Words from the Wise and Otherwise, Part One
Dear Reader,
One of the odd things about having made a reading comprehension app, particularly one focused on quotes, is that you find yourself with quite the collection of thoughts on reading. I haven’t reflected on any of them in a near decade, but I thought that from time to time I might share some of them here.
(A downside of that project is that I acquired absolute nerd volumes like Quotology, which is both an interesting book and a dry, fairly useless one. Unless you really desire boredom, I suggest letting my review stand without inquiring yourself.)
I should mention that I don’t necessarily agree with these assembled quotations on reading. I present them as the considerations of others that you may treat as you might a stream of Tweets or college-freshman-at-Thanksgiving-dinner pontifications. And so, without further preliminaries:
People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilised mankind. Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living.
Arnold Bennet. Literary Taste: How to Form It. 1914.
He’s a fun one, right? Definitely one I’d invite to the party.
This next one is slightly cheating, as it’s almost more about the writing craft than reading, but I think you can infer how it might influence one’s reading as well:
Certain authors, speaking of their works, say, “My book,” “My commentary,” “My history,” etc. They resemble middle-class people who have a house of their own, and always have “My house” on their tongue. They would do better to say, “Our book,” “Our commentary,” “Our history,” etc., because there is in them usually more of other people’s than their own.
Blaise Pascal. Pensées. 1662.
If you’re wondering what reading is like when the work is more someone else’s than the author’s own, take another tour of “Reading in Memoriam.” The main text is mostly not mine: it’s Walton’s. Yes, I’m sharing it with you and framing it in certain ways, but I did not invent the philosophical territory.
Echoes of this next quotation abound in various intellectual and nonintellectual conversation; and, aside from its very 1911 usage of the masculine and defeasible generalization nature, I still like it:
In the quest for culture, in the desire to improve your mind by close association with the great writers of all literature, do not be discouraged because you may have had little school training. The schools and the universities have produced only a few of the immortal writers. The men who speak to you with the greatest force from the books into which they put their living souls have been mainly men of simple life.
George Hamlin Fitch. Comfort Found in Good Old Books. 1911.
I’ll end today’s selected quotes with this one, which isn’t about reading at all and yet thoroughly is, perhaps more than anything I’ve shared in any newsletter thus far:
The sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding the things which he did not expect, but which he might have expected to expect. I mean the things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have been noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted.
G.K. Chesterton. What I Saw in America. Published 1922.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh