Letter 2: On discursiveness in reading
Judging by what you write me, and by what I hear, I am forming a good opinion regarding your future. You do not run hither and thither and distract yourself by changing your abode; for such restlessness is the sign of a disordered spirit. The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company.
Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere.
Running about and reinventing my interests whenever the wind changed was a hallmark of my youth, and the urge to be both flighty and shallow will still rear its ugly head to this day.
Back in college, I developed a grand scheme to make myself educated, and most of it revolved around an ever-growing list of essential texts I needed to read. This would somehow enlighten me, and then all of the artsy girls I admired from afar would start paying attention to me for a change.
I got all caught up in the “Great Books” movement, in and of itself a noble enterprise, but, like so many others, I abused it terribly. It came to the point where simply owning the book was enough, and then displaying it proudly on my shelf. The foolish list grew to something like two hundred volumes, and it became nothing but an albatross around my neck.
I would criticize my girlfriend for her obsession with directing her education toward professional success, telling her that learning should be an end in itself. Who was I to throw stones? I wasn’t interested in learning either, only in appearing to be learned. At least she ended up getting rich, as I always knew she would.
More and more books, glanced at causally? Nonsense. A few books, the best ones, to be digested completely? There’s the trick. I do not need to prove myself to anyone, only to try to become a kind and decent man.
As I look back now, I find that there were really only four books that changed my life so fundamentally that I would call them essential for me. Your own list will vary, of course, as it rightly should.
Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations.
If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your Divine part pure, as if you should be bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activity according to Nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which you utter, you will live happy.
And there is no man who is able to prevent this.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy.
By Love are peoples too kept bound together by a treaty which they may not break. Love binds with pure affection the sacred tie of wedlock, and speaks its bidding to all trusty friends.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées.
All of humanity's problems stem from a man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
James Joyce, Dubliners.
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the Universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
I am coming to the point where I no longer even need the printed texts, as I have read them so often that they are imprinted on my soul. I quote them to myself in my dreams.
I should stop saying it so often, since it defeats the very purpose of the phrase, but less is more.
Written in 2/2012
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