Resumo de On Books

"On Books."

It is an emotional event when a serious Book collector takes a well bound book of classic content into his or her hands; it is the same as that experienced by a seasoned admirer of art. To make this book yours becomes your immediate object. With the achievement of the object will come a pride of possession and a spiritual homage.
"He did not conceal a collector''s just pride of possession; but you need only see him take a book from its shield to know that he felt himself the ephemeral custodian of a perennial treasure. There is a right way and a wrong way of taking a book from the shelf. To put a finger on the top, is a vulgar error which has broken many backs. This was never his way: he would gently push back each of the adjacent books, and so pull out the desired volume with a persuasive finger and thumb. Then, before opening the pages, he applied his silk handkerchief to the gilded top, lest dust should find its way between the leaves. These were the visible signs of a spiritual homage.It is, of course, not the momentary look and feel of a book which sustains a person''s love for it; but, rather, its contents. A proper selection of Books will yield a ready and useful source of knowledge which will assist in the daily bouts with life: books will become your allies, your friends, to whom you may turn for assistance and solace.
"I have friends, whose society is extremely agreeable to me; they are of all ages, and of every country. They have distinguished themselves both in the cabinet and in the field, and obtained high honors for their knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to gain access to them, for they are always at my service, and I admit them to my company, and dismiss them from it, whenever I please. They are never troublesome, but immediately answer every question I ask them. Some relate to me the events of the past ages, while others reveal to me the secrets of nature. Some teach me how to live, and other how to die. Some, by their vivacity, drive away my cares and exhilarate my spirits, while others give fortitude to my mind, and teach me the important lesson how to restrain my desires, and to depend wholly on myself. They open to me, in short, the various avenues of all the arts and sciences, and upon their information I safely rely in all emergencies. ''In my study,'' quaintly said Sir William Waller, ''I am sure to converse with none but wise men; but abroad it is impossible for me to avoid the fools.''

Even a millionaire will ease his toils, lengthen his life, and add 100 per cent. to his daily pleasures, if he becomes a bibliophile; while to the man of business with a taste for books, who through the day has struggled in the battle of life, with all its irritating rebuffs and anxieties, what a blessed season of pleasurable repose opens upon him as he enters his sanctum, where every article wafts him a welcome and every book is a personal friend"...

There is no other method of fixing those thoughts which arise and disappear in the mind of man, and transmitting them to the last periods of time; no other method of giving a permanency to our ideas, and preserving the knowledge of any particular person, when his body is mixed with the common mass of matter, and his soul retired into the world of spirits. Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

The best books are sprinkled in the same number over a given span of time: the longer the span, the longer the list. Thus, while a list of the best books will contain ones written from all ages, the majority, naturally enough, will come from that long span of time which precedes the current age. One definition of a classic book is that it is one that has survived the age in which it was written; that its words of advice and direction are applicable to all ages; it is a book that has surfaceder age to a newer age, kept afloat, so to speak, by the readers of all ages. It follows, then, that no book written in the current age can bear the badge, classic; it must wait until a new age has arrived when likely its author has long been dead. Certainly, however, one will be able to spot, within the current age, leading candidates or contenders.
"A thousand snares beset the path to immortality ...; there are a hundred ways to the pit of oblivion. Therefore, when a writer has by general consent escaped his age, when he has survived his environment, it is madness and folly for us, the children of a brief hour, to despise the great literary tradition which has put him where he is.
"The study of the classics ... teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that low and servile fear which bows only to present power and upstart authority ... we feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.

An art which must be acquired if one is to advance himself or herself, no matter the area of pursuit, is to make a list of the best reading material on the subject. Knowing how to read is fundamental, but knowing what to read is just as essential. "Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

Read "no mean books," who then proceeded to lay down three rules:
1. Never read any book that is not a year old.
2. Never read any but famed books.
3. Never read any but what you like. In short, every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a purpose. One should not be a desultory reader; one should be a purposeful and organized reader. The world is much too full of books: "trivial, enervating, inane, and, even noxious."
"It is the case with literature as with life; wherever we turn we come upon the incorrigible mob of humankind, whose name is Legion, swarming everywhere, damaging everything, as flies in summer. Hence the multiplicity of bad books, those exuberant weeds of literature which choke the true corn. Such books rob the public of time, money, and attention, which ought properly to belong to good literature and noble aims, and they are written with a view merely to make money or occupation. They are therefore not merely useless, but injurious. Nine-tenths of our current literature has no other end but to inveigle a thaler or two out of the public pocket, for which purpose author, publisher and printer are leagued together. A more pernicious, subtler, and bolder piece of trickery is that by which penny-a-liners and scribblers succeed in destroying good taste and real culture. ... Hence, the paramount importance of acquiring the art not to read; in other words, of not reading such books as occupy the public mind, or even those which made a noise in the world, and reach several editions in their first and last years of existence. We should recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience, and we should devote the ever scant leisure of our circumscribed existence to the master spirits of all ages and nations, those who tower over humanity, and whom the voice of Fame proclaims: only such writers cultivate and instruct us. Of bad books we can never read too little; of the good never too much. The bad are intellectual poison and undermine the understanding. Because people insist on reading not the best books written for all time, but the newest contemporary literature, writers of the day remain in the narrow circle of the same perpetually revolving ideas, and the age continues to wallow in its own mire. ... Mere acquired knowledge belongs to us only like a wooden leg and wax nose. Knowledge attained by means of thinking resembles our natural limbs, and is the only kind that really b

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