Last Update: 6/18/07
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I must begin keeping green the memory of the cities,
the ferns and tiger plants in the boxes under the lights in the dining rooms and the grills….
In the bookshops the clerks, wanting to know if they can help, but you say no you are just looking around,
and the terrible excitement of so great a concentration of books in one place under one roof,
each book wanting the completion of being read.
All conservatism is based upon the idea that
if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not.
If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change. If you
leave a white post alone, it will soon be a black post. If you particularly
want it to be white, you must always be painting it again; that is you
must always be having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white
post, you must have a new white post. But this, which is true even of inanimate
things, is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human beings.
When we think of the virtues of publishers there is one we are likely to place high on
the list: discrimination. Obviously not every book published will or need be a masterpiece....
But whatever is published can, should, and it now seems may have to be, good in its own genre.
Unless we are prepared to ... suffocate under the weight of millions of unwanted and unsalable books
ground out yearly, we shall have to find ways to curtail the industry's overproduction.
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New;
but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear is
that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
Written words..seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it might be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not to address the wrong.
As long ago as I can remember, technology lovers have been announcing
the end of the codex book. First--I think--microfilm was going to replace it....
Book lovers protested that no one would want to take a microfilm reader to bed.
No one did.... And when all American dissertations were put on film by University Microfilms...,
there could be no further cause for publishing dissertations, and university presses could ignore them,
praise be, except for the very few.
Microfilm, joined to Xerox printing, took over one kind of publishing but had little or no effect
on a more central concern of publishers--new books, popular and scholarly.
Film may disappear before the book does.
Read every day something no one else is reading.
Think every day something no one else is thinking. Do every day something no one else would be silly
enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
It has often occurred to me that too few children are seen in bookshops.
In bad weather, when I couldn't go outside, I used to sit on those stairs and
extract a "Geographic" as carefully as if I were playing pick-up sticks,
so I wouldn't bring the whole attic down on myself. Among the glossy pages of the magazines, I met up with
pygmies and Balinese dancers, cities built on water, mountain peaks yet unscaled,
desert people and people who lived amid eternal snow, dragonflies and anacondas.
On those attic stairs in an old house that seemed always on the verge of collapse,
I began to sense huge possibilities.
[6/18/07] As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation,
just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be,
the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book participates in the creation of you,
your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.
My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what?
But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider
an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all of the characters.
Oh but I identified!
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
She will not want new fashions, nor expensive diversions, or variety of company,
if she can be amused by an author.
Once in a very rare year, there comes along a new book and I say,
as I am reading, as my eyes eat words without a blink, as my heart and mind grab each other,
This, I say, is The Best Book. I know before the first page is gone. I sense it building.
And as the book finishes, I go as slow as I can. I don't want to leave the book's world.
The flesh, alas, is wearied; and I have read all the books.
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books,
create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries
into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases
can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
...I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring
to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears....
books have meant so much more in my education than in that of others.
The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops,
picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you,
skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought,
or because it is part of a trend or a movement.
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are
forty or fifty-and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.
A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrop. Reading has a history. It was not always and everywhere the same.
We may think of it as a straightforward process of lifting information from a page;
but if we considered it further, we would agree that information must be sifted, sorted, and interpreted...
As our ancestors lived in different mental worlds, they must have read differently,
and the history of reading could be as complex as the history of thinking.
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