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Reading

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Brief overview

Reading the ancient classics in their original languages is the noblest exercise, and Concord neglects it.

  1. Read the classics in their own languageNo transcript of Homer, Aeschylus or Virgil has ever been made into a modern tongue, so translations leave the reader with an imperfect knowledge of the human race.
  2. Written words outlast spoken eloquenceWhat is called eloquence in the forum is rhetoric in the study; the writer speaks to all in any age who can understand him, while the orator speaks to the mob before him.
  3. Villages should fund minds, not only buildingsSeventeen thousand dollars went to a town house against one hundred and twenty-five dollars a year for the lyceum — the uncommon school Thoreau wants would board the wise men of the world.
Executive Summary AI
  • Reading Chapter 3 of Thoreau's Walden, Gordon Mackenzie opens with the claim that a cabin beyond the reach of the circulating library was more favorable to serious reading than a university, because Thoreau lived among the books that circulate round the world, first written on bark and now copied onto linen paper.
  • Thoreau keeps Homer's Iliad on his table all summer but barely opens it, since hoeing beans and finishing his house made study impossible, and he argues that the cheap modern press and its translations have done little to bring anyone nearer the heroic writers of antiquity.
  • To read well is held to be a noble exercise requiring the training an athlete underwent, because the written father tongue is a reserved and select expression, as far above the orator's fleeting speech as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.
  • Against that standard he sets what people actually read: the several volumes in the circulating library entitled Little Reading, the nine-thousandth tale about Zebulon and Zophronia, and a town where even college-bred men have little or no acquaintance with the English classics and cannot name the scriptures of any nation but the Hebrews.
  • His remedy is money and ambition: Concord spent seventeen thousand dollars on a town house while the one hundred and twenty-five dollars subscribed annually for a winter lyceum is the best-spent sum in town, so villages should become universities, hire the wise men of the world, and be noble villages of men rather than patrons of noblemen.
Key Quote
“We might as well omit to study nature because she is old.”
— Gordon Mackenzie
Key Quote
“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
— Gordon Mackenzie
Key Quote
“A written word is the choicest of relics.”
— Gordon Mackenzie

Transcript

0:00 CHAPTER III. READING. Gordon Mackenzie. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Chapter 3. Reading.
0:30 With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become
0:38 essentially students and observers. For certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.
0:47 In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal.
0:58 But in dealing with truth, we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindu
1:11 philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that
1:34 was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.
1:41 No dust has settled on that robe, no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.
1:50 That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. My residence was more favorable not only to thought, but to serious
2:10 reading, than a university. And though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating
2:17 library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written
2:28 on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time onto linen paper.
2:36 Says the poet Mr. Udd,
2:39 Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world, I have had this advantage in books.
2:49 To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine, I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.
3:03 I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then.
3:11 Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible.
3:22 Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or
3:29 two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of
3:35 myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived. The student may reader or aeschylus in the greek without danger of dissip will always be in a language dead to degenerate times,
4:10 and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,
4:17 conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern, cheap, and
4:31 fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic
4:40 writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare
4:49 and curious as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours,
4:57 if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the classics would at length make way for more
5:31 modern and practical studies.
5:35 But the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be
5:41 written and however ancient they may be written, and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest
5:49 recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are
5:58 such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave.
6:08 We might as well omit to study nature because she is old.
6:16 To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than
6:28 any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the
6:36 athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and
6:48 reservedly as they were written. It is not enough to be able to speak the language of that nation
6:56 by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the
7:06 language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect, merely, almost
7:16 brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that. If that is our mother
7:31 tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be

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