Many of us Baby Boomers remember reading "The Call of the Wild" in high school, right? How do you remember it? As an exciting adventure? Or a boy's book? Definitely a dog story.

Well, it's all of those and much more. I just finished re-reading it for a Great Books group that had it scheduled for discussion, but I really didn't expect very much. Instead, I found myself overwhelmed and moved by a great book. "The Call of the Wild" is a book of depth and lyrical beauty which can be enjoyed by a 50ish reader on levels not usually available to a teenager.

Jack London's most famous work is a fable in which Buck, the canine hero, is ripped from civilization and forced to live by new rules... the law of fang and club. So London asks, What are we when the protections of civilization are no longer available and one's only concern is survival? What is Buck (all of us, by extension) willing to do to survive? Members of my book group were reminded of memoirs by Holocaust survivors who faced that dilemma in the camps many years after the publication of "The Call of the Wild".

And how much control do we really have over our destinies? Buck's life is changed by circumstances that seemingly have nothing to do with him (the Klondike Gold Rush created an illegal traffic in exceptional dogs who could do the work demanded in the Yukon and for which horses were useless)...

"Thus, as a token of what a puppet thing life is...he came because men had found a yellow metal in the North."

Buck is forced to survive in a primitive world but in the course of discovering his ancestral instincts, he also experiences life as never before...

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move."

How many teenagers can relate to that? What beautiful, lyrical writing! And it was with this love of life that Jack London lived and wrote.

Many of us book-loving Boomers have found that returning to a text we read many years ago can be a totally new experience. We are no longer that adolescent who read a vivid story about a dog and the Klondike Gold Rush. The many years that have passed have made us deeper, more interesting people and we can take so much more from a great work of art. I recently heard a writer say, "Perhaps it is not so much that we read the book, but that the book reads us, the people we have become."

So, when your children (or grandchildren) tell you they are reading "The Call of the Wild" in school, or some other old chestnut that you fondly recall but never intend to re-read, pick it up and read a few pages. You will certainly be rewarded by the opportunity to share something wonderful with a young person, but who knows, you may be surprised by how the book (and you) have grown with the passage of time.