unread books

The art of tsundoku, which made you buy books that you wouldn't necessarily read, but that you just had to have. To have them there, not reading them, but so you were able to read other books in peace. [445]

—Rodrigo Fresán, The Remembered Past (Open Letter Books, 2022), translated by Will Vanderhyden

failed harvest

…the conquest of the public imagination by the arts, by “art as a way of life,” has reinforced the natural resistance of the mind to ordinary logic, order, and precision, without replacing these with any strong dose of artistic logic, order, and precision. The arts have simply given universal warrant to the offbeat, the intelligible, the defiant without purpose. The schools have soaked up this heady brew. Anything new, obscure, implausible, self-willed is worth trying out, is an educational experiment. Soon, the pupil comes to think that anything unformed, obscure, slovenly he may do is validated by art’s contempt for tradition, correctness, and sense.

[…]

Nothing is right by virtue of its origins, but only by virtue of its results. A stifling tradition is bad and a “great” tradition is good. Innovation that brings improvement is what we all desire; innovation that impoverishes the mind and the chances of life is damnable.

[…]

But nowadays we despise the very word cultivation. I admit that unweeded soil grows wondrous things, which nobody can predict. And these things have an abundance. But it would be a rash man who would call it a harvest.

—Jacques Barzun, “The Centrality of Reading,” The Written Word (Newbury House Publishers, 1971)

devouring reader

One first needs a good desire to eat, drink and read. One must want to read a lot, read more, always read. Thus, in the morning, before the books piled high on my table, to the god of reading, I say my prayer of the devouring reader: Give us this day our daily hunger

—Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie