Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Book of Delight and Other Papers by Israel Abrahams
page 67 of 221 (30%)
Legs move it." What Montaigne seems to mean is that we love rhythm. Body
and mind must move together in harmony. So it is with the Mohammedan over
the Koran, and the Rabbi over the Talmud. Jews sway at prayer for the same
reason. Movement of the body is not a mere mannerism; it is part of the
emotion, like the instrumental accompaniment to a song. The child cons his
lesson moving; we foolishly call it "fidgeting." The child is never
receptive unless also active. But there is another of Montaigne's feelings,
with which I have no sympathy. He loved to think when on the move, but his
walk must be solitary. "'Tis here," he says of his library, "I am in my
kingdom, and I endeavor to make myself an absolute monarch. So I sequester
this one corner from all society--conjugal, filial, civil." This is a
detestable habit. It is the acme of selfishness, to shut yourself up with
your books. To write over your study door "Let no one enter here!" is to
proclaim your work divorced from life. Montaigne gloried in the
inaccessibility of his asylum. His house was perched upon an "overpeering
hillock," so that in any part of it--still more in the round room of the
tower--he could "the better seclude myself from company, and keep
encroachers from me." Yet some may work best when there are others beside
them. From the book the reader turns to the child that prattles near, and
realizes how much more the child can ask than the book can answer. The
presence of the young living soul corrects the vanity of the dead old
pedant. Books are most solacing when the limitations of bookish wisdom are
perceived. "Literature," said Matthew Arnold, "is a criticism of life."
This is true, despite the objections of Saintsbury, but I venture to add
that "life is a criticism of literature."

Now, I am not going to convert a paper on the Solace of Books into a paper
in dispraise of books. I shall not be so untrue to my theme. But I give
fair warning that I shall make no attempt to scale the height or sound the
depth of the intellectual phases of this great subject. I invite my reader
DigitalOcean Referral Badge