The more successful and happy I am, the less time I have for reading books because I am too busy with people I love. Abundant time for reading is my solace for losing in life (I have no wealth, power, marriage, and children).<\/p>\n
Catherine Nicholson writes for NYBooks.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment\u2014for those who could afford it\u2014from the pursuits of wealth and power.<\/p>\n \u201cI daily listen to your words with more attention than one would believe, and perhaps I shall not be thought impertinent in wishing to be heard by you,\u201d wrote the Italian poet Petrarch in 1348. His addressee was the Roman philosopher Seneca, who had died nearly thirteen centuries before. Petrarch\u2019s practice of writing to long-dead authors epitomizes\u2014and helped to initiate\u2014the essential double movement of humanist imitatio, the exchange by which schoolboys and scholars across late medieval and early modern Europe formed their ideas, values, images, tastes, and turns of phrase along the lines of an antiquity they were just beginning to regard (but had not yet begun to speak of) as \u201cclassical.\u201d<\/p>\n The American scholar Thomas Greene in The Light in Troy, his 1982 study of humanism\u2019s intimate relation to and sense of estrangement from the ancient world, called imitatio \u201ca literary technique that was also a pedagogic method and a critical battleground.\u201d Whom to take as one\u2019s exemplars and how closely to follow them, which models to embrace and which to avoid or improve upon, were subjects of fervent debate. In theory, emulating the best of what had been written fostered expressiveness; \u201cin practice,\u201d Greene allows, \u201cit led not infrequently to sterility.\u201d <\/p>\n …channels the allure, for Petrarch and those who came after him, of a life in books, its pleasures \u201cmore intimate and more intense than the satisfaction afforded by other worldly goods.\u201d But such intimacy came at a cost: \u201cA sense of being unsuited to one\u2019s times, a feeling, almost, of extraneousness and alienation.\u201d<\/p>\n There is often a whiff of misanthropy about Petrarch\u2019s passion for books. <\/p>\n …No doubt Virgil, Horace, Boethius, and Cicero had their own human failings\u2014\u201cthey may have been difficult and stubborn\u201d; they too may have suffered from halitosis\u2014but in their writings \u201cthe flower and fruit of their intellect is undiluted and abounding.\u201d As Bolzoni observes, this is a significant alteration of existing commonplaces about books as mirrors:<\/p>\n “The ghost one encounters through reading is better than the real person; the book remains the mirror of the soul, but it is a mirror that selects the best, that refines the image we see in it, cleansing it of all traces of mundane existence.”<\/p>\n …Reading was a passion in early modern Italy, Bolzoni shows, but it was also a pose, an emblem of \u201caristocratic detachment\u201d from the pursuits of wealth, power, and social connections, on which access to and ownership of books practically depended.<\/p>\n …Occasionally, one senses some strain in the narrative\u2014a hint of how the self-flattering mythology of reading might compensate, or fail to compensate, for the inability to find other sources of purpose and fulfillment.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The more successful and happy I am, the less time I have for reading books because I am too busy with people I love. Abundant time for reading is my solace for losing in life (I have no wealth, power, … Continue reading