The other day a friend asked me how to read a classic work of literature.

I first returned the answer which the most extraordinary of my English literature professors had provided for me: “Slowly.”

Great works reveal themselves as flowers open; they cannot be forced without losing their beauty. The patient reader finds reward in digesting a text, ever returning to it, in an act of sustained attention foreign to our studying today, to say nothing of other reading habits.

By way of elaboration, I added this to my professor’s answer: “Humbly.”

The arrogance of my early education in literature astounds in retrospect. By no means malicious, the attitude towards our texts did them a disservice perhaps all the worse for its blindness. My first introduction to Dante, for instance, proffered this gem of literary criticism: the pilgrim faints repeatedly, our textbook suggested, to shortcut the difficulties of transitioning to the next scene.

Yes, one of the greatest poems ever composed employed this device for want of any other idea. Dante simply couldn’t cope with the challenge of thinking up something better. My friend, playing devil’s advocate, expressed this attitude towards great works most succinctly: “Haven’t we improved on literature since Homer?”

A progressive lens encourages this comfortable presumption of our technological, even moral, superiority over previous ages. We send messages faster than the ancient Greeks could manage, so we write better poetry, too — a narrative of chronological snobbery that overlooks the unevenness of technological advancement, the knowledge lost from previous generations, the waxing and waning of culture and artistry.

The inclination to disdain the past sits oddly alongside the injunction to respect cultures separated from us by space rather than time. We consider it bad manners to visit another country and disparage the food, dress, etiquette — verging on bad character if we pair these complaints with the conviction that the people there would do better to live more like we do. Our classrooms, however, not only permit but outright encourage this intolerance during students’ visits to the literary lands of an earlier age.

If the style or context of a great literary work does not suit our taste, perhaps the fault lies not with the literature. As A. A. Milne said of The Wind in the Willows, “You don’t judge it; it judges you.”

The further removed a text from our own experience, the greater the necessity of cultivating a taste for it — just as we accustom ourselves by degrees to spicy chillies or sour kimchi. Again, we see the importance of time, as my professor advised: slowly, slowly.

Another question then followed the first: “Might we not sometimes criticise Homer?”

My first instinct was to reply, “No,” and leave it at that. Reading great books is not about slavish devotion to a set canon, however; that only moves the question back a level: “Might we not criticise the canon?”

Instead, I asked my friend to imagine a lecture from his own department: “Your professor says something that makes no sense to you. Do you assume he made a mistake, or do you first consider that perhaps you haven’t understood?”

So it should be with great literary works. They are our teachers, and the subject is the human soul. What seem to be errors or shortcomings in such works will offer up further revelations, if we allow the possibility that we have yet to comprehend.

I witnessed this humble reading at work in class with my first great teacher of great books. In high school, if my class encountered an oddity in the Iliad or Odyssey, we would explain it with a shrug: “That’s just how they wrote back then,” ran the consensus, as one might excuse an incoherent remark or outlandish wardrobe choice with, “That’s just how grandma does it” — a casual dismissal of the aged.

My professor, however, would pause and repeat the text, lingering over it. “I wonder,” he mused, “why Homer wrote that?”

Attributing intention to every detail of this detailed, intentional work, rather than presuming inattention or carelessness, we gained access to new layers of meaning. Why did Homer describe Hector here with the epitaph reserved for Achilles? Before we conclude that the poet had run out of ideas, or slipped up, or only used epitaphs to pad the meter rather than for any literary purpose, first contemplate whether this text — preserved and studied for longer than any of us can dream of being remembered — might be trying to tell us something. Why link Hector with his great enemy in this particular moment? Has he perhaps done something to earn it?

Once we begin to look to the text for explanations, recognizing these moments of confusion and disorientation as flags planted to draw our attention, we will begin to find answers.