Philosophy Phriday -- Thoreau on Reading

My juniors, much as they may sometimes wish otherwise, are reading Walden right now. They complain about how difficult it is, but for all that the discussions in class are pretty good. Today, one section read the chapter called "Books," and I want to share some of Thoreau's ideas from that chapter:

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

This is one of my favorites. Some books, of course, weren't written that deliberately, but for ones that are, they deserve this sort of attention, which commonly isn't given to them. We pass our eyes over the page and call it reading--we don't wrestle with the words; we don't live with them. In fact,

The great works of the poets ... have only been read as the multitudes read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

We're largely an aliterate society--able to read but choosing not to read more than is absolutely necessary, and largely avoiding the most serious and intellectually demanding works. As Thoreau says

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar, but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;--and yet ... our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level.

To that, I would add that it's not just "the wisest men of antiquity" who we ignore, but also the products of the greatest minds of our own and recent generations--not just poetry or literature, but science, history, philosophy... and on and on. There is a wealth of knowledge out there of which most of us are only dimly aware, much of it free for the taking at our local libraries (or available in one way or another through them) and for that matter available at a relatively small cost, yet we ignore them, or buy them only to hold down a bookshelf and keep the dust from the wood's surface. Instead, we might echo, at least on a personal level, Thoreau's final admonition of the chapter:

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

tags: thoreau  walden  reading  

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