From the minds of Hillsdale’s professors: the song, book, and movie everyone ought to know

 

“Find the River,” R.E.M.

 

I’m probably just picking my favorite song from my favorite band here rather than what influenced me. The dual harmonies are beautiful, but I don’t think they changed me. And any song that mentions bergamot, ginger, and coriander is obviously a real toe-tapper, but it didn’t influence me. This is the song that, should it come on while I’m dying and my family gathers round to whisper sweet words of love, I’ll shout, “Shut up, shut up! I can’t hear the music!” Honorable mention to Beck’s “Lost Cause” because that’s sort of my and the wife’s song.

 

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

For originality I wish I could write something different, but I can’t. At the age of 18 in my grandmother’s house in Logan, West Virginia, I spent a Christmas weekend locked away devouring this book. It was like being presented with an entirely new language for which you unaccountably had some intuitive grasp of the grammar. My mother was irate because I wouldn’t spend time with family, but I was not leaving that book for aunts and uncles to ask me why I was so skinny. If any good thing awaits me in the hereafter, then my parents get most of the credit, but so too does the path this book laid before me. Of course, that means if bad things await me, Crime and Punishment has to take some blame. You too, mom.

 

A Thief in the Night

 

This is not movies I’ve seen the most. So I’m sorry Back to the Future, The Fugitive, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and Mad Max: Fury Road. When I was a little kid, we moved several times. My parents would check out new churches, which meant going to Sunday School classes filled with strangers. Still today, when I think of loneliness, it’s being in a new Sunday School class. At one church the teachers showed this 1970s movie about people left behind after the rapture. It scared me to death. Once my mom hid from me (why, mom?), and when I couldn’t find her, I collapsed into tears believing I had missed the rapture. She still tells this story and has always, always found it funny. That movie haunted me for years. Update: I have just returned from a Google search and can report it is available in its entirety on YouTube.