Against Censorship

From John Milton's Areopagitica.

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon`s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God`s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you

Solitude
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all;
There are none to decline your nectar'd wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

In a universe more and more abstract . . .

Quoted in Clive James' Cultural Amnesia.

In a universe more and more abstract, it is up to us to make sure that the human voice does not cease to be heard. - Witold Gombrowicz, Journal

A Klondike wilderness

This passage from David Perkins' The Eureka Effect made me think of the challenge facing parents in finding the books that they most their children to read and which their children are most likely to enjoy. Perkins is speaking of breakthrough thinking and its constituent components.

The first challenge of finding anything worthwhile in a Klondike wilderness is that there is just so much of it! Our conventional image of a breakthrough involves leaps of the imagination, a matter to be looked at more closely a little later. However, all too often there is no natural path even for imagination to follow. One just has to rove through the wilderness to see what turns up. And, if the wilderness is big, one has to rove with reasonable efficiency.

25-35,000 new children's titles are published each year in the US alone.

"You never say farewell to courage."

From James C. Humes' Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln.

In August 1964, Sir Winston Churchill lay dying in London's King Edward VII Hospital. General Eisenhower, who had just attended the twentieth anniversary of the D day invasion in France, visited his bedside. The venerable statesman, then in his ninetieth year, did not speak when Eisenhower entered his suite but instead reached out a frail pink hand to clasp Eisenhower's. The two hands joined on the bedside table.

No words were spoken - just two partners sharing silently the memories of their struggles in war and peace for the principles they both cherished. Ten minutes passed in silence. Two nations, two leaders, and two friends. Then Churchill unclasped his right hand and slowly moved it in a "vee for victory" sign!

Eisenhower, his eyes moist, left the room and told an aide:

I just said good-bye to Winston, but you never say farewell to courage.

Richard Henry Dana's nostalgia

I have nearly finished Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. An interesting story that it took a long time to getting around to read. Not a critical text in a reading life but one that has been worth the while. An unexpected pleasure has been the addendum to the original publication. Nearly a quarter of a century after his time as a laboring sailor on the coast of California, Dana returns as a prosperous, established, mature citizen to revisit the scenes of his youth. It is an interesting addendum on many levels; for the history of California, for social commentary, etc.

Not least is it interesting for Dana's marked nostalgia for a time and experience that while seminal to his development was also demonstrably challenging, hard and frequently unpleasant. The whole addendum is enfused with this sort of conflicted nostalgia as captured in this passage.

But evening is drawing on, and our boat sails to-night. So, refusing a horse or carriage, I walk down, not unwilling to be a little early, that I may pace up and down the beach, looking off to the islands and the points, and watching the roaring, tumbling billows. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear,--the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates. Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing from the vulgar, wearisome toil of uninteresting, forced manual labour.

"I wish you had read more books."

From Peter Martin's A Life of James Boswell. James Boswell has confessed to Samuel Johnson that "I don't talk much from books; but there is a very good reason for it. I have not read many books." To which Johnson replies, foreshadowing the plea of many reading researchers today that the more one reads the more one knows and the more one knows, the more one reads:

I wish you had read more books. The foundation must be laid by reading. General principles must be had from books. But they must be brought to the test of real life. In conversation, you never get a system.

Boswell was well aware of his deficiencies in systematic learning.

There is an imperfection, a superficialness, in all my notions. I understand nothing clearly, nothing to the bottom. I pick up fragments, but never have in my memory a mass of any size. I wonder really if it be possible for me to acquire any one part of knowledge fully.

For all that this was a serious issue for him, Boswell also recognized his true talent as a catalyst.

I am a quick fire, a taper, which can light up a great and lasting fire though itself is soon extinguished.

For all that self-knowledge, Boswell was ever a slave to his appetites and distractions. Wine, women and song were ever present hurdles to the course of action he knew he ought to pursue. Samuel Johnson decided to assist Boswell. "He is to buy for me a chest of books of his choosing off stalls, and I am to read more and drink less. That was his counsel."

Johnson did buy those books and had them delivered to Boswell but apparently they sat untended on shelves. There is also no evidence that Boswell ever drank less.

I wonder just which books those might have been to be so estimated by the author of the first English dictionary?