'Nothing Makes a Man More Reverent'

 I have never thought of reading as a “hobby.” I put the word in quotes because I sense a patronizing tinge to the word. A hobby is a lesser pastime than a job, something frivolous, a “leisure activity” that most people in the past couldn’t afford because they had to earn a living. Hobby entered English in the fifteenth century and referred to a small horse or pony – not a draft horse for farming or a mighty steed worthy of battle. Sterne famously uses hobby-horse to mean a passion or obsession. For Uncle Toby it was military strategy in a non-military setting, and construction of his bowling-green battlefield. The OED hints at these related meanings:

“A favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse . . . an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker’s opinion) out of proportion to its real importance.”

In Thoughts and Adventures (1932), Winston Churchill collects an essay titled “Hobbies” in which he writes: “To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real. It is no use starting late in life to say: ‘I will take an interest in this or that.’” In addition to being a prolific writer and the savior of England, Churchill was an ambitious reader, painter and, of all things, bricklayer. He writes in the essay:

“The most common form of diversion is reading. In that vast and varied field millions find their mental comfort. Nothing makes a man more reverent than a library.”

In Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Allen Lane, 2018), Andrew Roberts tells us that while stationed in India from 1896 to 1898, Churchill practiced a rigorous regimen of self-improvement. He quotes a source who says, “[Churchill] decided to be better informed. He began to spend after-siesta time lying on his charpoy [bed] reading.” Roberts refers to Churchill’s “supremely ambitious reading programme which within two years was to leave him easily as well read as those of his contemporaries who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge.” It gets even better:

“Churchill’s reading programme began with Edward Gibbon’s 4,000-page The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -- which he was to re-read twice more over the course of his life, and parts of which he could quote from memory. He followed it with Gibbon’s autobiography and then read Macaulay’s six-volume History of England, which he loved (except for the attacks on the 1st Duke of Marlborough) and the Lays of Ancient Rome. After that he read Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and the key texts of Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin, Adam Smith [and so forth].” As though in contradiction  of his own practice, Churchill writes in his essay:

“It is a mistake to read too many good books when quite young. A man once told me that he had read all the books that mattered. Cross-questioned, he appeared to have read a great many, but they seemed to have made only a slight impression. How many had he understood? How many had entered into his mental composition? How many had been hammered on the anvils of his mind and afterwards ranged in an armoury of bright weapons ready to hand?” 

Today we observe the sesquicentennial of the birth of Churchill, born November 30, 1874. He died January 24, 1965, and I remember watching his state funeral on television. My father, a World War II veteran, admired Churchill with an intensity comparable to his detestation of Charles de Gaulle. Churchill was a rare Nobel laureate in literature who actually deserved the prize.