Tag Archives: reading

The house had to be quiet.

poetry, summer, , , , ,
T.F. Simon

Oh, how I love this aspect of the experience of summer as I have known it,
in my youth and now in my older years… 

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

-Wallace Stevens

Whole types of thought are impossible.

culture, quotes, , , , ,

The following excerpt is from an interview with poet Dana Gioia that was, but is no longer, on the Fact and Arts website of the BBC, I think more than ten years ago. Gioia has been Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poet Laureate of California. I’m sorry I can no longer link to the whole interview, but I think this small part is worthwhile.

F&A: You’ve said, “I don’t think Americans are dumber than they were 25 years ago, but our culture is.” Tell me how our culture is dumber.

Dana Gioia: Our culture is vastly dumber. I’ll give you an example. If you’ve got a copy of The New Yorker from 30 years ago, it would have about six times as many words as it does now. The same thing for The Atlantic. With most of our newspapers, if somebody wrote a review of a book, it was thousands of words long. People would actually think through things in print in a serious way. Even if you didn’t like The New Yorker, you had to take it seriously.

Nowadays we have the USA Today version of culture. People have been trained by TV and the Internet to want an image and a headline. The notion of careful sequential thought contextualized historically, ideologically is a vanishing skill. When we collectively lose our ability to have sustained linear attention, whole types of thought are impossible. I see this in my students who are bright kids but have read very little.

Women reading and laughing.

books, friends, ,

As soon as I got inspired by the 5×5 reading plan that I mentioned in my last post, I collected most of the books from around my two-storey house that were in stacks and not on shelves, and spread them on the dining table. I started to arrange the appropriate ones according to topics, and the two categories of “Women” and “Church History/Saints” were quite overloaded.

As I perused this scene, I recalled that in the last few years, many books I’ve read have been by audio — and few of those on the table were of the sort that are easy for me to attend to, by the “ear gate.” I wondered, “When will I sit and read all these books, most of which are too big to read in bed at night?” Quickly my mood also went into the Overloaded/Overwhelmed category and I climbed the stairs to bed.

Soon I decided the 5×5 plan is not for me. Clearly it wasn’t designed for me, but for young homeschooling mothers who need to read more books and look less at screens, who need to develop the habit of lifelong learning. I picked out several — not 25 — that I want to try extra hard to read in print this year.

Hmm… I almost forgot these I want to read after that first bunch. Altogether I see that they add up to about half of 25:

My two long-time friends Cori and Di came to visit for a couple of days last week, and because I planned for us to eat at the smaller table near the kitchen, I left my book mess as it was. They each brought dozens of titles for show-and-tell, give-or-lend. The warmth of the wood stove drew us to the nearby love seats, where we talked about all the volumes they brought out of their bags, a broad variety of genres and titles that would make the Scholé Sisters proud.

Many of Di’s offerings had Cori in mind, because she and her husband had lost their extensive library when their house burned down, in one of the many northern California fires of recent years. The only books I kept from this trading session were small paperbacks that I can easily read lying in bed, while my mind is turning off just before conking out for the night.

Our gathering was a festival, and a marathon
of talking and thinking, laughing and even weeping.
Now, it’s time for the reading to begin.

Isaac Lazarus Israëls

Joan was a perfectly practical person.

history, quotes, women, , , , ,

It’s been a long time since I read Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. When I came across the quote below it made me want to read it again — though I can see the good in reading a different biographer.

The Scholé Sisters presented again their idea of the 5×5 reading plan. You pick five topics or genres of books and try to read five books in each category. Personally, I won’t be officially joining the group challenge, but this organizing of my stacks does sound appealing. Already “Women” was one of the categories that immediately came to my mind, and a book about Joan of Arc would fit very nicely. I wish Chesterton had written one; this is from his book Orthodoxy:

“Joan of Arc was not stuck at the Cross Roads either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I come to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche — all that was even tolerable in either of them.

“I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy: the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that, and with this great addition: that she endured poverty while she admired it, whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.

“And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that and, again, with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche for all we know was afraid of a cow.

“Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.”

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy