“Reading at Walden” by Henry David Thoreau

This is a new look at poetry.

“The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.”

“Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not to be cheated in trade…”

“…[T]his only is reading… what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.”

“I believe that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature…”

“Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate adn dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.”

Ouch. I think he’s talking to me.

“The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.”

Excuse me while I go recover. He’s clearly talking to me.

“…our reading, our conversation, and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.”

Yikes. Quite a slam.

“…I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my own townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.”

Here we have the first, “It’s not that Johnny can’t read it’s that he doesn’t” statement, as far as I know.

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.”

Whoa. Hope he’s not talking to me. That’s quite a slam.

“Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics. …to keep up and add to his English …. is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for this purpose.”

Whew. No, he’s not talking to me. Can you imagine? Only the papers, or the net, for keeping up and adding to your English.

“Of King’s Treasuries” by John Ruskin

“There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time.”

The good book of the hour… is simply useful or pleasant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for you. Very useful often, telling you what you need to know; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend’s present talk would be. These bright accounts of travels; good-humored and witty discussions of questions; lively or pathetic storytelling in the form of novel; firm fact-tellin by the real agents concerned in the events of passing history – all thse books of the hour, multiplying among us as education beocomes more general, are a peculiar possession of the present age.

Ah, I think they were not unique to Ruskin’s age, but perhaps began in Ruskin’s age. But think, is this “good book” described by Ruskin much like the internet of today. Think about it. That book versus literature that NEA was talking about is this one.

“We ought to be entirely thankful for them [the good book of the hour], and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no good use of them.”

“But we make the worst possible use if we allow them [books of the hour] to usurp the place of true books; for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print.”

“A book is not a talked thing, but a written thing, and written not with a view of mere communication, but of permanence. The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once; if he could, he would – the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you could, you would. You write instead; this is a mere conveyance of voice.”

Wow! He’s introducing the telephone, talking to your friend in India. And the internet “printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once.” But they can now! Amazing.

“…[A] book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful. So far as he knows, no one has yet said it…. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing or group of things, manifest to him – this the piece of true knowdege or sight which his share of sunshine and earth permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down forever….”

That is a high definition of “book.” I think it is what NEA calls literature.

“…whatever bit of a wiseman’s work is honestly and benevolently done, that bit is his book, or his piece of art. It is mixed always with evil fragments – ill-done, redundant, affected work. But if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true bits and those are the book.”

“On Reading Old Books” by William Hazlitt

“When I take up a work that I have read before (the oftener the better) I know what I have to expect. The satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated.”

Whoo hoo! Someone else besides myself finds joy and relaxation in re-reading old friends.

See my post here on the books I have read more than 10 times.

“Books” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom.”

“…[S]ome charitable soul, …would do a right act in naming those [books] which have been bridges or ships to carry him through the dark morasses and barren oceans…. private readers, reading purel for the love of the book, would serve us best by leaving each the shortest note of what he found. There are books [worth reading]; and it is practicable to read them because there are so few.”

“College education is the reading of certain books which the common-sense of all scholars agrees will represent the science already accumulated.”

“As whole nations have derived their culture form a single book- as the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large parts of Europe…. [P]erhaps, the human mind would be a gainer, if all the secondary writers were lost- say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon…”

“Nature is our friend in this matter. Nature is always clarifying her water and her wine…. There is always a selection in writers, and then a selection from the selections…. Time, who sits and weighs, and then years hence, out of a million of pages reprints one…”

Ah. So Emerson is saying that any book reprinted is chosen as a better book than one not reprinted. I think this applies to his time.

“In contemporaries it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety and fame.”

And this is why I think the reprint only refers to his time. In our time, those books which are reprinted are the best of the millions printed each year. But they are not necessarily the best of all the books of the decade or the century. Certainly they are not the best books of the millenium.

Would you put Terry Pratchett and Stephen King up against the other great authors of the millenium and say, “They too are worthy.” I certainly wouldn’t. And notice that I didn’t even include MY favorite authors. I don’t think they’ll be worthy either. I simply think they are the best out of the decade in which I am reading them.

It might be interesting to know that out of all the books I read in the two years of my high school, the only ones which I still own/remember reading are Here I Stand: A Biography of Martin Luther, Nevil Shute’s An Old Captivity, and Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart. I read many other Mary Stewart and Nevil Shute books and I vaguely remember that I thought they were good. But these two were engraved on my high school soul and meant a lot to me. When I recently came upon a hardback copy Touch Not the Cat at a library booksale I bought it.

Not every well written book is a lifetime keeper.

“The Commerce of Reading” by Michel de Montaigne

“To divert myself from a troublesome fancy ’tis but to run to my books…”

“it delivers me at all hours from company that I dislike”

“I never travel without books, either in peace or war; and yet I sometimes pass over several days, and sometimes months, wihtout looking at them…” (Okay, not reading at all I don’t do, but I do gather books and not read them immediately.)

Reading in Bed ed. by Steven Gilbar is one of the books I bought to read last year but haven’t read. So, I sat down with popcorn and water to read, refreshing my soul with winsome words and personal thoughts writ well in someone else’s essay. There were some thoughts I’d never had before as well. I copied them here if I thought they might be meaningful. I sometimes made a comment.

They were excellent and I have enjoyed reading the selections chosen by Mr. Gilbar. But it’s too meaty a work to breeze through in an evening. I will save the whole works and add to them tomorrow or the next day.

According to the survey firm NDP Group — which tracked the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s — this country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent.

This is from a 2001 article in the Washington Post.

I read less printed material than I used to. But I don’t read any less. I just read the internet more.

The NEA said that less people are reading it, so what do they say it is?

The survey asked respondents if, during the previous twelve months, they had read any novels, short stories, plays, or poetry in their leisure time (not for work or school).

But really what they asked, according to one of the questions, is “read any book” or “read literature.” I don’t read a lot of literature (although I read lots of novels). So would I have brought it down? No. I teach literature so I also read literature.

It [the survey information] comes at a critical time, when electronic media are becoming the dominant influence in young people’s worlds. Reading at Risk adds new and distressing information to the discussion…. If one believes that active and engaged readers lead richer intellectual lives than non-readers and that a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy, the decline of literary reading calls for serious action.

They offer the information that the survey “comes at a …time when electronic media are becoming the dominant influence in young people’s worlds.” But they don’t survey how much reading the person is doing on the net? What’s up with that?

According to Pew, 40 million Americans get their info on news and science on the net. So can we add them in as readers? I know there are pod casts, but most of the internet is still reading.