A couple of weeks ago my son was in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he found this sign propped up by the river. It's in a great park with a canopy of trees, a perfect place to be, to stop and to read over the summer months. The library supplied numerous crates of books for kids, magazines, leisure and coffee table books... attracting kids, teenagers, and adults of all ages to sit down on cushions or on the steps to read. - a GREAT idea!!!
In this post I am simply putting out there various comments or quotes on the subject of reading - something we need to pursue and enjoy.
2012 is the National Year of Reading in Australia. Their website "Love to Read" states - "There are 46% of Australians who can't read newspapers, follow a recipe, make sense of timetables, or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle."
Charlotte Mason over one hundred years ago wrote, "Our young men and maids do not read unless with the stimulus of a forth coming examination. They are good-natured and pleasant but have no wide range of thought, lofty purpose, little of the magnanimity which is proper for a citizen. Great thoughts and great actions are strange to them.....Therefore the stimuli to greatness, magnanimity,.... we must produce in the ordinary course of education."
The following quote is by Virginia Woolf and was printed over a hundred years ago in The Parents Review magazine. The original article is very long, but I have tried to keep a flow of her thoughts in this quote. Some words and expressions may require thought or the use of a dictionary. I think her comments are challenging and her ideas, which are not commonly heard today, need a new hearing.
"How Should One Read a Book?"
"...The only advice .... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. ..... After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities.... into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place on what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions - there we have none.
But to enjoy freedom.... we have of course to control ourselves. ...... Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?....
Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds .... Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any others. .....
Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall some event that has left a distinct impression on you - how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, and entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. .....
But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasized; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotions itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist - Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy.
Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person - Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy - but that we are living in a different world. Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; .... But if the open air and adventure means everything to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing room, and people talking , and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And if .... we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun round. The moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the mind is now exposed - the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude .... Our relations are not towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each is consistent with itself. ....
Thus to go from one great novel to another .... is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable of not just great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist - the great artist - gives you.
But a glance at .... the shelf will show you that writers are very seldom "great artists", far more often a book makes no claim to be a work of art at all. .... are we to refuse to read them because they are not "art"? Or shall we read them but read them in a different way, with a different aim? ....
Biographies and memoirs .... show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing, succeeding, eating hating, loving, until they die. And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish and we are out at sea; we are hunting, sailing, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are taking part in great campaigns. ....
How far, we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer's life - how safe is it to let the man interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies ... that the man himself rouses in us ... These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must answer them for ourselves ......
But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers. ..... The greater part of our library is nothing but the record of ... fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives ......
None of this has any value; it is negligible in the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go through the rubbish-heaps and find rings and scissors and broken noses buried in the huge past and try to piece them together while .... the woman fills her pail at the well, and the donkey brays."
To be continued ~
THISWEEKWITHTHEKIDS ~ read with and to your kids. Go to the library with them and let them borrow up big. Also borrow books that are outside everyone's interest areas - things you know nothing about. I always cruise the kids books aisles and look at the books that the librarian has placed facing out. They are often new books or books that are borrowed a lot. Bring them home and open them up leaving them out ready for reading.
Cathy
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