“In much wisdom is much grief,” counsels the book of Ecclesiastes, and in Christopher R. Beha’s tender intellectual memoir, we find plenty of both. By the time he set out to read all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics — known as the Five-Foot Shelf — Beha had already survived blood cancer and seen his identical twin brother nearly die after a car accident. And in a year that would take Beha from ancient Greece to the 20th century, illness and death returned once more, reminding him that no amount of learning can efface what Pascal called the “eternal silence of these infinite spaces.”

First published in 1909, the Five-Foot Shelf was conceived by the Harvard president Charles W. Eliot as “a good substitute for a liberal education” for a growing middle class eager for knowledge. All the big names and important ideas were here: Sophocles, Chaucer, the Constitution, three treatises on smallpox for good measure. Ordinary men and women who had never set foot in Harvard Yard could now stake a claim to the peaks of Western civilization.

A product of Manhattan private schools and Princeton, Beha seems an unlikely candidate for such earnest self-­improvement. But like the working masses who were Eliot’s intended audience, he was desperately seeking a retreat from the mundane. At 27 he was the picture of aimless youth: a struggling writer, marginally employed and grievously in debt. Searching for salvation, or at least something to do, he pledged on a lonely New Year’s Eve to spend the next 12 months reading the Harvard Classics, which had long been gathering dust in his parents’ library.

Image Christopher R. Beha Credit... Josephine Sittenfeld

A wealthy young man shacked up with Plato and Goethe sounds like a gimmick, and a tired one at that. But life intruded rudely on Beha’s sabbatical, and he rose to the occasion by writing an unexpected narrative that deftly reconciles lofty thoughts with earthly pain. In doing so, he makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion no less valuable than the iPod.