It is a man's duty to have books.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe:

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A home without books is like a room without windows. No man has the right to bring up children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against inferior excitement of passions and vices. Let us pity these poor rich men who live barrenly in great bookless houses! Let us congratulate the poor that, in our day, books are so cheap that a man may every year add a hundred volumes to his library for the price which his tobacco and his beer would cost him. Among the earliest ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen, and, indeed, among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, is that of forming and continually adding to a library of good books. A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but is one of the necessities of life.

A certain freshness of spirit

Umberto Eco from his How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays.

I'm not saying people are banal. Taking as divine inspiration, as a flash of originiality, something that is obvious reveals a certain freshness of spirit, an enthusiasm for life and its unpredictability, a love of ideas - small as they may be. I will always remember my first meeting with that great man Erving Hoffman, whom I admired and loved for the genius and penetration with which he could identify infinitesimal aspects of behavior that had previously eluded everyone else. We were sitting at an outdoor cafe when, looking at the street after a while, he said, "You know something? I believe there are too many automobiles in circulation in our cities." Maybe he had never thought this before because he had had far more important things to think about; he had just had a sudden epiphany and still had the mental freshness to express it. I, a little snob infected by the Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen of Nietsche, would have hesitated to say it, even if I thought it.

The contents of someone's bookcase . . .

Anatole Broyard:

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof

Self Culture, a speech given by William Ellery Channing in Boston in September 1838. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Similar wise advice still waiting for ears that will turn it into action. Among his comments on books are these passages, though the whole speech is worth reading.

I come now to another important measure of self-culture, and this is, intercourse with superior minds. I have insisted on our own activity as essential to our progress; but we were not made to live or advance alone. Society is as needful to us as air or food. A child doomed to utter loneliness, growing up without sight or sound of human beings, would not put forth equal power with many brutes; and a man, never brought into contact with minds superior to his own, will probably run one and the same dull round of thought and action to the end of llfe.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all who will faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof; if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakspeare to open to me the workings of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.

To make this means of culture effectual, a man must select good books, such as have been written by right-minded and strong-minded men, real thinkers, who, instead of diluting by repetition what others say, have something to say for themselves, and write to give relief to full, earnest souls; and these works must not be skimmed over for amusement, but read with fixed attention and a reverential love of truth. In selecting books, we may be aided much by those who have studied more than ourselves. But, after all, it is best to be determined in this particular a good deal by our own tastes. The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but oftener those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought. And here it may be well to observe, not only in regard to books but in other respects, that self-culture must vary with the individual. All means do not equally suit us all. A man must unfold himself freely, and should respect the peculiar gifts or biases by which nature has distinguished him from others. Self-culture does not demand the sacrifice of individuality. It does not regularly apply an established machinery, for the sake of torturing every man into one rigid shape, called perfection. As the human countenance, with the same features in us all, is diversified without end in the race, and is never the same in any two individuals, so the human soul, with the same grand powers and laws, expands into an infinite variety of forms, and would be wofully stinted by modes of culture requiring all men to learn the same lesson or to bend to the same rules.

I know how hard it is to some men, especially to those who spend much time in manual labor, to fix attention on books. Let them strive to overcome the difficulty by choosing subjects of deep interest, or by reading in company with those whom they love. Nothing can supply the place of books. They are cheering or soothing companions in solitude, illness, affliction. The wealth of both continents would not compensate for the good they impart. Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof, and obtain access for himself and family to some social library. Almost any luxury should be sacrificed to this.

I quite forgot what Bismarck said

At A Reading
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The spare Professor, grave and bald,
Began his paper. It was called,
I think, "A Brief Historic Glance
At Russia, Germany, and France."
A glance, but to my best belief
'Twas almost anything but brief -
A wide survey, in which the earth
Was seen before mankind had birth;
Strange monsters basked them in the sun,
Behemoth, armored glyptodon,
And in the dawn's unpractised ray
The transient dodo winged its way;
Then, by degrees, through silt and slough,
We reached Berlin - I don't know how.
The good Professor's monotone
Had turned me into senseless stone
Instanter, but that near me sat
Hypatia in her new spring hat,
Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom
Lighted the heavy-curtained room.
Hypatia - ah, what lovely things
Are fashioned out of eighteen springs!
At first, in sums of this amount,
The eighteen winters do not count.
Just as my eyes were growing dim
With heaviness, I saw that slim,
Erect, elastic figure there,
Like a pond-lily taking air.
She looked so fresh, so wise, so neat,
So altogether crisp and sweet,
I quite forgot what Bismarck said,
And why the Emperor shook his head,
And how it was Von Moltke's frown
Cost France another frontier town.
The only facts I took away
From the Professor's theme that day
Were these: a forehead broad and low,
Such as the antique sculptures show;
A chin to Greek perfection true;
Eyes of Astarte's tender blue;
A high complexion without fleck
Or flaw, and curls about her neck.

Pippa's Song

Pippa's Song
by Robert Browning

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven -
All's right with the world!

This was a favorite stanza for P.G. Wodehouse and shows up in several places among his more than ninety books and stories. For instance in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.

I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying "Tra-la-la" as I did the lathering, for I was feeling in mid-season form this morning. God, as I once heard Jeeves put it, was in His heaven and all right with the world. (He added, I remember, some guff about larks and snails, but that is a side issue and need not detain us.)

Or in Extricating Young Gussie:

The odd part of it was that after the first shock of seeing all this frightful energy the thing didn't seem so strange. I've spoken to fellows since who have been to New York, and they tell me they found it just the same. Apparently there's something in the air, either the ozone or the phosphates or something, which makes you sit up and take notice. A kind of zip, as it were. A sort of bally freedom, if you know what I mean, that gets into your blood and bucks you up, and makes you feel that--

God's in His Heaven:
All's right with the world,

and you don't care if you've got odd socks on. I can't express it better than by saying that the thought uppermost in my mind, as I walked about the place they call Times Square, was that there were three thousand miles of deep water between me and my Aunt Agatha.

500 million books can't all be wrong

Enid Blyton's Famous Five get 21st-century makeover by Alison Flood in The Guardian, July 23rd, 2010. Enid Blyton was a wonderful British author writing from the 1930's onwards. Hugely prolific she has always been very popular with children and more than a few habitual and enthusiastic readers were most likely led down the reading path by Blyton. For all that, from the 1960s onwards there have been literary, academic and political critics complaining that her language was too dated, racist, classist, etc. For all the proto-controversies, expungement from school and public libraries and other rediculous manifestations of faux indignation, children have continued to love and read her books. There is nothing to put small minds in their place like persistent success.

Although Blyton died in 1968, she remains one of the most popular children's authors. Hodder sells more than half a million copies of the Famous Five books a year, while Blyton has sold more than 500m books and still features in the top 10 of most borrowed children's authors from public libraries.

Usage evolves itself little disturbed by their likes & dislikes

There is a review by Warren Clements of a facsimile version H.W. Fowler's classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage first published in 1926 in The Globe and Mail. Language enthusiasts can get kind of boring sometimes in their myopic enthusiasms but I have always enjoyed Fowler whether I agreed with him or not on particualr points. He has a distinctive voice and is clever in his comments in a way that is quite refreshing even though times and usages have moved on.

Crystal acknowledges the long polarization between descriptivists, who observe the way language usage is changing, and prescriptivists, who often lament those changes and insist on rules that buck current trends. Fowler was largely a prescriptivist. Crystal, like Burchfield, is more of a descriptivist, but where Burchfield was unkind to Fowler, Crystal is of two minds: "Although the book is full of his personal likes and dislikes, his prescriptivism - unlike that practised by many of his disciples - is usually intelligent and reasoned."

Fowler was aware of the tension. "What grammarians say should be," he writes, "has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize; usage evolves itself little disturbed by their likes & dislikes. And yet the temptation to show how better use might have been made of the material to hand is sometimes irresistible." Crystal comments: "I sense a linguist inside him crying to get out, but being held back by a prescriptive conscience."

Fowler has a large following and he is an instance of that circumstance that raises the question - why is a book popular and how can we tell that it will be popular? I did a study a while ago of the comparison of books that receive awards and their longevity in terms of remaining in print as well as compared to other books that did not receive awards. The conclusion was that our capacity to accurately predict the enduring popularity of a book is vestigial. Only one book out of six awarded a prestigious prize seventy-five years ago remained in print. At the same time, even with a very cursory search, I was able to identify more than a dozen books published the same year and which did not receive prizes but remain strong sellers today. What makes the difference? Charm of the author, distinctiveness of style, enduring relevance of issues/emotions, communicated passion or sincerity or motivation all might be candidates but none lend themselves to being measured and so far there is no good way to tell.

It is by the imagination only

From Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. In the first chapter of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith lays out his rational for what would later be developed by psychologists into what is known as the Theory of Mind, i.e. the capacity of humans to reflect on the condition of others by mirroring their circumstances to our own imagination. A neurological base for supporting this theory was eventually established back in the early 1990's by researcher Giacomo Rizzolati.

What caught my eye was this passage by Smith in Chapter II where he is giving a series of examples of our ability to sympathetically experience that which is occurring to others. Here he points out that sympathetic experience is very powerful, allowing us to experience through another that which is worn out for us. The example which he uses is that of reading.

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty; we enter into the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him, but which it is no longer capable of exciting in us; we consider all the ideas which it presents rather in the light in which they appear to him, than in that in which they appear to ourselves, and we are amused by sympathy with his amusement which thus enlivens our own. On the contrary, we should be vexed if he did not seem to be entertained with it, and we could no longer take any pleasure in reading it to him.

This is a situation perfectly familiar to any parent reading to a child. We know precisely what Smith is talking about. The Little Engine That Could may have long ago left the station as a mainstay of our reading or even our particular interest in the narrative twists of the tale but we look forward to experiencing again that love of the book through our child and are vexed if our gift of a much loved story does not strike a similar note with our child.

Part of that vexation is of course disappointment that they won't love what you loved, part of that vexation is that we ourselves cannot re-experience the engagement with the story through our child. And finally, part of the vexation is that this is the first intimation that our child is not us. They do have their own interests, foibles, and enthusiasms and while they may be more or less in alignment with our own characteristics, they are not perfectly aligned. The child we seek to raise by our best lights will follow their own path causing great pain and great joy along the way. What we see in them at six months will be different from what we see at six years, much less sixteen years or twenty-six.

Smith identifies imagination as being the principle engine for our capacity to empathize with the conditions of others.

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.

Here he makes indirectly the case for enthusiastic reading. Our capacity to function well is contingent upon our sympathy for others. That sympathy is generated by our imagination. There are other ways to cultivate imagination but certainly one of the easiest and most easily accessible is by reading. By voluminous reading we expand our horizons and are called upon and assisted by gifted authors to imagine ourselves into other lives and circumstances. The more practice we have of this through reading, the better able we are to empathize with others in real life.

My library was dukedom large enough

William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Scene II, Prospero:

My library was dukedom large enough . .