Long before the word “liberal” became a dirty word for some political factions, it simply meant “free.” A libertus in Rome was a freed slave, of which there were many. A liberal education then was one that would make the reader “free,” free from cant, from superstition, and from ignorance.

One of the last vestiges of a true liberal arts college or university are the twin campuses of St. John’s College, in Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe, N.M. The latter campus offers seminars each summer, week-long sessions where one or more of the works covered in the regular St. John’s curriculum are discussed by anyone who wants to come.

I would like to suggest again that we use these works as suggestions for summer reading on our own, exploring books and treatises that take time and thought. As Francis Bacon wrote: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested.” I am talking about the third set.

I will start with an author I have little affinity for, Dostoyevsky. A St. John’s seminar will discuss “The Idiot,” perhaps Dostoyevsky’s most personal book. Prince Myshkin is a reflection of what Dostoyevsky would like to be. He is an innocent, truly honest and empathic. He is also epileptic, like Dostoyevsky.

In the first part of “The Idiot,” Myshkin describes men being lined up to be shot and then reprieved at the literal last moment. This also happened to Doestoyevsky. Eventually Myshkin is destroyed by society. No innocent can really survive other people. How and why is the rationale of the book.

The seminar I would most likely attend, if I could, would be on the “Short Works of Melville.” I’ve already read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” “Los Encantadas,” and “Billy Budd.” I would love to discuss Bartleby’s refusal to conform. He says to all requests, “I would prefer not to.” What do we do with someone like that?

Billy Budd is another innocent and a seaman in the British Navy. He is hanged because he strikes a superior who is evil and deserves the blow. Under Admiralty Rules, however, striking a superior officer is punishable only by death. How do we reconcile a legal punishment that is unfair?

Melville is always looking at evil and its semblance. It is a short journey from these works to the greatest single American novel ever written, “Moby Dick.” Is Ahab or the Whale evil, or both, or neither?

The St. John’s seminar leaders prefer Faulkner in American novelists. There is a seminar on “The Sound and the Fury” and one on “Go Down, Moses.” The latter is a series of short stories that Faulkner said make a novel. I’m not sure of that, but I am sure that one story, “The Bear,” is the most complicated and symbol-ridden story I have ever read, and I love it. It sums up everything Faulkner wrote before and after, and if one reads nothing else this summer, read “The Bear.”

Macbeth said, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The first section of Faulkner’s novel is told from the point of view of Benjy, a real idiot. The writing is a stream-of-consciousness tour de force, brilliant and convoluted. It sets up the other three sections of the novel in which Faulkner describes the disintegration of a family in the South. Relate this to “The Bear,” and a reader has a synthesis of why Faulkner rightfully won the Nobel Prize.

The seminars this year also concentrate on how World War I affected those in it. Starting with the seminal war novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” written from the German side, one seminar continues with “Regeneration,” a modern novel by Pat Barker about Siegfried Sassoon, a British poet who was actually sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he would no longer fight. Is Sassoon a coward or simply smarter than all who died on the Western Front?

Combine these two novels in the seminar with the bitter “Good-Bye to All That” by Robert Graves and the farcical “The Enormous Room” by e.e. cummings, and the reader will have more than a fair idea as to how stupid the war was. Add the poems of Wilfred Owens and the history books of Barbara Tuchman, “The Proud Tower” and “The Guns of August,” which detail how the war actually started, and this “war to end all wars” will seem even more catastrophic and stupid. Politicians still would have you believe Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

St. John’s seminars offer one other attractive possibility. Combined with the Santa Fe Summer Opera, you can read, say, Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” both parts, and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and then listen to Verdi’s opera, “Falstaff,” to see how one master interprets another. The seminars also treat Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and Britten’s “Billy Budd” the same way.

For more information on the St. John’s Summer Classics Program and other works one might read this summer, those interested can  visit  http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/outreach/SF/SC/classics.shtml.

Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He welcomes comments and suggestions regarding the column at rmohr1565@charter.net.