The keenest enjoyment of the wilderness is reserved for him who enjoys also the garnered wisdom of the present and the past

Reading wisdom from Teddy Roosevelt, On the Mount Rushmore of Literary Life by Rebecca Joines Schinsky.

Roosevelt describes the opening of the world to the prosperous man of 1916, that narrow window when all was open and immemorial cultures were accessible to the contemporary in a way never seen before.

The grandest scenery of the world is his to look at if he chooses; and he can witness the[ix] strange ways of tribes who have survived into an alien age from an immemorial past, tribes whose priests dance in honor of the serpent and worship the spirits of the wolf and the bear. Far and wide, all the continents are open to him as they never were to any of his forefathers; the Nile and the Paraguay are easy of access, and the borderland between savagery and civilization; and the veil of the past has been lifted so that he can dimly see how, in time immeasurably remote, his ancestors—no less remote—led furtive lives among uncouth and terrible beasts, whose kind has perished utterly from the face of the earth.

And what should the culture man bring with him?

He will take books with him as he journeys; for the keenest enjoyment of the wilderness is reserved for him who enjoys also the garnered wisdom of the present and the past.

And which books?

I am sometimes asked what books I advise men or women to take on holidays in the open. With the reservation of long trips, where bulk is of prime consequence, I can only answer: The same books one would read at home.