Just finished this excellent book called Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. Among its many pleasures was this passage,
which feels close to the heart of what keeps me blogging, or taking photographs,
for that matter:
Until
relatively recently…people had only a few books –
the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and
over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional
literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.
But after the
printing press appeared around 1440, things began gradually to change. In the
first century after Gutenberg, it because possible for the first time, for people
without great wealth to have a small library in their own homes...
Today, we read
books “extensively”, without much in the way of sustained focus, and with rare
exceptions, we read each book only once. We value quantity over quality of
reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. Few
of us make any serious effort to remember what we read…
We read and
read and read, and forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michael
de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth
century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them”, he wrote. “What I retain
of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the
material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with
which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other
circumstances, I immediately forget.”
He goes on to
explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory”,
he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical
judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of that the tome was about
and what he thought of it.
I know that works for me too. Synthesizing a thought on what a book, or movie, or trip was about, and writing it down, makes the experience itself richer, more memorable.
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| Joshua Foer |
