"On one occasion he went to the [Harvard] University Library to procure some books.
The librarian refused to lend them. Mr. Thoreau repaired to the President,
who stated to him the rules and usages, which permitted the loan of books to resident graduates,
to clergymen who were alumni, and to some other residents within
a circle of ten miles radius from the College.
Mr. Thoreau explained to the President that the railroad had destroyed the old scale of distances,
— that the library was useless, yes, and President and College useless, on the terms of his rules,
— that the one benefit he owed to the College was its library,
— that, at this moment, not only his want of books was imperative,
but he wanted a large number of books,
and assured him that he, Thoreau, and not the librarian, was the proper custodian of these.
In short, the President found the petitioner so formidable,
and the rules getting to look so ridiculous,
that he ended by giving him a privilege which in his hands proved unlimited thereafter."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,
all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers,
for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.
In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state,
or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal,
and need fear no change nor accident.
The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the
veil from the statue of the divinity;
and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,
since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.
No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.
That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.
My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university;
and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library,
I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world,
whose sentences were first written on bark,
and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper.
Says the poet M?r Camar Uddin Mast,
(1) "Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world;
I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine;
I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.
" I kept Homer's Iliad
(2) on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then.
Incessant labor with my hands, at first,
for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time,
made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future.
I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work,
till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.
The student may read Homer or ?schylus
(3) in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness,
for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes,
and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books,
even if printed in the character of our mother tongue,
will always be in a language dead to degenerate times;
and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,
conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of
what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press,
with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.
They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious,
as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours,
if you learn only some words of an ancient language,
which are raised out of the trivialness of the street,
to be perpetual suggestions and provocations.
It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would
at length make way for more modern and practical studies;
but the adventurous student will always study classics,
in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be.
For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
They are the only oracles which are not decayed,
and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona
(4) never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well,
that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise,
and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.
It requires a training such as the athletes underwent,
the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written,
for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language,
the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound,
a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously,
like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that;
if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression,
too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.
The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were
not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages;
for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew,
but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects
of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper
to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when
the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages
of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures,
then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness
the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear,
after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.
However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence,
the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting
spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.
There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment
on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath.
What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study.
The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him,
to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion,
and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator,
speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.
No wonder that Alexander
(5) carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket.
A written word is the choicest of relics.
It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art.
It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language,
and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;
— not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.
The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech.
Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature,
as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint,
for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to
protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world
and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best,
stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause
of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common
sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy
in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.
When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry
his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion,
he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of
intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and
the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves
his good sense by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that intellectual
culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were
written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is
remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless
our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been
printed in English, nor ?schylus, nor Virgil (6) even — works as refined, as solidly done,
and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their
genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong
and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never
knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius
which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when
those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even
less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the
Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas (7) and Zendavestas (8) and Bibles, with Homers
and Dantes and Shakespeares, (9) and all the centuries to come shall have successively
deposited their trophies in the forum of the world.
By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.