Quotable

“Go ahead then; study, study and meditate well what you study. Life is a very serious thing and only those with intelligence and heart go through it worthily. To live is to be among men and to be among men is to struggle. But this struggle is not a brutal and material struggle with men alone; it is a struggle with them, with one’s self, with their passions and one’s own, with errors and preoccupations. It is an eternal struggle with a smile on the lips and tears in the heart. On this battlefield man has no better weapon than his intelligence, no other force but his heart.”

— José Rizal, in a letter written to Alfredo Hidalgo

Quotable

"Even the very simple act that we call 'seeing a person we know' is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part." - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Quotable - The Freedom in Fiction

"To read fiction is to do something voluntary and free, to exercise choice over and over." - Jane Smiley, "Fiction is an Exercise in Empathy"

Added:

I can talk a lot about this idea in the context of a prison library. So much of the daily business of living is predetermined for men and women who are incarcerated, but no one tells them what fiction to read. It is a freedom I see many take great advantage of, and a freedom I wish others would not take for granted.

What do Smiley's words mean for people like me, who seems to have more freedom than we know what to do with?

"The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive." - James Gleick, "How Google Dominates Us"

Living with purpose is always a challenge. It is easier to binge on Netflix and onion dip. Other things drag my attention from reading and from even the fiction I want to read. But I learned a long time ago that books will always be there later. Other opportunities will pass.

Still, I want to continue to engage with fiction. I currently live in a small town, where my options are limited. To read blogs, keep up with new books, and blog regularly seems like it should be easy here, but in some ways it is more difficult. I'm not surrounded by librarians and college students anymore. There is no intellectual community to speak of - or perhaps I have just not found it!

I don't always take advantage of the freedom of fiction. My goal this year is to read 100 books, not just fiction. I want to reread books that I loved years ago. I want to read new books and learn new things. I want to keep up with my favorite blogs, and write daily posts of my own.

What will you do with your freedom?

Quotable: The Child That Books Built

"When I caught mumps, I couldn't read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of The Hobbit was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and joined hesitantly together. Primary schools in Britain now sometimes send home a photocopy of a page of Russian or Arabic to remind parents of that initial state when writing was a wall of spiky unknowns, an excluding briar hedge. By the time I reached The Hobbit's last page, though, writing had softened and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts. I had undergone the acceleration into the written word that you also experience as a change in the medium. In fact, writing had ceased to be a thing - an object in the world - and become a medium, a substance you look through."

- Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, pages 64-65

Quotable: The Child That Books Built

"Once books were sacred, literally: the regime of reading was set by the experience of reading scripture. But in the secular times of the last three centuries, which brought us printed words on every subject, print to screw into a ball and flip away after a single reading sometimes, the promise of revelation has splintered, and the splinters have fallen separately, without losing all of their original brightness. One smithereen (at least) has glimmered in the novel. With its conventions that mimic the three dimensions of the world off the page, and its simulation of time passing as measured by experience's ordinary clocks, we hope it can bring a fully uttered clarity to the living we do, which is, we know, so hard to disentangle and articulate."

- Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading

Edward Gorey...

...sums up my reading life right now:

"If I do not seem to be mentioning anything I’ve read lately, it is because I am in one of those periods of undifferentiated flux or something in which I am reading about fifty, at a minimum, books at once, so of course I seldom finish one. Eventually this phase will pass, and I’ll discover I have about ten pages to go in all of them, and will sit down and systematically finish them, one after another." - Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer (quotation found at So Many Books)

Which is my roundabout way of explaining why there's no review today. I'm in the middle of a long biography of Charles Dickens and a handful of other books have been calling my attention away in brief bursts.

More intriguing books also keep creeping up on me, which of course must be acquired to read right away, or maybe later, when I have time. The only thing keeping the books stacked on my bedroom floor moving right now are library due dates! (What do you mean someone else wants this book?!)

So Many Books, so little time...

That Patrick Hamilton can write!

"Those entering the Saloon Bar of "The Midnight Bell" from the street came through a large door with a fancifully frosted glass pane, a handle like a dumb-bell, a brass inscription "Saloon Bar and Lounge," and a brass adjuration to Push. Anyone temperamentally so wilful, careless, or incredulous as to ignore this friendly admonition was instantly snubbed, for this door actually would only succumb to Pushing. Nevertheless hundreds of temperamental people nightly argued with this door and got the worst of it." - page 16, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton (1935)