So I will end this little book, ut vineta egomet caedam mea, with a piece of advice which the first Lord Selborne gave to the late H.M. Wilkins, and Wilkins passed on to me,—we were all Scholars of Trinity, Oxford. It is this: READ THE CLASSICS RATHER THAN BOOKS ABOUT THE CLASSICS.Similarly, in the Internet Age, "Read the classics rather than blogs about the classics."
J.A. Willis gave similar advice in his article on "The 'Silvae' of Statius and Their Editors," Phoenix 20.4 (Winter 1966) 305-324, but the article is unavailable to me. Willis coined the term metaclassics to mean "books about the classics."
An email from an anonymous reader:
Your blog entry entitled "A Piece of Advice" reminds me of Schopenhauer's words in his preface to On the Will in Nature.
Click here.
He wrote: "Above all, my truth-seeking young friends, beware of letting our professors tell you what is contained in the Critique of Pure Reason. Read it yourselves and you will find in it something very different from what they deem it advisable for you to know."
Dave Lull wrote, "This made me think of CS Lewis on old books in his introduction to Athanasius' De Incarnatione Verbi Dei," advice which is well worth reading:
There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.