Often after his meal--which he took in the old fashion, during the day, light, and simple--if it was summer and he was at leisure, he lay in the sun, reading a book, annotating it and taking excerpts. For he took excerpts from everything he read: he used to say that a book was simply an evil if nothing came of it.I have fallen out of the habit of writing into a notebook excerpts from what I read. This may have happened when I started blogging. I do annotate books. In the more daunting this is the equivalent of dropping pebbles to find my way back; in others there may be references to other books, or to other pages in the same book. Certainly there are books that are simply wastes of time; but there are others that are not, and for which I could hardly tell you what came of the reading.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Simply an Evil
Noticed the other day in the letters of Pliny the Younger, describing the ways of his uncle:
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I consider myself as having a not-so-great memory (and I am married to someone with a retentive one, who can conjure facts from readings decades ago.) And though for a while I had a commonplace book, I don't any longer. But I have come to think that even when my head says that I don't remember, I do in some way--that is, the words have flowed through and made some change and have been nutritious to me.
ReplyDeleteAnd I do mark up books, particularly nonfiction, so that I can look again at what I found interesting, and see my former thoughts. I suppose those are my pebbles back into the forest.