The society of the illustrious dead can be enjoyed by me at leisure here; and when I choose to converse with sages, statesmen, or great poets, I have but to turn to my bookshelves, and my company is better than any that your palaces can afford with all their crowd of clients and flatterers.
Leon Battista Alberti
We met Leon Battista Alberti in my last column on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Renaissance. Alberti was a man of many talents, ranging from architect to expert equestrian and climber of mountains, but what appealed most from my reading of him was the above quotation on books.
Leon Battista Alberti
We met Leon Battista Alberti in my last column on Will and Ariel Durant’s The Renaissance. Alberti was a man of many talents, ranging from architect to expert equestrian and climber of mountains, but what appealed most from my reading of him was the above quotation on books.
Since I can remember, reading has brought me a tremendous pleasure. The bookmobile in Boonville, North Carolina; the magazines and comics at Weatherwax’s drugstore in the same town; With Lawrence In Arabia in the Staunton Military Academy in the seventh grade; the James Bond and Agatha Christie novels of high school; all the novels and histories read through college and graduate school; Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Larry Woiwode read in my mid-twenties in Boston; The Brothers Karamazov and Raymond Chandler read during my free time in San Diego; Joyce’s Ulysses read in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland; Anna Karenina read in Paris; A Confederacy of Dunces in Charlottesville; Shelby Foote and so many others in Waynesville…so many wonderful books.
Between people who read and those who rarely crack the cover of a book there is a divide. Many adults I’ve known rarely bruise their eyes with print from a book yet have found, by worldly standards, great success. Some others regarded as failures by those same worldly standards are stupendous readers, men and women who find life in books as much as in their kitchens or family rooms.
The divide, I think, lies not in material success—plenty of successful people are vociferous readers while plenty of those trailing behind are non-readers—but in a perspective of human nature. Some people are great observers of human nature, of taking their education, as it were, in the field rather than in a library. Others of us learn much about human beings, their minds and their hearts, by opening book after book, and reading observations written by others.
Though many books and public speakers advise parents on ways to form readers, and I view such books and speakers with favor, I know that in my case I became a fervent reader for reasons that remain a mystery to me even today. My parents owned a set of the Childcraft books when I was small, and later added the World Book Encyclopedia, and I am certain that they read to me before I entered public school, but ours was not what I would call a literary household.
Perhaps my avidity for the printed word came from the grownups who had assured me that on entering first grade—Boonville at that time had no kindergarten—I would learn to read. With this promise in mind, I entered my first grade classroom under the tutelage of Mrs. Whisenut. My mother picked me up after school. I was apparently silent on the way home, and on pulling into the breezeway, I got out of the car, slammed the door, and stomped away. “What’s wrong with you?” my mother called. “They didn’t teach us to read,” I said.
At any rate, when I look back at my life with books, in books, and of books, I am happy to find I have a friend in Leon Battista Alberti, a reader from the Renaissance. His words put me in mind of Argentinian writer Jorges Luis Borges: “I have always imagined that heaven will be a kind of library.”
May God make it so. Assuming, of course, I get past the door.
Between people who read and those who rarely crack the cover of a book there is a divide. Many adults I’ve known rarely bruise their eyes with print from a book yet have found, by worldly standards, great success. Some others regarded as failures by those same worldly standards are stupendous readers, men and women who find life in books as much as in their kitchens or family rooms.
The divide, I think, lies not in material success—plenty of successful people are vociferous readers while plenty of those trailing behind are non-readers—but in a perspective of human nature. Some people are great observers of human nature, of taking their education, as it were, in the field rather than in a library. Others of us learn much about human beings, their minds and their hearts, by opening book after book, and reading observations written by others.
Though many books and public speakers advise parents on ways to form readers, and I view such books and speakers with favor, I know that in my case I became a fervent reader for reasons that remain a mystery to me even today. My parents owned a set of the Childcraft books when I was small, and later added the World Book Encyclopedia, and I am certain that they read to me before I entered public school, but ours was not what I would call a literary household.
Perhaps my avidity for the printed word came from the grownups who had assured me that on entering first grade—Boonville at that time had no kindergarten—I would learn to read. With this promise in mind, I entered my first grade classroom under the tutelage of Mrs. Whisenut. My mother picked me up after school. I was apparently silent on the way home, and on pulling into the breezeway, I got out of the car, slammed the door, and stomped away. “What’s wrong with you?” my mother called. “They didn’t teach us to read,” I said.
At any rate, when I look back at my life with books, in books, and of books, I am happy to find I have a friend in Leon Battista Alberti, a reader from the Renaissance. His words put me in mind of Argentinian writer Jorges Luis Borges: “I have always imagined that heaven will be a kind of library.”
May God make it so. Assuming, of course, I get past the door.
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