Civlization in the Thrift Shop

Kenneth Clark's book Civilization was in the dollar book bin at the local Salvation Army Thrift Shop last week.  Williams  Lake is not the only place where civilization is discounted, but this book brought back memories of days when I tried to civilize myself, still a work in progress.

I was in University of Alberta Professor McCaughey's English language history course in 1980-81.  He recommended a film series then showing in the biggest lecture theatre in the humanities building, a rectilinear 1960s edifice that overlooked the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, Canada.  It still overlooks that river, but McCaughey is gone; I don't know if civilization survives in the university or city.   Perhaps smaller rooms suffice these days.  I watched many of the films.  Decades later, I still prefer civilization to barbarism, social misfit that I am. 

Kenneth Clark, an English blue blood, narrated Civilization, and opened my rural Canadian eyes to distant lands.  More than one academic has told me that rural students are more versatile than urban students in academia.   I remember Versatile tractors, and I hope I remember something from the films.  Clark, later knighted, had written the 1970 book, Civilization.  A copy is in the thrift shop.

When I find such things around here, I want to meet the people who donated them.  The Brothers Karamazov, not in my local library, was in share shed a couple years ago.  Virgil's Aeneid was there this year.  The share shed, beside the dump and recycle bins, is where people put things too good for dumping, or recycling.  Should I hope that others here have found civilization and want to spread it, recyclers, or despair that they regressed, and discarded their classics, dumpers?

One could make a film series about this.