CURIOSITY AND COURAGE
Each day that you spend on earth should be an adventure in thinking, where every hour, as Wordsworth wrote, ‘brings palpable access of knowledge.’ Thinking is the disease, more thinking is the cure.
1 Thinking about thinking
A good inspiration shows you a new thought, a great one shows you a new way of thinking. However wide the range of topics they may treat, the way of thinking of most thinkers is quite cramped. It is a uniform army deployed on multiple fronts.
The hardest thing to think about is thinking itself. It’s more difficult to grasp how you do an easy task than it is to do a difficult one. And, as Wilde wrote, ‘it is much harder to talk about a thing than to do it.’ Napoleon can’t tell you how to win a war. ‘I have fought sixty battles,’ he said, ‘and I have learned no more than I already knew after the first.’ Descartes, who meditated more incisively than anyone on how to think, announced that if you accede only to what you know to be right then you won’t go far wrong. Coleridge’s bland recipe of ‘best words in best order’ would turn out uninspired verse.
Do we ever think more dully than when we analyze genius, or more stolidly than when we speculate on the impassioned mind?
2 Thinking through method
There is no single method. We need a whole spectrum of them, to suit each tenor of mind, topic, faculty and style. And there is no technique that can teach you how to reason. The best it might do is show you how to mend the ideas that you have found out by chance or by unguided persistence. Descartes’s Discourse on Method demonstrates that there is none.
When writers try to unpack how they make their fictions, they make one of the most implausible of their fictions. And when they try to expound the procedures of a daring mind, they demurely set out their own. But when they try to set out their own, don’t they get them quite wrong? And when they lament the sad neglect of great talents, they mean their own.
It takes so long to get to know a thing, because you have to spend so much time first learning what sorts of things might be worth learning and then learning how to learn them.
3 The mind is the child of the external codes in which it works
The external, the social and the structural is prior to the internal, the individual and the unit.
The human mind is the product of the abstract codes in which it alienates itself. So the deepest thinking is neither conscious nor subconscious. And great thinking is not unconscious but extra-conscious. It goes on outside the mind in the medium that begets it, be it numbers or words or paint. The mind is the womb which the medium must make pregnant.
If our inner life weren’t tinged through and through in dyes from outside, it would be too dull to make out.
Our inner self is the most superficial part of us. Our self does not start as an inner core and grow outwards. It starts outside us as a cloud of practices, habits, customs, codes and prejudices, which at length form a more or less unified mass within us. And the most powerful minds are those in which these external codes have reached their inmost core and rewired all their circuits.
Dreams and the unconscious are so stupid because they put us in touch with our inmost selves, shorn of the forms of language, custom and artifice which give them value.
4 The collective mind
The collective unconscious is as worthless as the personal unconscious. It is the collective consciousness, which takes shape in forms, customs, language, music, culture and tradition, that is creative.
It is from the collective mind that we must draw the forms and materials that we need if we are to think for ourselves.
5 Idle curiosity leads us astray
Some people itch to learn new things, so long as they have to flap about to learn them and not sit motionless where they are. So what they end up with is a mishmash of busy, pushing information, and not a sanguine wisdom. They don’t love truth so much as the rush and ruckus that they make to find it out and show it off.
Most of our searching deflects us from discovering truths that are worth knowing. It immerses us in trifles, gabble and small talk. If curiosity were the force that fuels our desire to know, we would get no further than gossip. Real thinking begins where curiosity leaves off.
There are many things that it is better not to know than to know, as Aristotle showed, and these are the sorts of things that most curious people are so keen to know.
When you’re thinking for your life, you need more than mere idle or professional curiosity to drive you. But most of our curiosity is merely professional or idle. What we long for is to hear some snippet of information that we can use for our own ends or some tattling banter to regale our drowsy minds.
Curiosity is one of the antennae that pick up the signals from all the trash that might attract us.
6 Thinking to some purpose
How much I fail to see, because I’m not looking for it. And how little I find, since my eyes are fixed on the goal I aim at. In order to see, you must be looking. But if you are looking for a thing, that’s all you will find, and you will miss most of what’s worth seeing. How could you hope to make a great breakthrough, if you have no purpose to urge you on? But if you are urged on by a purpose, you won’t swerve from the narrow passageway that it marks out for you. Having a purpose makes you alert to everything except its own futility.
Now and then I notice how little I notice. And that’s about as much as I ever notice.
7 Curiosity is not thinking
Curiosity, like avarice, always wants more, but more of the same. Most of us gawk about like sightseers, and scoot through what all the world is well aware of. But audacious minds scout like adventurers, to blaze their way to thoughts that no one else has dreamt of. Were they merely curious, they could have learnt far more quickly what the rest of us know, rather than labouring so long to reach a few unforeseen truths of their own. In the time that it took them to track these down, they could have gleaned great sheaves of familiar facts.
Most children’s curiosity, like their cruelty, is their unoccupied and aimless boredom on the lookout for some new sport to titillate them.
Children keep on asking why, not because they are curious and want to learn, but for the fun of teasing adults. If they thought the adults could give them the real answer, they would stop.
We are as credulous as we are curious.
Our inquisitiveness, like the rest of our desires, is as insatiable in its appetites as it is petty in its objects.
We may have a natural hunger to know, as Aristotle said, but in our information age we feed it with the most unnatural stuffs.
8 Thinking the unfamiliar
You don’t begin to see a thing till you have seen it many times. But once you have seen it many times, you can no longer see it at all. ‘We never see a thing the first time,’ as Pavese notes, ‘but only the second, when it has changed into something else.’
You begin to see things fresh only when you cease to recognize them.
People need to be led like the blind to an unfamiliar truth. Then they finger it with their smutty paws which they keep thickly gloved with their ready-woven notions.
Most of us have no wish to learn anything fresh. We just want to hear more of the sorts of things which we have long known. ‘People don’t want to read anything except that with which they are already familiar,’ as Goethe said. ‘What they want is what they know.’
9 Recognition cuts short thinking
Far from evidencing how widely our minds range, our readiness to make out correspondences and similarities is often a dull reflex, like seeing shapes in clouds. ‘Very like a whale.’ Poets do not see two objects as one. They talk about one object as if it were two. ‘One should work by dissociation and not by association of ideas,’ as Renard wrote. ‘An association is almost always commonplace.’
The artist must dare to show you a beauty that you don’t yet have eyes for. And so it looks to you like ugliness. As Picasso said, ‘What is new, what is worth doing, can’t be recognized.’
People try to make sense of the unknown by the known, but what they know is a few dry formulas and smug truisms.
We dismiss rarities as anomalies, and we pay no mind to what we see each day. ‘If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years,’ Emerson wrote, ‘how would men believe and adore.’
10 We find the truth not by courage but by restraint
The sole cowardice for which we can blame thinkers is their failure to think as far as they ought. And if they do this, it’s not from pusillanimity but from haste to reach a conclusion and claim their reward.
In order to reflect, it’s not bravery that you require but restraint. To reach the truth, you don’t need to beat down daunting obstacles, you just need to withstand the world tempting you to chase after its cheap allurements. Fear doesn’t hold us back from thinking. Greed goads us on to do things that pay better. It’s our itching lust for the rest of life’s good things that keeps us from uncovering the truth. I have nothing to fear from truth, but what do I have to gain from it?
11 Craving and thinking
Few of us think, not because we dread what it will get us, but because we crave what we know it won’t, that is, profit and pleasure. Why would we want to hear the truth? It would stand in the way of us having more fun or making more money. So the one sort of thinking that we do is scheming how to come at what we want.
I don’t think, not because I’m afraid of what I might find, but because I want so many other things so much. And I lie, not from trepidation but from the lust for gain. And if I tell the truth, it’s not by mastering my fretfulness, but by embracing pride.
How could we spot large truths, when our eyes are on the watch for the least bait for our self-interest?
12 Dying or thinking
The ideas that are worth dying for are not the ones that the state calls on soldiers to die for. And what they die for is not the idea but the powerful who have no intention of dying for it. And the kind of ideas that the world would want to kill you for are scarcely worth having.
People who have the brains to conceive new ideas are so rare, that they ought least of all to be asked to lay down their lives for them.
It is people who have no ideas of their own that sign up to die for those of others.
13 Cowardice finds out the truth
Your cowardliness will teach you more than your courage could have done. For a thinker, to live fearfully might be the next best thing to living dangerously. Timorous people sound life to the core. They die so many times before their death, that they see more of life than the undaunted. They are all the time peering through the pane of their disquiet on the watch for what might be approaching to scare them.
Some people have been backed so far into a corner by their panic, that they have to turn and face the truth. They shiver through in a minute more revealing moods than the stalwart do in a month. They scan the rest of life with such nervous penetration, because they dare not look it in the eye. Since they have seen the truth up close, it’s pure luck if it doesn’t kill them.
Cowardly people, such as Hobbes, love to brandish the cold steel of truth. In its armour they feel as if they were dauntless and unafraid. They take revenge on the world which intimidates them by venturing to stare down its most menacing secrets.
14 Thinking dangerously
Have intellectuals ever been so craven, or so proud of their pluck? They chirp that they roam like nomads or exiles, when they are just cosily mobile careerists, a clique of tenured dissidents. How many cautious and inoffensive dons boast that they are dynamite. ‘A roofer,’ as Sartre wrote, ‘takes more risks than an intellectual.’
World-improvers argue that art ought to subvert prejudices, but only the ones of which they disapprove. And they praise art for being disconcerting, so long as it’s their fusty opponents that it disconcerts.
Some truths are too dangerous to be spoken. There will always be some firebrands who will have the courage and consistency to act on the false inferences that they draw from them.
ENLIGHTENMENT
15 The nightfall of enlightenment
People’s brains did not open up to the world till the sixteenth century. Before that the best they could do was to spin systems of abstract thought out of their baseless axioms.
The thinkers of the enlightenment promoted a naive credence in perfectibility, a facile psychology, an impertinent universalism, an unreasonable faith in reason. They were drunk with their hopes for the future, disdainfully disavowed the past, fomented rebellions which raised up bloodstained despots, and championed a humanism which will bring ruin on the human race and all living things.
Enlightenment hoped to inaugurate the reign of autonomy and ends. But it was the ideology of the system that has subjected us to a tyranny of heteronomy and means.
Some writers, such as Voltaire or Franklin, grow great by endorsing the progressive platitudes of their age, its rationalism, positivism, deism, tolerance, enlightened self-interest and faith in human perfectibility. And some, like Balzac or Dostoyevsky, have grown great by assaulting them.
16 Individualism
The melodramatic form of bourgeois individualism appears in the sphere of faith as revivalism, in the sphere of art as romanticism, in the sphere of the emotions as rousseauism, in the sphere of thinking as existentialism, in the sphere of the spirit as transcendentalism, and in the sphere of ethics as byronism.
Catholicism commands obedience to a crooked human corporation. And protestantism incites disobedience to all but the crooked human conscience.
We fashion our selves by our choices of the things we want. And yet we learn to want what we do from the choices that others make.
17 Primal sanities
Some sages, such as Confucius, Emerson or Thoreau, provide a bracing course in mental and moral hygiene but few new concepts. They are more a tonic than an aliment. They refresh us rather than feed us. But our race has now grown so morbid, that we mistrust sound minds till we have traced the spot where they ail. Goethe irks us as a person in rosy health affronts an invalid.
18 Prophets of perversity
The strongest thinkers were reactionary revolutionists. Such were Plato, Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, Johnson, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
Since the age of reason we have had to rely for our saving wisdom on our holy or unholy fools, the prophets of perversity, such as Maistre or Baudelaire, Blake or Yeats, Dostoyevsky or Céline, Lawrence or Rimbaud. Poe was Dostoyevsky’s vaudeville or waxworks John the baptist, which is a better thing than most writers. Yeats made the Psalms to Nietzsche’s new Torah.
The best guide through the chaos of the modern mind is Dostoyevsky. The best guide through the chaos of modern society is Balzac. Nietzsche is the best guide through the chaos of modern culture. And the best guide through the chaos of modern art is Yeats.
The human intellect was at its crest between 1870 and 1920. It was still disciplined by the rich forms that the past had built up and handed on to it, but it was vitalized by all its new tools and experiments.
19 Anaemic vitalism
Cosmopolitan and cerebral northerners, such as Nietzsche or Lawrence, pine for the blood, sap and verve of the savage, sun-drenched southland. They had far rather been ‘pagans suckled in a creed outworn.’ So the drooping twilight yearns for the dawn, which it dreams still lies in front of it, though it’s far back in a past that it can never return to. ‘The longing to be primitive is a disease of culture,’ Santayana wrote. ‘To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia.’ And vitalism is a late growth of an age that has lost its vitality.
To be against reason and the intellect, and on the side of blood, intuition and the life-force, is one more trick of the overweening intellect.
20 Exclude the human
Human kind makes its advances in form and truth by cleansing them bit by bit of their impure human element. ‘As well as thoughts which are not worthy of us,’ Rostand wrote, ‘we have ones of which we are not worthy.’ And these may be the only ones worth having.
Humankind makes good its claim to be here by its few inhuman exceptions. Life is justified only by what transcends it, and it has been most enhanced by those who had something better to do than live.
21 Common sense the enemy of thinking
We call common sense whichever of our herd’s prefabricated notions we happen to concur with. Einstein defined it as ‘the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen,’ as conscience is the stash of moral claptrap that we pick up by age eighteen. And so half of the common sense of a society is made up of its shared unquestioned superstitions.
What you know for certain you know by intuition. But what you think you know by intuition must be false. As Valéry wrote, ‘What has been believed by all, in all times and places, has every likelihood of being false.’ If you feel certain of a thing, you can be certain that you are wrong.
Common sense when sensible is not common, and when common is not sensible. Half our truisms are not so much as half true. But all of our commonplaces are commonplace through and through. And it is only common sense to believe the most common nonsense.
Common sense can grasp neither the perverseness of the heart nor the weirdness of the world of matter.
22 The platitudes of common sense
Common sense paves the world with flat platitudes, so that we can walk round in it and not trip up on its lush unevenness. It is the archenemy both of science and of art. Aristotle was its most proficient exponent, and so for two thousand years he lay like a dead hand on the life of the mind.
Our own small opinions arrange themselves like iron filings around the big magnet of common ideas.
Thinking is a solitary activity, but we are never on our own when we do it. Our heads hum with the bawling voices of the tumultuous world. What light could I gain from my seclusion, when I spend it in such lustreless company?
A platitude is a truism the converse of which is also true. Too many cooks spoil the broth, yet many hands make light work.
23 Common sense against science
Once mocked by faith, common sense is now confuted by science, which advances by deposing it and installing unlikely imagination in its seat. ‘This will be found discordant with all experience,’ as Euler said of one of his demonstrations, ‘yet it is true.’
It is not science that is ‘trained and organized common sense,’ as Huxley said. It is mythology. Science is an assault on common sense and mythology. Both these claim to be based on nature, but they are made by custom. They seek to trace all events back to simple personal intentions. The accounts that science gives of the big bang or of evolution are far more bizarre than the folktale of a watchmaker god fabricating the world as a machine for our use. All the laws of nature turn out to be contrary to nature as common sense conceives it. And in order to grasp them, we had to rid ourselves of our preconception of what is natural.
24 Common sense is anthropocentric nonsense
Science stood against the flights of metaphysics and for a real objective world that we could reach through our senses. But what it has led to is a far more bizarre world than any metaphysician dreamt of, and which our senses cannot validate.
The physical world, with its quarks, leptons, entanglement, superposition, wave-particle duality and uncertainty, is far more poetic, mysterious and mind-boggling than the spiritual world dreamt up by religious teachers, who could see no farther than the short and narrow views of human-centred common sense.
SPEED
25 The speed of thinking
You conceive an idea in a brief flash of rapture, carry it round in a long pregnancy, give birth to it in a quick struggle, and then have to spend years licking it into shape. You may incubate your thoughts unconsciously, but you must hatch them deliberately.
We deride those of our rivals who can’t do the things that we can do, and we deem that those who can do more than us must be fakes or shallow opportunists. Ponderous minds preen themselves on their thoroughness. Slapdash minds preen themselves on their quickness. Those who write at a crawl are proud of their fastidiousness, and those who write in haste are proud of their fluency.
26 The race is not to the swift
‘In philosophy,’ Wittgenstein notes, ‘the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly.’ It is the hare, scampering and napping in brief bursts, that comes last and gains the prize of truth.
To find your way to the truth, you have to go slow. But in order to gain the time to go slow, you have to be quick in dismissing most topics of common concern.
The laborious way is the lazy way. The hard way is to work less and to think more. ‘To do a great work,’ Butler said, ‘a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.’ Thinking is an assiduous idleness. Paid work is a regimented restlessness.
If you think about it long enough, you can get all you need out of any one thing.
In a life spent thinking even the most prolific mind comes up with no more than half a dozen fresh insights.
First thoughts may not all be bad, but too many of them are patched up from the second thoughts of others.
27 Patience
You ought to think as urgently as if you were to die today, and as patiently as if you were sure to live for all time. Our audacity goes to waste if it is not kept in order by patience. And our patience goes to waste if it lacks the spur of audacity. A seeker must ruminate like a cow and pounce like a tiger. You reach the truth by daring and delay.
The best perseverance waits so long, that it gains ends quite unlike the ones it first hoped for. How many teeming ideas you may breed in the interim from when the brain takes thought till the point at which the pen starts to work.
Half of talent consists in persistence. But you won’t have the heart to persist if you don’t have the talent for the work.
Patience is the key to forming an artist or thinker, almost as much as impatience. So Valéry called genius ‘a long impatience.’ It must run a sprint for the length of a marathon.
How few thinkers take the time to find the clarity that lies concealed at the core of most questions.
28 The inspiration of boredom
Only a creature that has the capacity to think can be bored, but one that is free to think should never be bored. And yet most of us would be intolerably bored if we were left with nothing to do but think.
The life of the artist is one of arduous inactivity and strenuous idleness.
Boredom and passivity lour like the sultry sky that preludes the lightning-bolt of inspiration. But we have now dreamt up no end of toys and games to skirt the tedium which might have precipitated thinking. Ennui was the creative curse of aristocratic societies. And busyness is the sterile curse of commercial ones.
Thoughts are formed as the cosmos was, by minute and random fluctuations in the void.
Instantaneous strokes of inspiration need long spans of vacant waiting in which to gather their force.
You have to stick to a steady diet of dry inactivity, if you want to think world-shattering thoughts.
29 Great things bore us
A great artist or thinker must bear with being bored. And a great work of art must dare to be a bore. We know great minds and their products by how soon they start to fatigue us. We don’t find them hard, but simply bland and foreign to all our interests.
Good art invents and surprises, is bright and amusing. But the best imagines monotonously. It dares to bore and bewilder you, and to demand that you give your whole mind to it. It repels you, where lacklustre art charms and entertains, satisfies and salves you. Second-rate works invite us in and make us feel at home. They amuse us but ask nothing of us.
Great books are so boring because they don’t feed our hunger for fun. And mediocre books are so banal because they do.
30 Fortunate obstructions
How delicate a fine intellect is, yet how robustly it thrives in the stoniest soil.
Like and unlike, associates and attackers, emulation and opposition, all goad and fire you to think. ‘Our antagonist is our helper,’ as Burke said.
Those who lack the courage to contend with worthy rivals fall as victims to worthless ones.
A thought has to hide a little, to show that it will repay the finding.
Our deficiencies enlarge us. We should be grateful for our flaws. They save us from squandering our best gifts. Cowardice keeps us from coveting the tin trophies which our dauntlessness might have won for us. And pride may stay us from misspending our talents on small aims. Our self-deceptions free us from scattering our force on worthless ventures by daring us to hope that we might have it in us to do grand ones.
Genius makes life hard and art easy. It puts everything to its best use, by smoothing the path, or else by roughening it.
In order to get on in the world, a middling talent needs to make the most of all its opportunities. But in order to find the truth, a great mind must put in its own way as many obstacles as it can. ‘All that is called hindrance without is but occasion within,’ as Thoreau says.
In the dungeon of this world you have nothing but your shackles to winch yourself up to freedom.
31 Dangerous rewards
A constructive mind is imperilled more by the incentives that are held out to it than by the impediments that stand in its way. Hindrances toughen and extend it. To smooth its way would be to shrink and slacken it. Golden prizes call forth tinsel virtues. The opportunities that come to us turn us from our real work. The world tempts the least talent with such rich bribes, that even the greatest are now willing to sell their best gifts to win them.
True artists are the ones who make art harder than it need be, both for themselves and for us. And real writers make writing hard for themselves and reading hard for their readers. We drive ourselves on by making rods for our own backs.
32 The wandering paths of thinking
Thinkers, like explorers, inch forward haltingly, miss the right path time and again, double back, and lose half their posse. At length they reach a newfound land of strange ideas which they never hoped to see. And what they leave for us is not the unruly realism of a logbook, but a map, a thing much more tidy, artificial and abstract. Then at their heels come the critics and savants, who pave a broad and level way, so that we can all commute back and forth to where they got with so much sweat. ‘Improvement makes strait roads,’ Blake says, ‘but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.’
Genius doesn’t go faster than talent. It hoes a different road.
Trailblazers have a knack for making fresh and fruitful blunders. Their wanderings will teach you more than a subaltern seeker’s truths. Fine insights avail, even when they err. Dull facts would still be dry and flavourless, were they ever so true. ‘Great men’s errors are to be venerated as more fertile than little men’s truths,’ as Nietzsche wrote.
33 Bless your errors
How many times you have to get everything wrong, so that you can get a few small things right. When you lose your way and retrace your steps, you may gain such unlooked-for vistas, that you bless your errors. A straight line sees least of the world. What a boon that life is so full of false starts and wrong turnings.
A genius is someone who has the brains and daring to go wrong in a quite new way. That all one’s ideas should be quite false is no disqualification for being a great thinker. Just the reverse.
It takes a fecund mind to spin a rich system out of a few initial false moves. A suggestive untruth may be worth more than a hundred sterile facts. Thinkers’ truths are rarely as lasting or fruitful as their errors.
Most of my ideas are more or less accurate approximations, which I keep till I fix them in their final precise untruth. Some misleading shortcuts may lead you to the truth as unswervingly as others lead you from it. You have to use the simplifications of yesterday if you are to form the thoughts of tomorrow.
The mental energy which humans have wasted on elaborating and defending their bizarre schemes of thought has been one of the chief fuels that has powered the search for truth.
34 The discipline of distraction
The best way to catch real thoughts is to lay out in writing a sprinkling of decoy ones. And you can ambush mindfulness by allowing your mind to ramble. Thinking is a studied vagrancy, and distraction is the devil’s providence. What the years will teach you are the innumerable small lessons that you glean while you’re waiting for your one grand awakening, which will never come.
It’s just because we can’t give our whole mind to the scene in front of us that we can think at all.
Scientists need to find their one big idea. But a seeker of human truth who does so should know that it is a lie.
The idea or event that suggests to you ten thoughts if you meet it one day might give no hint of a thought if you meet it the next.
35 The stuff of thinking
Ideas, like capital, aggregate in accordance with two laws, the law of self-reproduction and the law of concentration. Thoughts make thoughts as money makes money. And to those who have more will be vouchsafed. To think great thoughts, all you need is to have thought a lot of great thoughts beforehand, since it is the thoughts themselves that do most of the real thinking.
We must learn to think by thinking. So how is it that we learn to think at all?
Most people are impermeable to ideas. They can grasp what they mean, but they can’t see why they matter, since they lack the rich grounding of thought which might cause them to resonate.
DARKNESS
36 Passionate detachment
Genius feels thoughts, good sense merely thinks them. Masterly minds feel ideas as if they were passions, and transcribe their passions into ideas. They know, as Pessoa put it, ‘how to think with emotions and to feel with intellect.’ Yet they are scorched by thoughts whose flame we scarcely feel. And they are tinglingly awake to the trials through which we sleepwalk. They take in things as if they were close at hand, but can judge them as if they were miles away. They dream audacious dreams, yet still reason with all stringency.
Passion gives light to some, but it darkens others. It may urge you to search for the truth, but it makes you feel that you have already found it.
Thoughts are made like rocks, some by the pressure of a long despair, some by the transformation of sediments laid down an age ago, and some in a sudden eruption of ecstasy, ‘the fine delight that fathers thought,’ as Hopkins phrased it.
37 Thinking through estrangement
In order to know a thing you must be alienated from it. We can know the world because we are not at home in it. Science is a sign of our estrangement from nature, as history is one of the diseases of a culture that is cut off from its past. And self-knowledge is a symptom of our self-alienation.
To grasp what a thing means, you have to back off just far enough to misperceive it plausibly. Stay too far, and your eyes can’t make it out. Come too close, and you won’t misjudge and oversimplify it in a beguiling way.
In order to see a thing for the first time, you need to look at it with the same sad and ardent detachment as if it were for the last time.
38 Thinking alone
Solitude confines and concentrates your gifts, society broadens but dissipates them. Other people rouse you to be brighter, shallower and more false.
How could you be a real thinker, if the conversation that you hold with yourself does not mean more to you than all those that you hold with others?
Society, like suffering, supplies you with all the stuff that you would need in order to think. But it gets in the way of you turning it into a rich work. To do that you have to stay contentedly alone. Solitude is a darkroom that you enter to develop the photograph of the world that you took in society.
Solitude would be empty and unproductive if it were not filled with thinking. And thinking would bear no fruit if it were not done in solitude.
A plodding mind stays with others, even when it’s by itself. But a rare and intrepid one goes its own way, even when it’s with a crowd. For a crystal soul like Dickinson’s, friendship felt at once too intense and too insipid, and so she shut the door.
Truth is shy, and won’t come near you if you’re not alone. And so the best way to keep safe from its onslaughts is by huddling close to your herd. But if you want to think in a new key, you must stay on your own. And if you don’t start out like that, you soon will be. The greeks did not know solitude. So how could they know themselves?
In order to find the truth, you must stand alone. But most people would fear that they had lost it if they ever did that.
39 Thinking deprivation
You come to know a thing by desiring it, by acquiring it, by losing it, or by missing it. When you long for what you don’t have, don’t you learn all there is to know of it, save how palely you will care for it once you have got it in your hands?
You learn because you lack. Plenty gives you confidence, but privation makes you hunger. And confidence may train you to grow modest, light and quiet. But hunger goads you to excess, intrepidity and desperation, and it’s these that will guide you to the truth.
The most repressed and uneventful life gives plenty of scope for high raptures of reverie and emotion.
Some know the world through copious acquaintance, and some through deprivation. ‘It would have starved a gnat,’ Dickinson wrote, ‘to live so small as I.’ These view it as through a camera obscura. A tiny pin slit lets in the wide show.
Some of the deepest reasoners, such as Kant or Nietzsche, had scant experience of the world, as some of the richest lands are the most lacking in resources, while others are, like Africa, kept poor by their natural wealth.
40 Out of the dark
Misery acquaints you with strange bedfellows, and one of the strangest of these is truth.
Each blow the world deals you opens a gash through which the truth may seep in and poison you.
We are all plummeting down a chasm. Thinkers are those few who can still muse on what they see as they spiral downward.
There will never be a machine so distraught that it will feel the urge to form a work of art or a thought of its own. But it can turn out endless iterations of kitsch.
Misery files the mind to a finer and finer tip, till it blunts it. Like a monsoon, it first refreshes it, then swamps it, and in the end rots it.
Oppression makes its victims stupid. All they can think of is their own plight. And they lose the capacity to see themselves save in reference to their oppressors. But these have the luxury of never wasting a thought on their victims. So they are free to occupy their minds with things more worth their attention.
41 The sum of failures
How could you make out what is real or deep, till your eyes have grown used to the murk of unsuccess? Dusk brings out the subtle shades for those whose lives go dark before they close. You have to wrestle for years with the angel of your failure, till it will bless you.
You may net your most profound perceptions from your abysmal fiascos, so long as you don’t drown in their instruction first.
The amount of truth that you can glean is equal to the sum of the failures that you can bear to face.
Insomnia is the emblematic lot of the thinker, the eerie endless blank of despair, lost in a fog haunted by zombies, to feel one’s being evaporating into the night.
Impotence is the teeming father of fresh thoughts. Those who can’t do dream.
Your fate as a thinker is to spend more thought on things and people than they would ever spend on you.
WONDER
42 Thinking by exaggerating
Overstatement can spice the blandest truths. A platitude, like rancid meat, must be pungently seasoned to make it palatable. ‘The mixture of a lie,’ Bacon says, ‘doth ever add pleasure.’ Thinkers bring moribund views back to life by exaggerating them, and so they are reborn as more interesting untruths.
I can believe anything if it’s stretched far enough, even the truth.
A sprightly mind can trace its way to the plain truth by reading too much into the quotidian things that cross its path. Thoreau circumnavigated the globe by canoeing round Walden Pond. And he plumbed the inequity of the state by spending one night in the county jailhouse. When Delacroix wished to paint a tiger, he used his cat as a model.
Artists render their experiences exemplary by misrepresenting them.
43 Wonder is the fruit not the seed of thinking
Scientists don’t study nature because its rainbow multiformity overawes them. Their aim is to shrink it to a small sum of reductive laws of their own discovering. And they call nature beautiful because it yields them beautiful equations. The purpose of science is, as Einstein put it, ‘to make the chaotic diversity of sense experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.’
The mind works in the same way, whether it is an ancient assyrian sculptor or a modern particle physicist. It simplifies, economizes and abstracts, and brings a jumble of accidents under its own rule and order.
Wonderment is the consequence and not the cause of our discoveries. It is not the seedbed of knowledge, as Bacon claimed, but its fruit. You don’t learn because you wonder. You wonder by dint of what you have learnt.
The ancients felt awe at the cosmos because it seemed so full of order and purpose. It awes us because it seems so bizarre, chaotic and pointless.
44 Cultivating wonder
Born blasé, we come by slow steps to be startled. Children are not prone to wonder. All the world is too new to them.
The starry cosmos and uncharted space grow more strange and uncanny the more we get to know of them, though we marvel at them less and less. Our minds are large enough to solve their most involved mysteries, but are too harried by their own low drives to feel much reverence for their majesty. We are, in Dickinson’s phrase, limited guests in this incredible lodging. How inadequate our use to the infinite gift.
We are so cheaply amazed, yet so reluctantly awed. Having framed this world of wonders, the Lord made our hearts dry and small, so that they wouldn’t burst in awe.
Is there any puzzle too large to baffle the human mind, or too small to engross it?
45 The ladder of abstraction
Genius is the exception that is able to piece out the rule. A great theorist, such as Newton, is the first to draft an overarching law, the instances of which men and women had been witnessing day by day for thousands of years. Small minds see more than they know. Great ones know more than they see. ‘Great ideas,’ as Johnson wrote, ‘are always general.’
The mind climbs to its acme by the scaffold of abstraction. And the best writing builds on unsupported speculation. ‘Man,’ Valéry says, ‘fabricates by abstracting.’
We postulate general laws from specific precedents which strike us just because they jar with general laws.
EXPERIENCE
46 The idiocy of anecdote
‘Common minds,’ Macrobius notes, ‘are more struck by examples than by arguments.’ We are repelled by cold reason, as much as we are soothed and amused by bubbly anecdotes.
Average people reel off yarns and opinions. Intellectuals cobble ideas and systems. But a true pathfinder must seek out a way where no ideas have yet been mapped.
We love stories, because they are intimate yet shared, sparkle with droll details, and scratch our itch for what is new and titillating, while conforming to the old tropes which comfort us.
People want to see all their tired old notions reworked in bright new tales. What they love, as Goethe said, is ‘a new way of putting what they are used to.’
47 Truth or stories
The worst story draws us in more magnetically than the best idea. Christians love their faith for its fables more than for its truths. They like to hear how Peter sheared an ear, but take no heed of the injunctions to turn the other cheek and resist not evil. The trivial, the personalized and the anecdotal trumps the serious, deep and transcendental. Divine truths don’t mean much to us. It’s the small human details that stick in our minds. And we are convinced that a story is factual by the novelistic touches which show that it is a fiction.
We are all swimming away from the strand of truth out to a waste sea of stories. We flee dry and barren fact for gaudy and barren anecdotes. Anecdotes are as gratifying as analysis is mortifying. Stories dress up our selfishness, but thinking strips it bare. We spin stories to garnish our greed and hide how implacably it wolfs its way to what it wants.
Stories occlude from us the truth of our being by distracting us with the accidents of our urgent activity. They assert our agency and blind us to the deep structures which shape the arc of our lives.
48 We trust experience rather than reason
I place more trust in my experiences than in my reasons, since my experience is more my own. When asked to adduce a pertinent reason, I prefer to cite some illustration drawn from my own life.
Anecdote, as Heidegger said, is the enemy of intellectuality, which is why we are so fond of it. Reason would unpleasantly clear our minds of the sludge and debris that they have banked up. So we use anecdotes to keep replenishing them.
People would rather be fooled by stories than fatigued and disillusioned by the truth.
Reasons are common property which anyone can lay claim to. But my anecdotes and experiences belong to me alone.
One anecdote can kill a hundred truths. There’s no arguing with a story.
Reason would not be able to take a single step forward, if memory did not keep stored up all the previous steps it had made.
49 Thinking needs imagination not experience
A poet to whom nothing has happened is still older than the pharaohs. ‘I have more memories,’ Baudelaire said, ‘than if I had lived for a thousand years.’ The best minds make most of what they have least. ‘One may know the world without stepping out of doors,’ as Lao Tzu says. ‘One may see the way of heaven without looking through the window.’ Kafka vows that it will roll in exultation in front of you.
There is one kind of experience that a thinker needs, and that is to think, as there is one activity essential to a painter, and that is to paint. This will teach them more than all the rest of life.
Insight is wise before its time, experience learns to be provident only after the event. ‘How much I’ve lived,’ Pessoa exclaimed, ‘without having lived.’
Who can trace grand thoughts back to the events from which they spring? Who can find the source of the big cataracts?
50 Details
Our minds are at once stolid and inattentive, vacant but humming, vague yet congested with workaday details. We stop short at the accredited semblance, neither graphically exact nor instructively abstract. Most of the things to which we give our faith are both too nebulous and too specific to deserve the name of ideas.
Most of us choose to cling to particular falsehoods rather than find a general truth.
‘What need of details when you know the principle?’ Thoreau asked. People have to keep on compiling a painstaking kit of minute particulars, since they won’t take the time to ascertain the few basic theses which would make sense of them and make their study of them needless. Dismissive of principles, they are entranced by technicalities and trivia. They gnaw on the dry rind of fact, and fling away the juicy pulp of truth.
CONSISTENCY
51 Self-contradiction by not thinking
We fall into inconsistency, whether we think long and hard, or fail to think at all. We think too scantily to make our thoughts cohere. Or else we think so much that they get tangled in a knot of contradictions.
Others can’t help contradicting themselves, because they don’t think enough. But if I contradict myself now and then, it’s because I have so many thoughts, how could they not be out of joint with one another here and there? I glory in both my mulish consistency and my flighty self-contradictions.
Those whose minds are not large enough to hold two coherent truths at the one time don’t find it hard to hold a hundred brawling errors.
People may have a great capacity for believing several contradictory things at the same time, but only because their belief does not mean much at all.
We don’t take the trouble to scrutinize our views, and so they stay the same through time but jar with one another.
There are Don Juans of the intellect, irremediably promiscuous, who have caught inconsistency like syphilis, though most of them stay mental virgins through years of such whoring.
52 Consistency by not thinking
Some people can keep up the same slant on an issue only by continually shifting the grounds on which it rests. Those who hanker to seem consistent are all the time controverting their own views, since they have thought too sluggishly to grasp what they entail.
We change on a whim, yet we drone on with the same thoughts over and over. And though we have such a small range of opinions, they still clash with one another.
We are serial dogmatists, immovable but unsteady, fixed with the same stubbornness in a dozen attitudes in turn. Our belief is rigid, though our beliefs are shifting and shapeless.
My ideas are as fixed as my moods are fitful, and they are as tractable as my drives are tenacious.
53 The virtues of inconsistency
A strong will must be undivided, but a strong intellect is forked and mobile. Intellectual love is purest when most promiscuous.
A writer or book garners its strength from the force and tension of its contradictions.
To be consistent is to be smaller than you might be or false to all that you are.
By being disjoined from yourself you may catch a glimpse of the unity of things.
Thinking is an exercise not in self-expression but in self-alienation. A thinker can never be quite sincere. Each is double and divided, split between the mind observing and the mind observed. To think in a new way, you have to make yourself quite unlike all actual selves, and most of all your own. ‘I stand as remote from myself as from another,’ as Thoreau wrote. Bold imaginers are as much out of harmony with themselves as they are with others. They goad you on either by disagreeing with you or by disagreeing with themselves.
It is only on the edge of disintegration that it all begins to cohere. And it’s when you feel it all start to go that you learn what it was all for.
54 Infinite perspectives
Self-contradiction is a way of multiplying your points of view on a question.
It’s better that a thought should be light enough to float, than that it should be solidly grounded.
Truth is not transparent, but each perspective is translucent. Through it you see further perspectives, each one colouring the rest, which in turn call it in question.
55 Complex simplicity
The largest truths are hard to find but easy to grasp. And some are still more difficult to believe than they are to discover. They mystify us less by their complexity than by their profuse suggestiveness.
It takes a long time to see the complexity of things. It takes a lot longer to see their simplicity. “To perceive the simplest but true condition of things,’ Lichtenberg wrote, ‘requires a very profound degree of knowledge.’
Simplicity is a vessel which is worth just as much as the complex ideas that you pour in to it. ‘Simpleness,’ as Leonardo said, ‘is the height of sophistication.’
Great ideas are as simple as they are rich, and as plain as they are powerful.
56 The whole lie
There is only one whole in the universe, and that is the universe itself. And that is no more than the sum of its parts. The things that we treat as wholes, such as cities, societies or epochs, we form by splitting off from the rest of the world and forcing them to merge as one by the contiguity of their parts.
We are too broad and too diversified to grow all of one piece. ‘The entire,’ wrote Adorno, ‘is the false.’ We become whole at the cost of narrowing and limiting ourselves, and by excluding influences which might have spurred our growth. Multiplicity of becoming or variety of making would be aims both more attainable and more worth attaining than unity of being.
57 Best in bits
A great mind is fragmented and self-divided. Only a mediocre mind can be whole and integrated.
We are at our best only in stray exploits. If our thoughts were of a piece with our whole self, what a mess of dry scraps they would be. ‘Our ability is chopped up in small chunks,’ as Montaigne says. Human kind has done such great things, not by dint of its high level of average capacities, but by the force of its range and variability. The general run is of no account. It’s the extremes and outliers, the freaks and monsters, the oddbods, waifs and strays, the deadbeats and suicides, that show us the way forward.
True nobility cannot fill the wide sky of a life, but it may flash out in stray points of light.
It is the discords that make the music of humanity worth listening to. ‘There is nothing stable in the world,’ as Keats wrote. ‘Uproar’s your only music.’
We are most creative when we are most broken and fragmented.
58 Thinking through paradox
As rhythm and imagery are to verse, so parallelism and paradox are to prose. A principle of musical symmetry and a principle of conceptual difference. Dissimilarity of meaning and similarity of sound. Thus the Bible, Johnson or Wilde.
Strong thinking must make war on its own suppositions. But most paradoxes merely stage mock combats.
Common sense comfortably leads us down the wrong path. And so we need the slant rays of paradox to light our way back to the right one. Thought in any field makes progress by substituting the unlikely paradoxes of plain truth for the platitudes of common sense.
Some paradoxes open your eyes to unsuspected panoramas. But don’t most of them just salt your rancid platitudes as tart perversities?
EDUCATION
59 Education
The schooling of children should bring out the skills that suit their age, which is to say, their formal imagination and their gift for memorizing. So they ought to learn languages, mathematics, music and arts. But we act as if they were competent to make wise judgments on subjects for which they would need wide knowledge, such as philosophy, history, literature and the social sciences. We ask them to judge cases before they can grasp principles, and to master principles before they have learnt methods. So all our education is misdirected.
60 The futility of education
While children are at school, it’s too early for them to learn how to think. And by the time they have left it, it’s too late.
The solution to all our problems, all agree, lies in education. Too bad then, that no one has solved the problem of how to educate the young.
In order to make the good society, you would first need to set up the right system of education. But in order to set up the right system of education, you would first need to have made the good society.
Education is the process which aims to turn us into rational animals. But nothing is more absurd than to design a system of schooling in line with the dictates of reason.
You have to use the tools that your schooling has equipped you with to break out of the prison that your schooling has built for you.
The natural repugnance which most people feel for poetry lies dormant in their souls till school wakes it.
Most people are force-fed a few plums of poetry in the schoolroom, and the mere thought of it makes them sick for the rest of their lives.
61 False education
False schooling moulds us for a life of useful futility. True education unfits us for the world. It brings in no return, is for leisure not for work, for the few not for the mass, for self-cultivation not for the state. And so of course there is no longer any true education.
Where all are sent to school, no one is educated. They are only trained to serve as cogs in the economy which promises to make all so rich.
The use of true education was to be useless. And the real mission of a university was to enforce a season of idleness on young minds at an age when they might use it to grow. A university is not fulfilling its proper function if it is not useless.
Fun fills up our leisure hours, and we need no tuition for that. So the sole task that school performs now is to prepare us for a job.
The aim of mass schooling is not to train people to think but to equip them to do their job without the need to.
True education would act as an antidote to narrow specialization. False education infects us with it.
Schools don’t make girls and boys bright. They raise the average level of dullness.
Nothing beats a religious education for instructing you how to lie with a crystal conscience.
The state trains up the young by corrupting them in the ways sanctioned by fashion.
62 Education for thinking
When you are taught a fact by someone else, all you learn is that one fact. But find out a truth by your own endeavours, and you guess ten more and maybe a hundred. Dullards have to be taught, a quick mind learns, a deep one makes its own discoveries.
Education turns the mind into a magnet to draw facts to it. Thinking sets it spinning to make a motor to spark new thoughts.
You can’t make sense of any one thing, till you have learnt how the whole works. But you can’t make out how the whole works, till you have mastered many discrete things. A few writers, such as Montaigne, Shakespeare, Nietzsche or Yeats, provide you with a complete education. But you need a complete education before you can reap much good from them. Their books contain a model of style, patterns of form, paradigms of character, precepts of taste, a table of values, a manual of how to think, schemas of historical development, and concepts to set your thoughts in order.
Useless knowledge is the only kind worth acquiring. But these days we’re all too poor to afford it.
63 Educating yourself for others
All schooling is sophistical, since it enables us to act as if we knew what we don’t know. It gives us a semblance of knowledge. And in this shifty world that’s of more use than the real thing.
A teacher learns the wrong lesson twice, first as a docile and emulous pupil, then as a smug performer. And some can’t spare the time to learn, because they are in such a hurry to instruct. Few of us can let pass an invitation to show off how little we know.
Teachers are eager to hand on the lessons that they’ve learnt, since they have no better use for them. But anyone who knows things that are worth teaching will have more sense than to set up as a teacher.
The proof of knowledge may be the ability to teach, as Aristotle said, but the urge to teach is proof of a lack of wisdom.
Most teachers are not worth listening to, because all they have done is listen to their teachers.
How stupid I become by educating myself for others.
Teachers are content to serve as a thoroughfare for the feet of their students to trample. Yet they presume that they know the goal to which to guide them.
‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’ Too bad one of the things they can’t do is teach.
64 Cultural senility
Our new alexandrian age is resourceful yet sapless, frenetic yet spiritless, puerile yet senile, squeamish but selfish, lacking in wisdom but technically adept.
You can gauge the vigour of a culture from the dilapidation of its colleges. If they are ailing, it may be sound. But it has lost its juice, if they are rich and flourishing. If they are healthy and thronging, it will be sclerotic and emaciated. Alexandria is the antipodes of the imagination.
Academies are the mortuaries of thought, and scholars are the undertakers and morticians of a culture. They don’t lend it new life, but lay it out for a decent burial.
A university is no more fit to foster fresh ideas than a factory is to make art. Academics are the bureaucrats of the intellect. They collate and curate and sort and marshal facts, but lack the audacity to seek out large new truths.
In a decaying culture the poet gives place to the critic as the prophet gives place to the priest.
Scholarship is the premature senility of a sprightly mind, which has grown fussing, repetitive and myopic. Scholars are not thinkers but hoarders.
65 Research is not thinking
News is trivia that everyone is keen to hear, scholarship is trivia that no one cares to learn.
Scholarship is one of the most diligent and laboursome forms of mental laziness.
Research is what scholars do instead of thinking.
Scholars find more and more subtle ways of grossly missing the point. They may not arrive at the right answers, but at least they know how to ask the wrong questions.
We feel far more reverence for laborious erudition than for mere original thinking. Facts can be heaped up, shared, shown off, discussed, checked and verified. But an original thought is not the sort of thing that you can mention in polite company. But the respect for knowledge has now slumped so low, that people have ceased to revere learned asses.
Scholars fear to be caught in an error more than they love the truth. And so they get it all wrong.
A specialist has drab views on one subject, a polymath has drab views on several. They are both too busy gathering facts to gain fresh insights.
The most delimited topic has room for enough puzzles to obsess the most dexterous mind and to conceal that they are not worth deciphering. Such meagre riddles fixate us, but we shut our minds to signal truths.
66 The megalomania of small minds
A smallminded specialist feels like stout Cortés, dizzied by the vast bonanza that they hope to reap from some small patch of barren fact. Let the skies fall, but let my treatise on roman bean farming be published.
What minor scribbler or dried-up scholar doesn’t feel that their books justify the universe?
Scholars regard each trivial revision in their subject as a revolution in thought. No idea is too small to count for them as a revelation, so long as it pertains to them and their own little sphere. Which of them would not say of their staggering findings, ‘I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world’? And how could such discoveries ever be lost?
67 Pedants
Quibblers and purists insist on a misplaced precision, since they lack the finesse to gauge how many sides a question might have. They grope for the key, but in their bat-eyed fumbling have not yet found the door.
A pedant’s mind painstakingly sifts facts, and lets in none but the most minute.
Rigid people learn a few small points so well when they’re young, that they lose the flexibility to learn much else after that. How many things you need to keep in mind, and how many things you need to shut your eyes to or unlearn, if you aim to search out new truths.
Some sticklers split hairs because they know so much about a small area, and some because they know a mere smattering. Those who know nothing love to point out how little others know.
Both doggedness and dabbling come to the same thing in the end, namely a flat and dry formalism.
Smug pedants presume that they are sedulous perfectionists.
Some people become formalists because they have no sense of form. They note each comma, colon or parenthesis in a sentence, but are blind to its deep pattern and deaf to its music.
68 Parasitic critics
Would literature now seem alive, if its corpse weren’t wriggling with so many busy critical maggots? But a worm in the guts of a lion feels as pleased with its lot as the king of beasts.
Scholarship is parasitic but self-perpetuating. Scholars have no more need of their host. They have found out how to feed off the excrement of their fellow parasites. And commentators hold that the role of a great writer is to provide fodder for their commentaries. The death of the author has made room for the birth of the academic.
Critics are spiders, and their interpretations are the cobwebs which disfigure great works of art.
The scholarly strain their ingenuity to dig out in a piece of art those features that prove their own ingenuity.
69 The critic’s Judas kiss
Critics betray art with the Judas kiss of interpretation. It is a way of shirking the challenge that art sets us. The value of a work of art lies in the intensity of its imaginative fire. It is not the transmission of a message. That is the straw to which a pedagogue would dry it. All the things that we say of a work of art are a waste of breath. It is not there to be decoded, classified or contextualized. You must feel it as a coup of imagination.
An ingenious work of art sparks infinite interpretations. A superlative work of art makes all interpretations vain, though it can’t thwart critics who are paid to multiply them. By multiplying interpretations, scholars don’t free a text to reveal its own meaning. They torture it till it yields up all the meanings they want to drag out of it, so as to show off their own skill in interpreting.
We seek to elucidate works of art, because we have no idea what a work of art is for.
Most critics are not failed artists. They are failed critics. If they were failed artists, they would know a lot more about art. All that they learn from great writing is how to write badly.
The only useful criticism is that which is implicit in the form of great creative works. But we are far too deep to have the skill to read that.
READING
70 Reading
Words wait patiently in the living tomb of a book for a reader to dream them back to life.
You learn nothing from the best books until you are ready for them. But it’s they that have to do half the readying.
In order to make yourself worthy of the best, you have to read books that are better than you deserve. You have to overrate your powers if you want to enlarge them.
In each second-rank work I recognize my own best thoughts. They come back to me with a certain alienated mediocrity.
Some authors hold that we read too much and too widely, and that we ought to confine our reading to their own books and a few other classics, and spend the rest of our time meditating on these.
You no more catch the drift of a sentence by attending to the meaning of each word in it than you grasp the meaning of a word by spelling out each of its letters.
Let pleasure guide what you read, but only if you have first learnt to read for some worthier end than pleasure. Those who think that they read for pleasure will read the books that others round them say they find pleasurable.
71 Thinking through reading
You can’t read well if you have not thought. But how could you think well if you have not read well? You learn to reflect by reading, and then you learn to read by reflecting.
Meditation advances far more ploddingly and far more rapidly than reading. It may take an age to find a new way of thinking, but once you have it, it will give you the key to unlock a whole mint of mysteries, which no amount of reading would have done.
You add to your knowledge by what you read, but you multiply it by how you think. Read to gain breadth, reflect to go deep.
You can grasp a new concept only if you have already thought up to the brink of it on your own. It’s a bridge that you have to beat your path to by your own efforts before you can cross it. You benefit from some books because you are prepared for them, and from others because you never will be.
The work of thinking never ends. And when you assume that you’ve got to the end, you have still to learn what you needed to know from the beginning. By thinking through a problem or reading through a book, you change your way of thinking so much, that you have to start again thinking or reading through it using the new organs you have grown.
72 Reading and not thinking
Some people get no ideas except when they hold a book in their hands, and some except when they hold a pen in their hand. But most writers are so busy writing that they have no time to think, as most readers are too busy reading to have time to think. We read to be spared the exertion of thinking. The writer will think for us, or neither need think at all.
Some people read in order to reinforce their prejudices. But most don’t read for any purpose as serious as that. It’s observant people, who might have been able to think, that read so that they won’t have to. Clever people read those writers whom they trust to do their thinking for them, and dull people read those whom they can count on not to think at all.
Thinkers know that books are for people who don’t think for themselves. And yet they live and think in order to write books.
If you want to use books to help you to think new thoughts, you have to keep rereading the same old ones.
How widely we read, and how narrowly we think. ‘We live,’ as Wilde said, ‘in an age that reads too much to be wise.’ But we have now ceased to read, so why are we still as empty-headed as we always were?
73 Read to grow more evil
Reading won’t make you better, but read as well as you can, and it might at least make you worse. A rich work should leave you happier and more evil, more open to adventure in mischief, and more mistrustful of your own fine feelings.
To read well is not an innocent act. You must have been corrupted by a whole history of guilty knowledge.
A book is a carefully constructed bomb, and reading is a controlled explosion, which critics would defuse with their laboured exegesis.
Mawkish critics presume to deliver art from its inhuman flawlessness, and graciously vest giant writers with their own lilliputian virtues.
74 Bad books
Most people would prefer any entertainment to reading a book. And if they must read, they would far rather read a bad book than a good one and a good one than a great one. But a book that’s easy reading is not worth the effort. And a book that is not worth reading at least twice will not be worth reading at all. Yet these are the only books that most of us want to read.
It is only by reading the same old books again and again that we gain new ways of thinking.
Some readers go to books in order to find their own hackneyed notions heightened into shoddy eloquence and set out as a ramshackle programme. When they say that one is well written, they mean that it gives fluent utterance to their own stodgy outlook.
How could people learn anything, when they read such bad books? But they are such bad readers, that they wouldn’t learn much, even if they read good ones.
Poor books are hard to read because they are so turgid. And great books are hard to read because they are so terse.
75 Bad reading, not thinking
We prefer to skim through a hundred big diffuse books than give our attention to a single succinct and exacting one. Most of us want to devote no more than half our mind to the books that we read. And so we want to read only those books whose authors have devoted no more than half their mind to write.
Some readers, like termites, swallow a stack of books, and shred them to a mound of sawdust. ‘To read without reflecting,’ as Burke said, ‘is like eating without digesting.’ We like books that we can bolt without chewing. All we ask of them is that they should ask nothing of us. Yet in the long run we give most to those that demand most of us.
The sole serious kind of reading is rereading. But we read only those books that are not worth rereading and we can grasp at once. And rethinking is the kind of thinking that bears most fruit. ‘Thinkers,’ Valéry wrote, ‘are people who rethink.’ And it is only by rewriting that an author can find the deep underground wells where cisterns of fresh language pool.
76 Good reading is slow reading
A great book takes at least as long to read as it does to write, since you go on reading it for years after you’ve put it down. But poor books take as little time and thought to read as they did to write, which is no doubt why they are so popular.
There is no method to reading, except to read none but the best with unhurried and pensive reverence. ‘Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.’ But we would rather skim through second-rate stuff in a careless rush.
Set all your mind to grasp a few lines of a great author, and you’ll learn more than from all your hasty devouring of their copious volumes. You could deduce all the principles of painting from a single canvas by Cézanne.
To write is a work of compression, to read is a work of expansion. The writer must condense a long time spent thinking to fit a small space of text. And then the reader must expand this by converting it back to a long time spent reading and cogitating.
The writer must be concise, to coax the reader to go slow. The most compact writing takes the longest time to read, since it would force us to pause and think.