The library

LISTEN. Rained all weekend, so I didn't get to do the bikeride the doc finally greenlighted.

But I did have fun watching the Cards solidify the second wildcard, and the first installment of Ken Burns' latest trip down history lane. (And okay, I confess: the Titans' OT win in Seattle.) 

And reading.

Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card, Arthur used to sing to our girls. 

(Older Daughter reminded me yesterday of another studious friend of our childhood, or rather her childhood and my lucky dadhood: Morris. Reminded me in turn of Wallace and Gromit and Frog and Toad...)

We're going to the Walker Library in CoPhi today and tomorrow, to prepare for October reports. After hearing from the librarians and reps of the writing center, I hope we'll have time to wander into the stacks. That was one of the more important components of my own undergraduate education at Mizzou, just roaming Ellis Library and pulling this or that volume from its random obscurity to see if it had anything to teach me. Kids these days don't do that or know why they'd want to. They don't know what they're missing.

Michel de Montaigne had a lovely personal library, up there in his tower. He knew that direct personal experience and vicarious experience via reading inform the best writing. He knew books, no less than life itself, had much to teach him. "Que sais-je?" ["What do I know?"] He knew quite a lot, actually, for a skeptic. PhilD

 

Maria Popova is a fan, of his, of books and libraries and reading generally, and of Sarah Bakewell's terrific introduction to Montaigne in How to Live.

What separated Montaigne from other memoirists of his day was that he didn’t write about his daily deeds and his achievements — rather, he contemplated the meaning of life from all possible angles, and in the process popularized the essay as a form. He began writing fairly late in life, when he was thirty-nine, and continued for twenty years, halted only by his death in 1592. The 107 essays he penned range across the entire spectrum of human concerns — from the grandly existential, like death and the art of living, to the universally human, like fear and friendship and sadness and love, to the seemingly trivial, like the customs of dress. Above all, however, he was interested in the simple yet infinitely profound question of how to live — which, Bakewell is careful to point out, is quite different from the ethical prescription of how we should live. She writes:

Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did. He wanted to know how to live a good life — meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one. This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present. He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did. And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself.

Like Thoreau, he wrote of himself not so much from egocentrism but simply because first-person acquaintance is where we all must begin. "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."

But readers get to know others much better, and are not restricted to the living. Or rather, readers live in the company of men and women of all ages. Writers live in the future too, or can at least imagine being read by future readers. 

For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth... Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate — with the best teachers — the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Carl Sagan

But as Mr. Twain pointed out, a person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't. And a citizenry that won't read, like those people on the bus in Mount Airy who insulted Ted Koppel yesterday on Sunday Morning, can't keep a democratic republic. 

See you at the library.

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