Fire and Knowledge

One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I’m absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth-century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.

—David McCullough

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky.
My pile of books
Are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard
By the time I read them.

—Arnold Lobel

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

—Samuel Johnson

In the first place, the majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of the unliterary man is that he considers “I’ve read it already” to be a conclusive argument against reading a work…. Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.

Secondly, the majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a least resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude…. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

Thirdly, the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become not what they were not before. But there is no sign of anything like this among the other sort of readers. When they have finished the story or the novel, nothing much, or nothing at all, seems to have happened to them.

—C.S. Lewis, “The Few and the Many: Good Readers and Bad,” in The Christian Imagination edited by Leland Ryken (2002), p. 225

In Praise of Reading Aloud

Many of us were read to as children, of course, and may now read to our own. But how often these days do adults read to one another? We are too busy, too wary perhaps of a pastime so decidedly of the past. But reading aloud lets you hear each others’ voices in a new way, and value afresh the power of the English language. At its best, it can conjure an enchanted circle.

The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used. Atrophy of the mental muscles is the penalty that we pay for not taking mental exercise. And this is a terrible penalty, for there is evidence that atrophy of the mind is a mortal disease. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that so many busy people die so soon after retirement. They were kept alive by the demands of their work upon their minds; they were propped up artificially, as it were, by external forces. But as soon as those demands cease, having no resources within themselves in the way of mental activity, they cease thinking altogether, and expire.

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And when we cease to grow, we begin to die.

Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing.

—Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book (Revised Edition, 1972), pp. 345-6

God not only inspired the content of the Bible but also it’s form. Poetry, prose, narrative, story—God approves and delights in the styles he chose. God did not leave us with inspired drawings, paintings, or pottery. He warns us against the image—he points us towards the Word.

Just when you begin to feel there is no hope for the blogosphere, Joe Carter comes to the rescue with his post on Media, Blogs, and the Rise of the Non-Event. It brings me joy to know that Joe Carter is not only blogging but thinking. WorldMag made a good choice.

Staying abreast of relevant current events is no longer sufficient; to be truly informed of what is going on in the world, one is also expected to have the freshest information on breaking non-events. If you are a blogger you can add to this the expectation to have an opinion/denunciation/apology posted in case someone might be unsure of where you stand on a matter of complete unimportance. Several bloggers feigned surprise and disappointment that Christian bloggers (like me) did not denounce Robertson’s remark. In the age of instant media, it is not enough to simply be our brother’s keeper. Now, we must also be their press agent.

As a Christian, though, I’m expected to take an eternal perspective, viewing events not just in their historical but in their eschatological context. But I can’t do that while focusing on the churning events in the last 24 hours and furiously scripting my reactions to insignificant minutiae.

[HT: Justin]