Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.
To read and be conscious of the act of reading is for some men (the writer among them) to suffer. I loathe the operation. My eyes are geared for the horizon. Nevertheless I do read for days on end when I have caught the scent of a trail. And I, like any other tired business man, read also when I am "sunk", when I am too exhausted to use my mind to any good purpose or derive any exhilaration or pleasure from using it.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, October 02, 2023
Reading
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, ©1970), p. 55: