Saturday, June 30, 2018

Simply an Evil

Noticed the other day in the letters of Pliny the Younger, describing the ways of his uncle:
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.


2 comments:

  1. Hmmm. Are some books really wastes of time. We always learn something, even in awful books.

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  2. 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.

    And 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.

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