"Not to have read War and Peace and La Cousine Bette and La Chartreuse de Parme is not to be educated; but so is not to have a glimmer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics." C. P. Snow
I do have some glimmer of the Second Law, but I have never read War and Peace, or La Cousine Bette, or La Chartreuse de Parme, so I suppose that puts me in the Not Educated category. Given that I'm not really a huge fan of Tolstoy (I did like Resurrection, but it's very atypical Tolstoy), and that The Red and the Black largely disappointed me, I am unrepentantly uneducated. I hadn't even heard of La Cousine Bette; it turns out it's by Balzac, and I've only read short stories by Balzac (many of which are very, very good -- I especially recommend "The Atheist's Mass" and "The Succubus"). But having gone nearly half my life without even having heard of it, or at least in no way that ever stuck in my head, I doubt it will be leaping out at me from the shelf anytime soon.
Snow's Two Cultures idea, incidentally, is one of those things that take on a life of their own until they become obviously stupid. It made a certain amount of sense in Snow's own context; "The Two Cultures" idea grew out of Snow's criticisms of British education and Cambridge in particular. He did not propose it as a general thesis, and, in fact, in similar works from the same period contrasted the humanities-heavy educational approach of Britain with (for instance) German approaches to higher education. This gets expanded and generalized over time, and not in a very coherent way, since Snow is vague and arguably equivocal in how he uses key terms. But as a general thesis, assumed to be coherent, it always gets taken, and the result is simplistic nonsense uncritically parading as sociological insight.
