“Books you have read share a deep ontological similarity with books you haven’t: both can be profoundly fuzzy. At times books you haven’t read shine more brightly than those you have, and often reading part of a book will shape your mind more decisively than reading all of it; there is no inherent epistemic superiority to having read a book or not having read it.”
-John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds
After my first and second postings of quotes from this book that I still haven’t read, I found this declaration from the author quite generous, even if he does use both ontological and epistemic in one paragraph. In 2016 and 2019, which seems ages ago now, several of my readers said that they had been prompted to order the book, or at least put it on their TBR list. Did any of you pursue it further?
I know very well by experience what he is talking about here, how impactful books can be just by their presence on my shelves. I read the intro to The Marvelous Clouds twice already, and it evidently did not shine brightly enough in my mind for me to remember anything of it, or to continue.
I found the quote above on Goodreads, where I do quite a bit of mining from time to time. Reading a few quotes from a book is certainly a very small part, but these bits can provide a lot to chew on. Here is another thought provoking passage from the book that I also got by cheating:
“Schopenhauer remarked that buying books would be better if you could also buy the time to read them. Books are different from natural objects in that they can overwhelm us in a way that nature’s abundance rarely does. There has always been too much to know; the universe is thoroughly baffling. When we walk into a bookstore, it is easy to feel oppressed by the amount of knowledge on tap. Why don’t
we have the same feeling in a forest, at the beach, in a big city, or simply in breathing? There is more going on in our body every second than we will ever understand, and yet we rarely feel bothered by our inability to know it all. Books, however, are designed to make demands on our attention and time: they hail us in ways that nature rarely does. A thing is what Heidegger calls zunichtsgedrängt, relaxed and bothered about nothing. A plant or stone is as self-sufficient as the Aristotelian god or Heidegger’s slacker things, but books are needy. They cry out for readers as devils hunger for souls.”
It could be that somewhere else in the book Peters mentions the different kinds of knowledge. When you are walking in a forest you are getting to know the trees and the air in a non-intellectual way, and that makes all the difference. It would be a shame to know rocks and trees and clouds only by reading about them.
A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. ~Jeremy Collier
I had intended to think and write more about all of this, but just now ditched that plan and am headed out to see the clouds with my own eyes. It might happen that while I am gazing up there, the contents of the cloud will empty on my bare head and give me an even more intimate knowledge of its wet self. I’d rather not get experiential knowledge of the rocks along the path by tripping on them, but you never know what might happen when you get your nose out of a book.
Just now I was reminded that this is the day, 59 years ago, that C.S. Lewis died, and I want to share a quote from him to mark the anniversary. At least two other famous people died that day, Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy, but I don’t find those men nearly as wise or quotable. So here is one of the first quotes that I ever shared on my site, from one of my favorite authors . What he says is also something I think about more all the time, as I myself see more clearly some of those fundamental realities of the sort I think he is talking about — and wish I could articulate them to the younger generations!
No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light. The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.
But though spiritual sight must be part of what Christ is talking about, twice He uses the words, “whole body full of light.” Pause and think on that! What can it even mean? We can theorize about it, but Christ, Who called Himself “The light of the world,” is not an idea or a theory or a spiritual practice. He will have to teach us what this means by experience. Our yearly Lenten effort is our effort to return again and again to that lifelong process. And He has many ways of opening our eyes and bringing us to Himself, customized to each person’s unique situation.
is losing some of his youthful goodness. If our lives are like mirrors that are meant to reflect the glory of our Creator, his mirror is not doing that very well; it has gotten dirty by slow degrees and not even his parents understand why their son does not bring them joy as he used to.
“It was indeed a lovely being, and Curdie thought how happy it must 
after an indefinable time out of time, which may be less than a minute, our boy comes through the storm with clarity, and proceeds with his repentance.
Gladsome Lights 