Monday 27 April 2009

Brit's Back Pages

Reading Brit's response to Non-Obvious Appleyard on torture, I retreat before the complexities of the issue (into a generalised sense that it's probably dangerous to propose a total principled all-circumstances ban on just about anything, and that the British pragmatic bottom-up cumulative approach is preferable to almost anything derived from 'first principles'. By the way, it's Herbert Spencer's birthday today, but I have also retreated from the daunting prospect of writing anything about that strange lost colossus - though I did check out Herbert Spencer quotes online and some of them are surprisingly pithy and insightful - have a look. Maybe he's due a revival. God knows I'm not the man to start it - philosophy is definitely not my thing.) Which brings me to where I intended to start, with Brit's account of boxing up his philosophical Back Pages are realising how little connection he has with the person who read those books. Little remains but a vague memory of having once read them. I think we're all likely to feel this at such times, especially if we hang on to the books of our student years. And if there are comments in the margins... Aiee who was that person? What on earth did he mean by that? Being a good deal older than Brit, I think I've weeded out most of my student books, but I still have some that I know survive as essentially 'props' or totems, rather than reading matter. It is, I like to think, the sign of true education (rather than increasing feebleness of mind) that one can end up so far adrift from an earlier reading self. There is nothing sadder or, in any real sense of the word, less educated than the person whose library consists almost entirely of what they read in their student days. This is a sure sign of someone who has not moved on, whose education ceased with their graduation. True education is more likely to consist, as Brit says, in the stripping away of everything that once seeemed obvious, in the realisation that the more we know the more there is that we don't know. E sempre si fa il mar maggiore... Or, as John Sebastian puts it, 'but the more I see, the more I see there is to see'. This is a process that is hugely expanded and accelerated when we are active on the web and in particular in the blogscape, where worlds of instant connection are constantly opening up vast possibilities, vast areas of knowledge and its handmaiden ignorance. For myself I feel that my true education began all over again once I began to navigate those vast virtual waters, and still more so when I became a part of the blogscape, connected so profitably to the likes of Frank Wilson, Patrick Kurp, D.G. Myers, the indefatigable Yard of course - and Brit.

11 comments:

  1. By the way, to anyone wondering why this post apparently made its first appearance 6 days ago - so am I. Something similar happened with another recent one, but that was worked up from an older draft, so I could understand that - this one, clearly, was new today, so how did that happen? A mystifying place, the blogosphere...

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  2. ...and my lovingly crafted comment I made already has now disappeared :(

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  3. The best stuff I've read since graduation includes:-
    Orwell (essays and so on)
    Larkin
    Hayek
    Darwin

    and three histories - Rackham on the Countryside, Rhodes on the Making of the Atom Bomb, and Rubinstein on The Myth of Rescue.

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  4. Most of the best things I've read since graduation have been blogs (including Nigeness) and blog commenters.

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  5. Imagine if you were forced by some ungodly law to keep every book you had ever read on display.

    My library of horrors from my early years would begin with such gems as Willard Price, moving on to the literary wonders of James Herbert, Steven King, Eric Van Lustbader and the inestimable Sven Hassel to name but a few. Luckily at about the age of 14-15 I read an obscure but beautiful eco-philosophy book called 'The Worm Forgives the Plough' by John Stewart Collis and it set me on track to the love of great literature that I have today.

    If I was still reading Sven Hassel, you would have my full permission to try me for nazi book crimes

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  6. "Once upon a time philosopher, psychologist, and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1823-1903) was popular and respectable enough to feature on cigarette trading cards."

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  7. Your usual insightful commentary, Nige. Yes, the purpose of education should be to make the student an auto-didact. Once you know how to read and enjoy it, you'll begin hunting down your own interests, reinforcing some, discarding others, finding new ones.

    I read a lot of crap in grad school -- all of which (except maybe Foucault) can be happily thrown out. The theorese of the '80s was truly awful stuff. No Edmund Wilson or G.K. Chesterton in my generation, just a lot of hip Marxists who couldn't write a clear sentence to save their lives.

    Now reading the new Colm Toibin and much enjoying it. Makes me want to go to Ireland....

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  8. Back in my drinking days I knew quite a few people who seemed to read the same books they had always read over and over. Anything else you brought to their attention was judged by the standard of those few books - and of course found wanting.

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  9. Thanks for the link Dave (I'd love to have a Herbert Spencer cigarette card! He was also popular enough to become a euphemism for hell, as in 'A Herbert Spencer of a day')... And for yr vision of Hell's library Will, an intriguing idea... And thanks veryone else.

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  10. i thought by the time i was 30 i'd read most of what was worth reading, and at least knew about the ones i hadn't yet got round to - one of the delights of Kurp's blog is coming across names i hadn't even heard of before, e.g. Guy Davenport, Cynthia Ozick, William Gass.

    i'm in the process of trying to massively cull my possessions. It is sobering to reflect how many of my books are carry-overs from when i was younger.

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  11. Wonderful post, Nige. I find that, at age 50, I am, for the first time, traveling back to my earlier reading (and looking - let's not forget the visual arts, which is after all my professional specialty) self and ruminating on the then vs. now. I remember thinking when I was 20 or so that the two greatest painters were Vermeer and Rothko. That the greatest novelists were Proust and Nabokov. So now, at my ripe age, I'm moved to go back and re-read, or re-look, just as an excercise in seeing how I've changed, or where I've been. And, actually, I'm slightly more charmed by my former than by my current self, but this is likely only because I am 50. By 51, it will pass. Self-acceptance and all that.

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