Reading Books

Some thoughts about reading


Reading:




Reading is the threshold to the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. ~

Marcel Proust

When you are young, every book you truly fall in love with is a life of yours, one that you have, as it

were, lived in the past and now can remember in full. It is a blessing of remarkable proportion, for

through books one is incarnated many times—not only, say, as a questing sailor aboard a whaling ship, a

mortally ill heiress, a woman taken in adultery, but also as the mind who conceives and renders these

things and experiences the world in a certain manner. ~ Mark Edmundson, Teacher: The One Who Made the

Difference, p. 255

Mostly what I read for, I have to admit, was to find out who I myself might be. I was perpetually in

hope of hearing my own inarticulate thoughts and feelings put into words by someone who had gone deeper

into life, and into language, than I had done. ~ Mark Edmundson, Teacher: The One Who Made the

Difference, p. 255

It is only the incessant labor of combining your own experience, taken in and metabolized by intense

feeling and thought, with what you have acquired in books that actually creates and re-creates a

free-flowing identity. ~ Mark Edmundson, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference, p. 255