I have again begun my German and do half an hour every morning before beginning my other work. I am still at Novalis — you will wonder how I have not finished it long ago, and even to myself I seem to have been reading it almost all my life. As I go at about the pace of a schoolboy translating Caesar I expect it will last me for the rest of my days. (I am like the man in the story. 'Why not buy a book?' 'Oh I have one already.')
"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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Sunday, September 14, 2025
Studying German
C.S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves (August 13, 1930):