I am humbled, I tell you, humbled!

Well, when I think about it (which I do not do very often) I suppose being humbled is the story of my life!  Not, of course, that it stops me from being the jumped-up, opinionated, know-all that you all admire so much - and I definitely heard that one!  So it was no surprise to me that when it comes to reading, something of which I pride myself, that exceedingly distinguished man of letters, Mr. Jacob Epstein, stands supreme on a World Olympic pinnacle whilst I remain at the bottom of Division 459!  Even worse, the sheer, unbelievable range of what he reads turns me into a narrow-minded dunce.  Having read his essay on the subject, I am left with only one question - where the hell does he find the time to read so much?  Actually, I have a second question, how much of what he reads does he remember?

To be fair, Mr. Epstein answers that question courtesy of Montaigne:

Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. . . . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.” As I put it elsewhere some years ago, I read for the pleasures of style and in the hope of “laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness,” and, like Montaigne, on lucky days perhaps to pick up a touch of wisdom along the way.

Dammit, that paragraph reminds me sharply, like a kick in the shins, that for several decades I have been meaning to read Montaigne who, from the various quotations I have come across, strikes me as a writer and thinker on a level with William Shakespeare, than which etc, etc!

Mr. Epstein confesses to being a 'book accumulator', or perhaps that should be a 'bookaholic', of almost drug addiction levels but even he is forced to concede a secondary position when compared to his friend, the late Mr. Edward Shils:

As a book accumulator, I am a piker next to Edward Shils, who in a capacious three-bedroom apartment in Chicago had a library of roughly 16,000 volumes, in three languages, all of them serious, with another six thousand books stored in a house he kept at Cambridge in England. In one of the two bathrooms in his Chicago apartment, Edward had bookshelves built over and above the bath and commode. No flat surface in his apartment, including his dining room table, was uncovered by books (or magazines or papers).

Crikey!  I will never again complain about the couple of hundred books that clutter up my garret here, at the 'HQ' of Duff & Nonsense!

 

 

Comments

[AussieD]

Duffers one day you may be known at the Dr Johnson of Zumerzet so don't abandon your literary aspirations just yet.

[Whyaxye]

"I have been meaning to read Montaigne who, from the various quotations I have come across, strikes me as a writer and thinker on a level with William Shakespeare"

You are aware, DD, that this Montaigne chap is actually a Frenchman?

[David Duff]

AussieD, it is more likely that I will be remembered as the Dr. Doolittle of Zummerzet, in the microscopically tiny chance that anyone will remember me!

'Mais oui', 'W', so what's the French for 'dammit'?

[Whitewall]

David,
"so what's the French for 'dammit'?"
"Englishman"?

[missred]

I was going to be serious and say merde alors, but I cannot out-class WW hehe

[Richard]

There's a wonderful family called Stein,
There's Gert and there's Ep and there's Ein.
Gert's poems are bunk, Ep's statues are junk
And no one can understand Ein.

[David Duff]

Nice one, Richard!