The best books highlighting the fragility of human culture

This story has always struck me as a quest to identify and regain humanity, as its hero repeatedly faces strange and powerful obstacles to his voyage home. I first read it as a child and then again, but in Greek, as a student—a time in life when anyone is trying to find their feet as a human being!

Perhaps the most comforting thing is that amongst all the gods and monsters and cursing and fighting, eating habits often characterize the work’s characters. Odysseus is always looking for sitophagoi, bread eaters, i.e. civilized people who make their own food, rather than man-eating monsters. I can identify with a hero looking for nice people to share a nice meal with.

I’ve always loved this story of the misguided scientist and his outwardly monstrous but inwardly very sympathetic creation. My favorite scene is the one where the monster hides out in a shed of an unsuspecting family, and by watching them through a chink in the wall, he learns to speak; then, he learns to read with some of their abandoned books.

For me, his acquisition of language and literacy most poignantly characterizes his humanity in a surprising twist since Victor Frankenstein ought to be the learned one. The centrality of language to human experience has been an important theme in my own journey toward specializing in linguistics.

For me, this is the ultimate science fiction story: the Victorian inventor whose contraption works so well that he can travel to witness the end of human society. I first saw the film, with the wonderful Rod Taylor, then loved the book—what a story!

The Morlocks terrified me as a child, but as I grew older, I realized there is much more complexity to these apparent antagonists. Who should we sympathize with more, the Eloi who have forgotten all human knowledge and leave their books crumbling as they frolic mindlessly, with no sense of social responsibility, or the resourceful Morlocks who have no choice but to live their lives in the shadows?

The hero’s devastation is palpable when he learns where mankind’s journey ultimately leads.

A book about a hobbit, thirteen dwarves, and a wizard may seem an odd choice to reflect on the fragility of human culture—but I think this is the most human of journeys I’ve read, as Bilbo interrupts his gentle life in the Shire for an uncomfortable adventure.

Now I’m reading it to my nine-month-old son and noticing how much this is a story about social vulnerability—Bilbo’s displacement, the dwarves adrift from their ancestral home, the ruined town of Dale, and the damage caused by the dragon Smaug in the name of amassing a fortune (which he simply sits on like some big corporation with its profits). In the middle of all that devastation, it reminds me that friendship is one of the most important aspects of humanity.

I first scared myself with this vampire story as a teenager holidaying in a big house—trips along the dark corridor to the bathroom took on a new sense of terror! It’s a bleak story with a heart, especially in the relationship between the protagonist and a young boy who loses his family.

I wanted to choose a vampire or zombie book because it represents sudden loss, in this case, a whole town and all its inhabitants, unlike the loss of civilization over a long time in a book like The Time Machine. Sadly, human culture is vulnerable to many kinds of social changes, whether sudden or gradual. But fiction gives us a safe place to reflect.