT English book. As far as I remember, the name of the chapter was “Don’t call out or you’ll be shot” because Captain Bluntschli uttered these words when he entered into the bedroom of Raina for saving his life from the winning army.

There was a romance in the air, and I wanted to know what happened in the end—whether they met or not in the sense of happily ever after. So, I managed to read the whole play, and it was worth the effort.

It’s famously said that everything’s fair in love and war. In the play Arms and the Man, too, love and war were compared throughout.

What fascinated me as a teenage boy was the romantic tension between the characters though there were subtle comments about the futility of war and the concept of heroism. Some sections of the Press at that time even accused Shaw of sneering at heroism and patriotism.

In his book Great Books for Great Thoughts, Matheikal presented the play from the perspective of the futility of war and romanticization of human ideals.

The term ‘Classic’ in the context of literature was first used by John Bowle for Don Quixote to place it along with ancient classical Greek & Roman literature.

In fact, Shaw also compared one of the characters in Arms and the Man with Don Quixote himself. It has direct references in The Three Musketeers and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well.

It also got a place in Great Books for Great Thoughts. Matheikal introduced Don Quixote by saying that it’s too classical to need an introduction or summary.

This is what a Classic is all about. It has something for everyone irrespective of one’s age, background, or the era one is born. It is often defined in terms of its lasting freshness, multidimensional perspectives, and reinterpretability.

About the Author

Tomichan Matheikal is an English teacher by profession having decades of experience.  When I say experience, it’s not limited to profession only but life as well—his personal since April 20, 1960, as well as gained from others including the books. His Faustian quest for understanding life led him to various subjects such as literature, psychology, religion, philosophy, etc.

His writing is his compassion for others. He’s not bound to pass on his experiences, but he does through his books & blog. There could not be any greater evidence to show it than the present book.

If presenting the wisdom of great minds like G. B. Shaw, Franz Kafka, Henrik Ibsen, D. H. Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Herman Hesse, William Golding, Yuval Noah, Nikos Kazantzakis, and others together in one place is not an act of kindness, then what is it?

Matheikal is a true rebel in the sense of Albert Camus’s The Rebel, showed in his present book as the artist who questions existing values & beliefs and suggests better alternatives for the welfare of the human race.

Though the author denies that he’s a religious person because he sees most people are content with superficial religion and use it as a tool to dominate other people, he is indeed a religious person in its truest sense. His religion is his experience. In chapter Siddhartha, he wrote: “Unless your religion becomes your experience it is meaningless.”

Abuse of Religion

He describes how religions are abused for domineering purposes and adding comforting illusions and delusions to life using the reference of many classics over various chapters. It makes you question your religious views & beliefs and compel you to ponder whether your religion liberates you or enslaves you.

The chapter Malcolm X exposes the intention of religious institutions and provides a pretty close view of their dirty games using the example of Nation of Islam, which was playing with the sentiments of oppressed blacks by mixing Islam in the prevailing racism in the United States to expand its reach.

It’s a summary of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It also reveals how the religious leaders fought over the control of power within the organization, forgetting all the religious & spiritual ideologies.

The book also shows how religion should be. It also talks about the characteristics of a true messiah and differentiates a fake with a genuine one.

Exploitation of Patriotic & Nationalist Sentiments

Great Books for Great Thoughts also lifts the veil from how personal aspirations are served in the name of patriotism and nationalism using the works of G. B. Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, William Golding, Ernest Hemingway, Miguel de Cervantes, and Yuval Noah.

Though the gimmicks have been explained through various chapters, I’d like to mention two of them here—Lord of the Flies and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Sapiens give you an evidence-based explanation while Lord of the Flies is a fictionalized presentation of the understanding. Both start from the very basics, i.e., the formation of society, getting civilized, introduction of myths & politics, struggle for power, the advent of war, and so on.

Exploring Love

People have been trying to understand the love for ages. This book provides you some interesting insights into different aspects of love.

Like, love & insensitivity cannot go together though love & fight can go hand in hand, the difference between being actually in love and thinking it pleasant to be in love, etc.

In the chapter The Old Man and the Sea, Santiago tells the fish, “Because I love you, I have to kill you.”

Wuthering Heights forces you to think, “What kind of love was it that grew between Heathcliff and Catherine if they were never sexually drawn to each other?”

The book speaks about all kinds of love: humane to spiritual.  The institution of marriage is also dealt with in detail in the few chapters.

Suffering and Wisdom

In the chapter The Karamazov Brothers, it’s written: “Suffering can be a purifying process. Suffering can be the crucible in which the soul melts and sheds its impurities.”

Unless you experience yourself, you don’t learn. Borrowed words of wisdom have no effect. Remember Nolan’s Inception? The whole point was that the people had to believe the implanted idea as their own to act on it.

Works like The Castle, The Grapes of Wrath, Jude the Obscure, To Kill a Mockingbird, Vernon God Little, etc. are written to provide you a close encounter in which you can feel the suffering yourself, not only read them superficially.

Authors of such works also don’t want you to be influenced by their beliefs and therefore leave you with more questions than you already had without providing any answers.

Quest for Meaning

Whether there’s an inherent meaning in Existence or it’s meaningless, it doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is that meaning is needed to live a happy & meaningful life. Meaning is important how you get it is not.

Some people seek it. Some create it. Some simply borrow readymade meanings from others. The book discusses all the ways.

Spirituality and Enlightenment

The book Great Books for Great Thoughts starts with a talk on practicality—the difference between practicality & romanticism, reason & sentiments, etc.

Morality is also discussed in the forms of good & evil. Goodness is categorized as intrinsic, rational, & learnt.

A large part of the discussion is around the philosophy of existentialism & absurdism. A contrast of fate & free will is also there.

Spirituality is dealt with in great depth in terms of the difference between knowledge & wisdom, the difference between seeking & finding, etc.  The concepts of body, mind, and spirit are explained through the characters of Dmitry, Ivan, and Alyosha of The Karamazov Brothers respectively.

The crescendo reaches its zenith when spirituality enters into the realm of mysticism in the form of Zorba the Greek. Duality merges into non-duality. Zero equals infinity. Simplicity becomes highly sophisticated. Paradox is quite evident. What remains is AWE.

Matheikal calls it ‘Sacred Awe’ and sees Zorba as the personification of that Awe.

Though the book Great Books for Great Thoughts is self-sufficient to have a glimpse of the innermost core of spirituality, if you wanna read more about this experience of awe & spirituality, especially Zen, you can read my book See Through Words.

Structure and Writing Style of Great Books for Great Thoughts

The book is not divided into sections on the basis of some themes, ideologies, or philosophies. It deals one book at a time and progresses into alphabetical order.

And, this is what makes the reading exciting. You have to be attentive all the time. You have to find the cues of a particular theme in different chapters and then connect the dots.

Also, the book is a collection of summaries. There isn’t any unnecessary line. Every sentence is not only meaningful but loaded with different layers of meaning.

Quotes from Great Books for Great Thoughts

• Life is a protracted pain with enough intervals of joys and delights. We add more joys in the form of illusions and delusions in order to alleviate the pain.
• Devils and their tortures are not required to create hell. You are my hell and I am yours. You freeze me into a label and create my hell.
• Autobiographies are written in order to give shape to lives which are otherwise chaotic.
• Most people won’t take logic and reason far enough to realise that good is a rational choice over evil. That is why people need food for their souls—religion, for instance.
• Divinity was not sitting up somewhere in the heavens but was to be discovered among human beings.

Some Trivia

• Two books of Albert Camus have been included in this collection.
• Seven out of twenty-five authors mentioned in this book received the Noble Prize in the field of literature. They are George Bernard Shaw, Hermann Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William Golding.
• Three of the twenty-six books discussed in Great Books for Great Thoughts won the Pulitzer Prize. They are The Grapes of Wrath, The Old Man and the Sea, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
• Kafka died while writing The Castle due to tuberculosis, leaving the last sentence incomplete and it’s his friend Max Brod who gave the conclusion to the novel.
• UNESCO has inscribed Ibsen’s autographed manuscripts of A Doll’s House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value.
• Lord of the Flies and Vernon God Little are debut novels of Golding and Pierre respectively. Vernon God Little also won the Booker Prize.
• The phrase “Hell is other people” originated from Sartre’s No Exit.
• Wuthering Heights is the only novel of Emily Bronte in her writing career, and it was published under her pseudonym “Ellis Bell.”

Helen Exley said, “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’” So, I’m warning you that this book Great Books for Great Thoughts has the potential to change your life if read seriously.

You can download it from here. It’s available free for a limited time only.

Note: I do paid manuscript analysis. Here’s a sample of detailed feedback, written keeping in mind the author’s interest.