Curiosity and the Bibliomaniac

The fanatical reader is not only anxious, he or she is curious. And surely human curiosity—condemned as it was by certain Fathers of the Church as being of no purpose since the coming of Christ, and even prohibited, since we now have the Gospels—is one of the determining factors of all our actions? A capital element in the search for knowledge, in scientific discoveries or technological progress, the essential force behind human endeavor. And curiosity has no end: it is without limits. It feeds on itself, is never satisfied with what it finds, but must always press on, exhausting itself only with our dying breath.

 

 … And reading expands indefinitely our perforce limited experience of reality, giving us access to distant ages, foreign customs, hearts and minds, human motivations, and everything else. How can you stop once you have found the doorway offering the chance of escape from an inevitably constricted environment? Liberty was within arm’s reach, so all I have to do was read and read, more and more, hoping to escape my individual destiny. Then I had only to add to this boundless curiosity a certain methodical tendency, which drove me to read all the works of a given write, or all the books written on a certain subject, or the literature of a certain period, or country, and to wish as I went along to keep the books I had read, adding new ones that might be connected to them, gradually acquiring more topics I was interested in—and there I was—a bibliomaniac reader. 

Jacques Bonnet  Phantoms on the Bookshelves. Trans. Sian Reynolds. MacLehose Press, London. 2008

A Good Adventurous Reason for Matrimony

If I were asked the most agreeable thing in life, I should say it is the pleasure of contrast.  One cannot imagine anyone but an angel sitting with a harp in Paradise forever.  The ordinary human being needs a change.  This is the secret charm of the oasis, usually an indifferent patch of greenery made precious solely by surrounding sands.  The celebrated fountains of the world—Helicon, Bandusium, of the water of Salsabil which Solomon gave to the Queen of Sheeba—all spring in arid places.  The beauty of an Alpine dawn lies half in the sleeping world below.  A warm chair by the fire after a day with hounds, a shuttered room when the wind is tossing, belong to this category of pleasures.  The Greek shepherd knew the joy of the safe pinewood when storms tear the open sea; and a woman I know told me she had married her husband because what he said was always unexpected—a good adventurous reason for matrimony, I thought.

Quotation: The Southern Gates of Arabia. Freya Stark. 1936

Other People's Worth

 

 Sarah was intelligent, but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty. It was not in the least analytical or problem-solving, and it is no doubt symptomatic that the one subject that had cost her agonies to master was mathematics. Nor did it manifest itself in the form of any particular vivacity or wit, even in her happier days. It was rather an uncanny—uncanny in one who had never been to London, never mixed in the world—ability to classify other people’s worth: to understand them, in the fullest sense of that word.

She had some sort of psychological equivalent of the experiences horse-dealer’s skill—the ability to know almost at the first glance the good horse from the bad one; or as if, jumping a century, she was born with a computer in her heart. I say her heart, since the values she computed belong more there than in the mind. She could sense the pretensions of a hollow argument, a false scholarship, a biased logic when she came across them; but she also saw through people in subtler ways. Without being able to say how, any more than a computer can explain its own processes, she saw them as they were and not as they tried to seem. It would not be enough to say she was a fine moral judge of people. Her comprehension was broader than that, and if mere morality had been her touchstone she would not have behaved as she did—the simple fact of the matter being that she had not lodged with a female cousin at Weymouth.

Quotation: The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969).

Seasonal Confusion

I've often maintained that living in the deep south is like living in permanent spring and autumn. Here's the proof!
Despite the snow on the hills (admittedly at a quite high level) these two pictures were taken within 10meters of each other and within about 3minutes of each other, on a mid-winter's day (June 24th). Leaves still cling to weeping willow trees whilst a wasp pollinates an early rhododendron flower, evidence of seasonal confusion if ever there was!

The Lamp of Learning

In the Wadi 'Amd this family remained, and gathered in their hands and guarded through many vicissitudes all civilisation that the valley contained. Just so, in the Dark Ages of Europe, the lamp of learning was fed--a feeble flicker, yet sufficient to light a greater flame when the general illumination of the Renaissance ushered in the modern world.

How many obscure heroisms, what invincible patience and hope must have gone to carry through those blood stained ages the the mild treasure of wisdom!

Psychologists tell us that the impulse of sex is the fundamental mover of this world, and we are perhaps getting a little tired of hearing it so often. But there are two impulses stronger than desire, deeper than love of man or woman, and independent of it--the human hunger for truth and liberty. For these two greater sacrifices are made than for any love of person; against them nothing can prevail, since love and life itself have proved themselves light in the balance; and the creature man is ever ready to refute the Matter-of-fact Realist and his statistics by sacrificing all he has for some abstract idea of wisdom or freedom, unprofitable in every mercenary scale.

What with popular lecture, compulsory instruction and the belief that one is educated if one can read and write, we sometimes forget that this hunger of our soul exists: but in the Wadi 'Amd it is difficult to satisfy, adn therefore more easily recognised for what it is, ...

Quotation: The Southern Gates of Arabia by Freya Stark, 1936.

A Decent Shape

I've discovered people I've never really met before: natural simple people.  People who've made a decent shape out of their lives.  And I'm coming to think they get their values straighter than people like us ever will have.  Oh, I know we can talk more ingeniously, and we can out-argue them every time; and we can read books written by people like ourselves and make-believe that what we think of life, and what our writers think of life, is all life is.

Quotation from  The Search by C.P. Snow

Woodland Walk

A woodland walk on a Saturday autumn afternoon, well its early winter I suppose.

Hard to think it had a snowed on Tuesday, sufficient to bring the city to a full stop.

The temperature high then was a mere 2degrees, brrrr very chilly. But temperatures since then have been balmy, and today we had a high of 14, yesterday was 16 which meant I was decidedly overdressed with anorak and jumper!


These bracket fungi were growing on an earth bank and well hidden from most passers-by. Not surprising really as the mountain bikers who frequent these woods are too intent on keeping upright and generally move at a quicker pace than I do.

With the low sunshine, however, my attention was caught by the straight larch tree trunks. Its clearly a planting of european larch trees, my guess is it was about 70 or 80 years ago when the area was included as part of Dunedin's water-catchment.

Several trees, near the vehicle track, were felled some years ago and their stumps are steadily rotting. providing a habitat for lichens, mosses, and fungi.

To The Bus-stop

A rather soggy day ... no week!

But there's plenty of colour.

The bus-stop is about 25m from my front door.

But up a steep bank with a set of steps, which can be slippery when wet!

Hot Pied Shag

One recent hot day I found this pied shag keeping its feet and tail cool in the murky waters of the lower Leith.

Before it detected my presence, or rather, that of some noisy builders on the other side of the channel and flew off. Neat plumage though I thought.

Knowledge

Knowledge, it is rightly said, does not stand outside of practical activity: it is made and sustained through situated practical activity.

Yet, despite the chorus of modern voices commending detailed study of the particularities by which knowledge is made, protected, and transmitted, advocacy largely remains at a programmatic and abstract level.

A view about knowledge and practical activity which seems to demand the historian's finest microscope is largely fobbed off with traditional philosopher's toy-examples and socail theorist's impenetrably airy generalities. This is both odd and deeply unsatisfactory.

Quotation from: A Social History of Truth: Civility & Science in Seventeenth-century England. by Steven Shapin, 1994, University of Chicago Press.