Notes on Reading

Dear Reader: A few years ago I decided to make up for some of the deficiencies in my education...

I made up a list of books that I felt I should read and began my project. I also kept a notebook of quotations that seemed to summarize some important aspect of the text at hand. After a while I abandoned this part of my unschooled approach to learning because it occurred to me that I might be making a mistake, since by extracting these nuggets perhaps I was really only reinforcing my own prejudices. However, my object was to eliminate as many as these as possible so that I could form a more fully developed view of art and literature, which I intended then to merge with my own scientific world view. On the other hand, it also seemed possible that these nuggets reflected something central to the authors’ conceptions, and I have not yet decided which was true. Before I gave up my nugget extraction habit, I recorded the passages that follow, which I copied from the crumbling pages of my ancient notebooks. This is in some sense a map of an approach to reading, and you can decide for yourself, based upon your own reading of these authors, whether I have captured the essence of their thoughts. Sometimes, in my more optimistic moments, I am inclined to think that I have because, just as we can immediately identify not only a composer, but a specific work and even a specific musician from the sound of a single phrase, and sometimes even a single bar of music, we can often identify an author by a certain turn of phrase that reveals his essential qualities. On the other hand, it is more than possible that in this selection of passages, copied from books I read over the course of several years, I have merely traced the outlines of my own world view, so that during the course of reading these works, and hundreds of others besides, I have found only myself.