'Attentive and Repeated Perusals'

As a boy I was most attracted to reference books, in the broadest sense. I liked dictionaries, atlases, thesauruses, field guides and almanacs. I liked information collected, collated and convenient, and still do. I think this is related to my lifelong fondness for good anthologies. Such books are the autodidact’s friend, the map and compass needed when entering terra incognita. There’s comfort in densely, intelligently packed information. The Anatomy of Melancholy has been one of my favorite books since I discovered it as a college freshman. I can dip in anytime, to any page, and learn something. In his wonderful essay “On Reading” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996), Guy Davenport writes: “And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.”

This week I picked up The Practical Cogitator; or, The Thinker’s Anthology (1945), edited by Charles P. Curtis Jr. and Ferris Greenslet, again. I wanted something to read while eating my lunch at my desk. In his preface, Curtis glosses his title: “To begin with, this anthology is for the thinker, and not for the feeler, primarily for the extrovert thinker. Needless to say, it runs over into some of his introverted and intuitive margins.” And he means it. Among his rules of selection:

“Nothing that is not worth re-reading. Some things can be chewed over almost indefinitely. Pieces that are tough enough, juicy enough to chew. Some that are scarcely worth reading only once.”

Early in the book, almost as an endorsement of their project, Curtis and Greenslet include a passage from the letter Keats wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds on Feb. 19, 1818. Here’s an excerpt:

“I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner - Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale - But when will it do so? Never - When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all ‘the two-and-thirty Palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of concentration, what delicious diligent Indolence!”

Keats precisely captures the pleasure of reading when he oxymoronically couples “concentration” with “delicious diligent Indolence.” Based on my experience, there is no contradiction. Later, Curtis and Greenslet quote Edward Gibbon’s “Abstract of My Readings”: “Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to what our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.” The passage, as printed, is deceptive. Gibbon’s two sentences, as he wrote them, are separated by two paragraphs. A subsequent passage from the same essay is pertinent:

“But what ought we to read? Each individual must answer this question for himself, agreeably to the object of his studies. The only general precept that I would venture to give, is that of Pliny, ‘to read much, rather than many things’; to make a careful selection of the best works, and to render them familiar to us by attentive and repeated perusals.”