“Everything I ever really needed to know I learned in kindergarten,” a popular writer once claimed.

Not me.

Oh, I certainly learned some hard lessons back then, playing in the sandbox. But for me, slow learner that I am, the most important lessons came much later in life. In high school.

Most of these came from my high school English teacher, Rose Barth. Mrs. Barth (wasn’t it wonderful when married women were called “Mrs.?” So much more respect they had then) was not only a brilliant teacher of literature, she was tough. “Break it up,” she snapped one day to me and my high school sweetheart, Scott, as we stood by our lockers entwined in teenaged embrace. We obeyed. No one dared disobey Mrs. Barth.

Among other virtues, Rose Barth and her colleagues in the English Department made us, even the most sullen and resistant, read great books—scads of them. Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Faulkner, Proust, Steinbeck, even Homer. (We hated Homer.) Serious consequences befell any student caught with a single copy of Cliff’s Notes.

To this day I possess the mimeographed list headed BOOKS THAT STUDENTS SHOULD HAVE READ that was distributed to the college-bound students. It’s three pages in small type of titles, and I hope to have read them all by the time I reach eighty years of age. You see, at that time the school still operated on the idea that the teachers knew more than the students. This mode of operation changed only a few years later, when the administration began to allow students to design their own curricula so that the material would be relevant. Ah, the Seventies.

Here’s one simple but hugely valuable lesson Mrs. Barth imparted: Always be reading something good. Always be chipping away at a good piece of literature, even if you have time only for a couple of pages a day.

Fast-forward to adulthood. As we all know, life in urban America in the twenty-first century can be overwhelming. We seek simplicity (though Martha Stewart’s idea of simplicity is too rich for my blood—have you ever fixed any of the recipes she calls “simple?”) but we’re drowning in bill-paying, filling out claim forms, purchasing airline tickets online, answering e-mail, taking our automobiles for emission tests, standing in line to purchase car stickers, calling 800 numbers and navigating phone menus—collectively what columnist Florence King refers to as the “crap” of life. This is addition to working, raising children, eating and sleeping and making love and fixing your hair.

Staying civilized in this culture requires some effort, and the small effort of dipping in to a beautifully-composed block of text by a time-tested author is one way to rise above the (pardon me) crap. It clears the mind and then fills it with something of great worth.

I haven’t the time, you say. But almost anyone can find, say, six minutes a day for a pursuit that keeps you human. Six minutes’ worth of a Willa Cather novel reminds me of who I am. And if you’re seriously short on time, all the more important that when you read, you read something good and enduring.

Here’s the ultimate secret for the time-pressed: Poetry. Lots of poems are short and still pack a wallop. It’s easy: buy a volume of best-loved poems and keep it by your bed. Here’s a Wordsworth poem that I keep with my stack of bills to be paid so I’m forced to encounter it repeatedly:

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Too serious for you? Okay. We can lighten up. Here’s another, by Leigh Hunt:

Jenny kissed me!

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Marie T. (Terry) Sullivan is culture and arts editor for The Chicago Daily Observer and a member of its editorial board.