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Why don’t we learn from History?

9/5/2012

8 Comments

 
PictureRoyston Cave, Hertfordshire cc 3.0 Cruccone 2004
   
You may want to agree with the common place that the knowledge of History is a priceless treasury of sleeping wisdom, waiting to be resurrected and understood - to improve our life - instead of slowly turning to dust, forgotten in tomes nobody reads or in confidential erudition nobody listens to.




Hegel, the philosopher of grand synthesis looks at history and concludes dryly:
We learn from History that people learn nothing from History [1].

Then, Santayana the disquiet humanist warns wisely that those who cannot remember the past are destined to relive it [2].

To this outrageous and unanimously overlooked truth, an anonymous saying appends: Wise people learn from other people’s errors [2a]; intelligent people learn from their own; fools never learn.

Are we all such hopeless fools? With so many great minds and intelligent people around, is the entirety of humanity as incapable to build up such learning from experience in spite of mastering thought, language and writing? Can’t we gain some reliable wisdom from the hard-earned experience of the past generations? Why?*

                                                                               *

We do not learn from History because we are educated from utopias and theories of how the world should be, instead of what was real life, experienced by the actual people of the past; our schooling is abstract, ideology-biased and irrelevant, full of artificial, dry, high-level explanations of "processes" with no connection to our person-size life, feelings, understanding and concerns. We learn and forget century yardsticks, pompous dates of battles and opportunistic monumental events, instead of critical events that would inform our values and decisions.

We do not learn from history because we were brainwashed to believe that things do not happen again, taking literally the abstract dictum that you will not step into the same river again. Thus we learned to believe that similar things do not happen again, when they do, so obviously.

Unfortunately, modernity's philosophers, theorists and ideologists conceived History as a necessary one-way evolution of material forces or of ideas; progress of a collective (and in-existent) colossus called "Humanity". Grand, abstract, irresistible processes in which we, individuals, play no role, except understanding and serving. In such history, everything did and will happen, with or without us. The locus of control (the place where important things are decided and controlled) is not in us, but somewhere else, where we have no access. Laws of Matter, Science, Technology, rule as good and omnipotent as God- given fate. We, as we were schooled,  are not the authors of History and therefore we are not responsible, we are powerless. "History" is not made by people, only witnessed, at best understood, explained and complied with.

In the twentieth Century class-rooms of History, the human face and the credible narrative of its witnesses were missing. We missed a way to feel that we could have been them, the ancient, individual people and groups like us... so that we - persons, communities and nations - would try to do better this time when it is our turn.

Were we to draw wisdom from the past of humanity, we would be, each of us and all together, more seasoned than Methuselah. Therefore I am puzzled by the apparent elimination from the history books of that wise and compelling narration of concrete human experience patterns which constitutes practical wisdom.

As for the equally emancipating wide picture allowing the common individual to understand how relative are in fact some of the things taken today for granted, eternal or final, how we can change them, that scope was equally absent in the XXth Century. Only recently, Big History attempts to see the whole at galactic or planetary scope and time; unfortunately, that too belittles to naught the role of humanity and persons as compared with the billions and millions of years and cosmic infinity. Again. people are nought.

​                                                                                *

Beyond the backbone of facts, causalities and dates on record and the abstract interpretations, where is the flesh on the skeleton, the way people experienced and tackled the concrete events and the seasons of change? Where is  the way people lived lived their life, understood, willed, acted and survived the typical and critical situations of individual and collective human existence?

Could we please have a Book of Witnesses?

What did actual people understand, how did they reason and do to cope with those circumstances, dangers and opportunities so characteristic and so many times repeated? What gave meaning to their lives, how did they make their life meaningful? What was happiness, success, fulfilment for them? What did they respect and value? What influence were they able to have on their condition and their future? What did they, the persons, do when they met violence, revolutions, invasion, poverty, famine, catastrophe, pestilence, terror, the unexpected newness, the rise of new civilisations and states? What choices did they have when surprised by sudden wealth or discovery, progress or aggression? Or when hit by betrayal, rejection, prejudice, decay, insecurity? How do people survive and prosper in unfree times? Which are the main mistakes people did which ruined lives so that we better know about them? What choices were found and experienced by men and women and children - or by their leaders - when meeting the long list of "historic" events and critical situations? In short what did the members of humanity learn about dealing with change?

Is it so difficult to heed Paulo Coelho's Copt, felicitously inspired by Gibran's Prophet:
"Our task is not to leave a record of what happened on this date for those who will inherit the Earth; history will take care of that. Therefore, we will speak about our daily lives, about the difficulties we have had to face. That is all the future will be interested in, because I do not believe very much will change in the next thousand years."? (2b)

Are the narrations of all that to be lost? Obsolete? Are they valueless because of not being supported by hard data fit to present-day Method?

The facts of life learned in bygone days, the ways of the world, the beliefs, the views of the World already held by those precursors, the narrations of why and how errors and successes came to be, do not get to us. This, in spite of them having been known, rehearsed and tested in real life, generation after generation. The savoir-faire, the savoir-vivre, the life-saving ideas and skills of the key situations and deeds - all those precious and meaningful patterns and insights that made lives and cost lives in other times do not seem worth to recall. The ideas of prey already proven deadly or ruinous in fallen civilisations are forgotten, prone to reappear as new. The same stupid decisions, deeds and discourses, the same dogmas and tyrannies occur again, as if we were hit by amnesia or by Cassandra's curse..

Where are these costly experiences vanishing? No branch of honourable Knowledge owns them.

Wisdom extracted from the past at such a low "everyday memories" folkish, commonsense level is not considered a worthy part of the Historical Record. Is someone preserving that fount? In fact, who cares to even define luxuries like "wisdom" - that which caused flourishing and meaningful life in the past for individuals, for nations -  or at least for whatever the authors believe to be prudence, civilisation, good life and "change for the better"? 

The way bygone individuals carved their path into their times seems of no concern for the publicly influential writers of history. I am at pains to find old narratives and reflection of this kind. We did not learn what I would call life histories - typical or exceptional - in our school years. Biographical time and narration seems too subjective and partial, of no interest for the scholars of historical time; as if they, the scholars, were amici humani generi (friends of humanity "in general") but indifferent to the living human individuals, probably too biased in the old testimonies. Should we count on the television series and the big-budget films to become wiser? Is this an entertainment-task to be relegated to popular literature? Or should we trust the gurus and the sects to give us the light? 

I believe that opposed to this attitude of taking cold distance, History is the way we look at the past.

Even more, I think that history is the way we look at the past at the time we live, from our point of view today, with our interest; let this transformation be conscious. It is legitimate to draw and interpret from former experience hints meaningful and useful for our life now, by means of dramatic, concrete accounts, faithful to the spirit of what actually happened but presented in compelling forms of present-day common sense. Not dry smoked as dates and "data" and vectors. Rather as mind-size forms and means to re-imagine and make sense of the past. To understand and to interpret from example, we need to see and hear and feel; moreover we need to identify with those ancestors, to imagine ourselves in their stead, to relate and to understand them in the way Gianbattista Vico proposed already in the Eighteens Century [2c]. I do not deny though that critical thinking and precision added would help.

Is being vivid and formative, even convincing - incompatible with serious history? Is making things simple a falsification? Are people unable to represent and conceive properly, by imagination, things done by other people? Should a reader be considered unable to judge with his own head? Must history be a dried-out grave of the ended and finished?

                                                                                 *

​The words of Herodotus, the one who invented history some two thousands five hundred years ago, lost their echo as it seems:

“WHAT Herodotus the Halicarnassian has learnt by inquiry is here set forth: in order that so the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvellous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other may not lack renown.”[3]

The Father of history did not seem to ambition creating a new domain of academic excellence and accuracy. As it appears, he conceived history as a narrative and a morality tale for purposes of judgement and example.

Because of Herodotus’ flirting with myth, marvel and imprecision in his pursuit of the greater good, righteous Plutarch - who's Lives teach precisely what Herodotus wanted to teach - will cry out that the king is naked and the data false: “Herodotus is a father of lies!”[4] No more no less, like Satan. So, for millennia, everybody will nod approvingly, forgetting that unscientific Herodotus is still the one who introduced the very word History [3.1], and imagined its aim, the occupation of writing down the memories of the past for future generations to learn from them.

This practical purpose was simple and revolutionary, a purpose of doing something good for people: in today's wording, to make us different from all the other animals, by giving us conclusions of a wider past to own, a huge Lamarckian memory of our civilisation-driven species, allowing us to acquire and make ours the sum of what other people, previous generations, discovered in their experience; to let us learn – unlike animals – from the ancestors no more present, from former people’s mistakes and achievements. The task of the histories was clearly to avoid oblivion of wisdom hard paid, and to recount memories in such a way as to educate the living.

There are of course wonderful pragmatic books drawing risky but valuable conclusions from the past for the living person of today, I just don’t know much about them except say, some big tomes reserved to the knowing amateurs: Thucydides's Peloponesian War, Machiavelli's historical incursions, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Durant’s Story of Civilisation, Toynbee’s Study of History or Spengler’s Decline of the West [4a]. Sombre stuff too. In fact, I learned more about past wisdom from Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers than from the history books. I can hardly imagine those tomes as an accessible public source of present-day wisdom for the common people or even for their elected governments. At this time most people show an attention span of fifteen minutes at most, then they "zap" or "click".

                                                                                    *

Maybe the historians, tired of repetition, do not believe any more that their role is to help the new generations avoid the notorious, disastrous, mistakes done and paid many times before, nor to profit from the always relative understanding of the past; maybe they believe that it is more important to contemplate from very high the tiny verified facts left, with a dispassionate eye. Unaltered past truth seems to be more important than influencing the future. Who would deny the virtue of a fact-based history?

Maybe the historians do not believe at all that it were their vocation to touch and improve the future, to talk to individual people, to spare individuals and nations struggling again from zero with things faced many times before by their ancestors. Are they satisfied to inquire, discern and explain causes and conditions of "necessary evolution" and leave the task of shaping the future to the inexorable progress of science and technology or even to the utopias of ideologists?

Maybe the historians do personally understand deep human truth but do not know any more how to speak with the teachers conveying their work to us or, if the teachers do not want to listen, the historians do not find the subjects and the rhetoric to move common people. Maybe convincing people seems undignified to them.

Something clips the wings of the knowing ones.

                                                                                 *

Maybe that which clips the wings of our great historians is, paradoxically, the noble idea of progress [5]. If progress is a necessary, upwards, one-way, from less good to better, if the future is forever new and what was will never come again, then it is indeed not worth learning from the past. Is this faith in progress more secure than other unquestioned beliefs?

Moreover, if humanity does not move ahead through the dreams and the deeds of people in flesh and bone, but through necessary processes, there is no value for us to learn from personal histories recounted. Such history would be just wild goose chase, a fool’s errand or, as a colourful Romanian proverb puts it, "amassing dead-horse-shoes." Accordingly, they let the sleeping wisdom of History sleep in peace and audit instead the authenticity of the dead horse shoes found in old strata.

It may also be that historians became shy to teach the old uncertain stories of the genre si non e vero e ben trovato,** because of their urge to be honourable scientists, reviewed and respected by their peers. They may consider and seek only certain and high-level theory-tested facts of “historic” significance. They can only represent true universal beliefs, justified by fact, based on necessary causes in objective environments, induced and deduced through impeccable methods and logical processes. Perhaps these learned people, cannot care for the practical, old, people-level recipes remembered from history, since that folkish truth is not scientific, not pure enough, not precise enough, too practical. Obviously, you cannot reproduce the narratives of history in a laboratory to test them. Or so I hope after I witnessed part of the Marxist experiment at work.

The serious historians must have found in their inner chambers that the traces of written history left to us are thin, imprecise, purposefully biased, mostly fable, cosmetic, self-serving apology by leaders who dreamt their image into posterity. Maybe they found that the most interesting memories transmitted to us from the past offer mainly deceptive and self-deceptive lies, fantasies, personal detail and wishful interpretation, no objective laws; What's the use of stories that are not even true? [6] Well, those stories transmit at least what those people were able to imagine and think.

Method detected even deadlier sins of past history writing; imagine the horror of the rational thinker when he considers scientifically the value of testimony - the narratives of other people [6a]. It is most probably scientifically correct to forget that even today, all people - you and me, including additionally the most rigorous scientists - obtain and keep obtaining the overwhelming majority of their own "justified beliefs" about the world by trust in the authority and reliability of words, of testimony and explanations from parents, teachers and preachers, of books, completed and grounded with images and sound transmitted by media known for their impartiality; only a minuscule part of what we know for certain comes from our own senses, empiric checking and from work of our personal, isolated, autonomous and critical reasoning. So that historians had to discard most of the long chains of testimonies of those eye and ear and deeds witnesses present in bygone days, when important events happened or were even initiated by them. This is a good excuse for not presenting accounts of individuals living events.

                                                                                 *

Maybe, besides scientific impartiality, there is too much pressure on the historian to be opportunistic, politically correct, which actual history is definitely not. Perhaps the convenient present-day meaning of the past changes too often. Indeed, I remember my late Mother, a researcher in history, saying years ago under a totalitarian regime; “The past is most difficult to foresee nowadays, as the line of the Party changes all the time.”

Or, on the contrary, the historians fell pray to the theories of "historicism" that fascinating (and discouraging) belief that everything is helplessly relative, contextual, ideological, language-based, without stable substance, changing, so that everything goes and nothing counts?

Maybe, discouraged, the historians decided that - in the same way there is no meaning or intention in the material Universe - there is no shape to find in the history of past humanity, no meaning of human life, no purpose of humankind, no regularity, nothing reoccurring so that we may learn from it? That to quote the apostle of the mass-production future H. Ford, history is bunk? [6b]

The professional study of History developed so amazingly the last century; the archaeologist keep digging into ever supplementary millions of years of our pedigree, the researchers found and checked flurries of documents. Even carbon speaks now. Concepts and methods are more and more precise.

Science keeps drilling deeper and deeper into the bottomless well of the past.

What a shame that these bright learned minds (whom I admire and respect) give us back so little! Forgive me the time-worn jest, perhaps they specialize so much that each learns more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing or nothing about everything [7].

                                                                                   *

For the rest of us end-users of history the question lingers: why do so many excellent historians do so little to educate us wiser? Why is it that schoolboy Montaigne found more wisdom in Herodotus and Erasmus’s gossipy, myth-laden  Apophthegms [7a] than we could learn today from the huge, sound treatises (not to speak about the boring manuals and school-lessons)? Why is past experience of people left to myths and sacred books alone?

I confess that for me, the real public benefit of history – and a vital benefit too - is Herodotus’ initial intention, to teach something meaningful from the past in order for us to do better next time we meet something similar.

                                                                                  *

I still have a dream that can learn wisdom from history, elusive as it is; I am not shocked by memories being most often a mixture of interpreted reality and of fable. So are some of the great works of literature and of art, fabricated to be full of human and historic truth and to generate civilisation. So are the great social theories we follow. What I seek in the history text, for myself and for the ones I want to educate with wisdom, is some coherent and understandable form and regularity, meaningful at my own level; gestalt, metaphor, comparison, striking narratives from which we can make sense and  learn to live better, accounts of essence, typical of real life that was. I imagine a lay concept of “historic truth” akin to literary truth - an intelligent narration centred on that which was lived by people, that caries loyal, candid, reliable historic meaning - the deep human truth that the honest historian understood personally - at the best of his educated ability - from the many lacunar and uncertain witnessing and documents studied.

We need vivid mental treasuries that would furnish - as Montaigne dreamt - minds well made, able to judge well and exclaim “But this happened before!” instead of doing the same mistakes again as if newborn in a squirrel-cage of ever turning Samsara. People who do learn from the past may be able to prevent periodic relapse into barbarianism and cause progress - or at least defend the achieved one from foundering -  instead of just suffering "change" and evolution. They may do more to avoid the decline of our "culminant" western civilisation of the day arrogant enough to believe that it saw the End of History, with nothing really new left to surprise us. This ridiculous attitude requires indeed not having learned a thing from History.

                                                                               *
As a plain reader I beg you:

If Humanity saw all that before, let Humanity tell me what it means for me! For us! ... I am avid to know how past life was lived, and its vital advice for people today and tomorrow. Help me judge and chose with my own head!

                                                                               *

Maybe the best historians of today would care to create – the same way some courageous scholars write of  everyday private [8] and intimate [9] life across the centuries – a basic level of “life experience” historiography. They would share with us, even without Method, what they learned personally about human nature and the human condition, about critical life events and situations, to explain us what they understood from their research that what we should know to live better. We would trust their witnessing, on their word.

Can’t you historians do for people at least as much as Herodotus?

___________
* To put some water in my wine, I must concede that there may be many reasons for which we - and our governments - don't learn wisdom from history; like the pressure to live here and now and our mind’s inability to count with things out of sight, too far away or too long ago. Indeed, we hardly learn from our parents; why would we listen to people dead ages before? I only consider here one important cause, the work of the historians, as something could be done about it.
 
[1]Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Philosophy of History, Batoche Books, Kitchener, Ontario, 2001, p.19 : "Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this — that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."

[2] George Santayana The Life of Reason, NEW YORK, CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 1917, p. 284:”Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

[2a]  This part is attributed to statesman Otto von Bismarck.

[2b] Coelho, Paulo, Manuscript found in Accra : a novel, Alfred Knopf, NY 2013
​
[2c] Vico, Gianbattista, The First New Science (1725) Tr leon Pompa, Cambridge U.P. Cambridge 2002 Read Isaia Berlin's expalnation in  Vico and Herder, Two Studies in the History of Ideas, CHATTO & WINDUS, London 1980
 
[3] Herodotus, Book I, Loeb Classical Library 1920 p. 3

[3.1]  history, n. ... Also 4 histoire, 5 hystorye, 5–6 historye, 6–7 historie.
†1.1 A relation of incidents (in early use, either true or imaginary; later only of those professedly true); a narrative, tale, story. (Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0) Oxford University Press 2009)

[4] Plutarch, On the Malignity of Herodotus, Moralia XI (Loeb Classical Library 426).

[4a] Pardon my ignorance. I will keep completing this superficial list.

[5] Becker Carl L., Progress and Power: Three Lectures Delivered at Stanford University, on the Raymond Fred West Memorial Foundation, April 1935. Contributors: Carl L. Becker - author. Publisher: Stanford University Press. Place of Publication: Stanford, CA. Publication Year: 1936.

** It may not be true, but it is well conceived

[6] Rushdie, Salman, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Penguin, 1990

[6a] Kennedy, Rick, A History of Reasonableness; Testimony and Authority in the Art of Thinking, University of Rochester Press, Rochester, 2004 pp 227-255

[6b] See Corfield, Penelope J., Time and the shape of history, Yale University Press, New Haven.., 2007  - a very interesting book - for the contrary view.

[7]  I wonder who said this: A physicist learns more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing; whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything. The Routledge Dictionary of Quotation (Robert Andrews) quotes Nicholas Murray Buttler 1862-1948 to have said at the Columbia University that “ An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less”

[7a] Erasmus The Apopthegmes of Erasmus, Printed by Robert Roberts, Boston Lincolnshire, 1877
 
[8] Ariès, P., Duby, G., Veyne, P., Goldhammer, A., History of Private Life, Vol. I-V, Belknap Press, 1992-1998

[9] Zeldin Theodore, An Intimate History of Humanity, Vintage, 1995

8 Comments

You don’t need to know everything?

29/4/2012

3 Comments

 
Picture

One of my competitive advantages in life was learning early that you do not need to know everything, it is sufficient to know where to find it [1]. I opted for the nimbleness of a "A well made rather than a well filled head " as Montaigne wrote [2] while other people confused themselves by gobbling everything presented to them.

However, now I must reconsider and ask again: Is that so? Is that sufficient?

The world changed. Finding becomes easy but flooded. Look at this pad in front of me! It contains many thousands of the best books in the world: writers of the great literature, sages, thinkers, legends, myth, fable, proverbs and sayings, sacred writ of great religions, history, philosophy, sculptures, paintings,... and also the best dictionaries, sources of quotes...* The sleeping wisdom of the World...

I made my book-hungry father's dream come true and honoured his memory with a library larger than whatever he ever hoped. Only kings and Universities were able to have such libraries in the past. Here and now, the tomes are (almost as if) all laying in my lap. I posses the books, I have them, well, I have copies of copies of copies of them. Now what, Ioan?

Truth hits me right in the face, all this wisdom is still asleep for me; I cannot own these books, they are not mine; when I touch them with my eyes they turn into deep forests, impenetrable tomes to explore. I can embrace my laptop but not the knowledge of humanity. The books would be mine only after I took time to absorb the marrow of the whole lot in my mind and also in the working of my mind. A child can count on his fingers that in the best of cases I cannot hope enough days left in my life to read  all this, and even less to assimilate it and make it mine.

                                                                                   *

In fact, even if the brigand rapacity of the copy right businesses, the impudent paywalls and the censorship of the tyrants or the snooping mania of terrorized governments do not choke the open access to culture on Internet, we still head into a Huxley-world of cheap zillion channel Television and mystified Internet and "mobile", so called networked civilization where people become unable to read books, in spite of all being available to them. As Neil Postman [3] wrote, George Orwell described a "1984" world where people were forbidden to read books, while Huxley drew one - much worse -  in which people will be incapable to read.

As I see, this world is coming alive now.

Even without gate-keeping and censorship, another evil monster advances, the deluge of undiscerning quantity and purposeful confusion or fake, which dilutes the valuable culture in an ocean of rubbish. If you do not understand in advance what you seek, unprotected with a life buoy of critical spirit, you will drown. As if a subtle devilish adversary were working against humane civilisation, against our passion to know and understand, with a perverse strategy applying in reverse the old wisdom: "If you want to grow it, water it. If you want to kill it, flood it!" We are flooded.

For the young Internautes of humanity, this implies, now, a choice between a new kind of education and yet another middle age century of numerate illiteracy and ignorance. This time it will be darkness in full light, believing to know enough!

                                                                                  *

How to prepare for the flood? What to do under the deluge of confusion?

Obviously we must learn to float and navigate across a global ocean of debris and disinformation. We must consider what deserves to be taken aboard to be saved from the soiled ocean.

                                                                                   *

To help myself across immensity, I devised my personal strategy: to go back to square one – in haste – and like legendary Noah - who saved exemplars of the essential species - to select and take aboard only the time-tested great books of humanity most needed to reproduce Culture, wisdom, and to save that humane erudition which I call humane Civilisation. Read them first, I told myself, at the source, ad fons, all the rest can wait;  This seems to work.  Unfortunately. it only works for me in private, such passéism generalised would unjustly kill almost everything recent. How sinister it would be to drag humanity back into the past, how unfair to the bright new creators! They do bring new value into this world, and they keep civilisation alive.

I gained temporary advantage though; from the time I started my cultural fundamentalism strategy, I felt less confused and I learned much quicker, with less spam in my eyes and ears. I feel relatively secure because I see the way and I have a key, a compass to orient me. A few great books are now mine too.

Gradually, I become a little more aware from where we come and what my words mean. Definitely, I know today much more about the immensity I do not know. With this, I am that much wiser.

Mine, is a strong survival strategy, for a while. (But understand me well - this is only a temporary strategy of urgency, not a long term solution.)

                                                                                   *

Seneca the philosopher was more radical, as he limited the choice to conformity:

"...reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady.  You must linger among a limited number of masterthinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind.  Everywhere means nowhere.  When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends...

... So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before.  Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.  This is my own custom; from the many things which I have read, I claim some one part for myself...
" [4]

                                                                           *
Michel de Montaigne  has another approach, careful to avoid choking his own spontaneous thought from the interference of other peoples' books:

​When I write, I dispense of the company end memory of books, less they interrupt my own wording. I skim through the books, I do not study them; what stays with me, I do not reckon anymore as being somebody else's." [4a]

Later, another great thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer, proposes another reason to only read selectively, by thinking first your own thoughts and reading afterwards to complete them:

"...much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a spring continually under pressure. The safest way of having no thoughts of one's own is to take up a book every moment one has nothing else to do. It is this practice which explains why erudition makes most men more stupid and silly than they are by nature, and prevents their writings obtaining any measure of success...

Reading is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one's own. It means putting the mind into leading-strings. The multitude of books serves only to show how many false paths there are, and how widely astray a man may wander if he follows any of them. But he who is guided by his genius, he who thinks for himself, who thinks spontaneously and exactly, possesses the only compass by which he can steer aright. A man should read only when his own thoughts stagnate at their source, which will happen often enough even with the best of minds.
"  [5]

                                                                               *
If selective reading is not sufficient remedy, what else?

The bad solution to the immensity of the past is certainly the current, dominant one: specialise yourself into a corner, live in a box and ignore the rest. This arrogant choice of expert ignorance is grounded by a blurred, unexamined belief that – with the progress of science and technology – the old writings, the past, grew obsolete and only recent things count because they carry the superior future. Worst than this techno-scientist cult are only the radical rejections of culture: “We don’t need no education...” or the one-book-culture of the zealots.

On this mind-narrowing path of tight separation by disciplines we also lost the way of reasoning of the universal genius... We wait, I believe, for new giants of synthetic mind like Aristotle or Leonardo, Montaigne, Shakespeare or Newton, or Einstein, not blinded by technology, method and gain, to turn their genius towards the human condition and culture today.

                                                                             *

There are some other solutions to immensity, trusting witness and common sense:

We have a possibility to trust - for a while - some recent well read sages to select for us credible lists of books worth reading; they cannot be however technicians alien to the cultural heritage which “does not compute” and certainly they cannot be little-red-book activists or firm monist believers of whatever exclusive creed.

If you make this choice, there is good company available to join. Great writers use to share what they read and advise what is worth. Some lettered trials are the life-time reading plans of the Western Cannon and the Eastern one:

Harold Bloom proposed the Western literary Canon [6] Read the books he listed and you will be a cultivated Occidental... and a few years older. For a shorter kind of list, Italo Calvino would probably inspire you [7]



{UPDATE august 2018 } In 2018 as I revisit, all the web adresses are now obsolete- fatigue, life, small egos incapable to give away, indolence, copyright trolls devoured them. At this time try other excellent links tested until October 2019 (or learn to do web research):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon

http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html

An Eastern canon must be added to the Western, to speak meaningfully about a world culture: a trial among several is at Online Literature.

Indeed, how could you write about culture, without minimum minimorum reading sacred writs of the East, like the Koran, Tao te Ching, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, some Upanishads, some Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead, to complete our Hebrew and Greek roots? How to ignore Gilgamesh, the Persian poets, The Chinese Arts of War, Zen haikus and the oceans of streams of "Indian" stories from which come most of our tales, fables and dreams?

If you chose this path of following mentors - and you should do it with patience - with some perseverance and while still young enough, you will find plenty of good leads and pleasure, rewarding juicy fruit. You will find even here on Earth, another, richer, world of spiritual elevation a citadel of freedom in the mind to complete you view of the World and to protect you in this obtuse material world of the daily life. An inner paradise in which your mind has more words understood and thus more choice and freedom to think with your head and act as a person.

                                                                    *

To travel in the empire of books, we require an education of search for our own voyage.

We need to learn how to learn. That means going beyond learning what we are taught or whatever is cast under our noses.

Beyond just being instructed with what is given to us and beyond striving vainly to know everything, we need - to have a chance of freedom - to learn how to discern and chose, how to weigh critically, how to judge, how to discard and how to forget. We need to learn how to keep aware of what we do not know and find out and remember where to find the things we do not hold in mind - when we need them.

This learning means that you proceed to build your own head, a habit to ask questions and to evaluate what you found, to ask:
“Really?"
"Who says so? Based on what?” to say
“I like this, but not this.” and
“Sorry, this I do not understand.” and
"Interesting! Important! I keep in mind where to find this and who can help me to understand it when needed." 

Such style of learning is built traditionally on being educated by example, in an educated family or by great mentors. For the art of reading books, you need masters, not instructors, certainly not instructions. "programmes" and "trainers".. The internet explorer deserves an aristocratic education, not a democratic one, else his intellect will become run-of-the-mill trash carried by digital tides.

To stay clean of litter coming our way, we also need a re-education of the quote-culture; most of the rubbish that pollutes the mind on Internet today drips from imbecile attribution of ideas and phrases to people who never said them. By some candid perversion, it became usual to "quote" boldly, without indicating who and where and when.

To really understand an idea you must know its parents.

Keep in mind that a quote quotes!

We also need the technology, the software, to turn towards content, with tools serving the seeker and not only the offerer, the client instead of the advertiser and the seller. We need applications to haunt and crawl the net and find what we want instead of landing on what is advertised or offered within a bubble confirming what we believe already. We need reliable references of seriousness and value, by credible people.

We need urgently search engines to search for us us not only on the Net but also home, on our own hard disks, to find things in our own overgrown treasure trove: to find what we need quickly and accurately enough, in the place where we know it to be hidden.

Today, I still do not find the simple decent private search engine which - like Google - would dig out the paragraph, the phrase, the idea I need, when I need it, not on Internet but here in my lap, on my own computer. A profusion of technicians do not seem to understand or better said do not care for the usefulness of helping us, private persons to find things in our own treasury chest.

                                                                  *

Well, this being the disquieting state of the matter it is still true that a voyage of a thousand miles keeps starting with the one next step; any good book is a door to everything else. In spite of my anxious look at all those tomes, it is never too late in fact to start reading a great book, any good book, as a first step.

It was well said that even a little learning, no matter how late in life, makes radical difference, as in one of my favourite parables, like a small candle lit in the dark. It kindles a warm little nest of light, much friendlier and totally other than the chilling darkness of ignorance.

------------
*and I left aside Music and Science and particularly everything else I forgot this day.

 [1] “You don't need to know everything, just know where to find it.”
No, it is not from Einstein, nor an American president! Exact quote with context: “A clergyman should be well equipped for indexing the best he reads in books and for filing clippings. Educated people are not those who know everything, but rather those who know where to find, at a moment's notice, the information they desire..." The Expositor and Current Anecdotes, Volume 16, Indexing and Filing, 1914-1915, [INDEXING AND FILING, Advertisement for Wilson Index Company of Lynn, Massachusetts] Page XX, Column 2, F. M. Barton, Publishing, Cleveland, Ohio. Quotation appears two pages after page 744 on a page labeled XX) This, cf. Quote Investigator to whom I thank again for their work.

Rectification on 3 October 2012: The original source appears to be Samuel Johnson: "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries." — Samuel Johnson (Boswell's Life of Johnson, Ed, A Birrell, Westminster, Archibald Constable and Co, 1896). Thanks to John I. Spouge for looking deeper into the well of the past.

[2] Explains Montaigne: “ For a child of noble family who seeks learning not for gain (...), or so much for external advantages as for his own, and to enrich and furnish himself inwardly, since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose for him a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head; that both these qualities should be required of him, but more particularly character and understanding than learning; and that he should go about his job in a novel way. (my bolding; IT) Michel de Montaigne, Of the education of children, in SELECTED ESSAYS TRANSLATED, AND WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY DONALD M. FRAME, Classics Club, WALTER J. BLACK,  • ROSLYN, N. Y. , 1943

[3] Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. USA: Penguin Books, N.Y., 1985.  A book to read carefully, I am afraid. The exact quote from the Introduction: “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

[4] Seneca, Epistles to Lucillius, II, Loeb, tr Gummere

[4a]  My light translation of " 
Quand j’escris, je me passe bien de la compaignie et souvenance des livres, de peur qu’ils n’interrompent ma forme. (III 5, 874b) Je feuillette les livres, je ne les estudie pas; ce qui m’en demeure, c’est chose que je ne reconnois plus estre d’autruy (II 17, 651a). " Quoted from Michel Magnien, "Montaigne et Erasme" in p. 24 in Smith, Paul J. K. A. E. Enenkel - Montaigne and the Low Countries (1580-1700)-BRILL (2007)
The references (in parantheses) to the Essays are from Michel de Montaigne, Essais III 2 (Paris: 1588; Ex. de Bordeaux) 353r ; éd. P. Villey (Paris : 1965) 810c 


[5] Schopenhauer, A., ON THINKING FOR ONESELF, in THE ESSAYS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER Tr  T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, THE ART OF LITERATURE Volume Six, Penn State Electronic Classics Series

 [6] Bloom Harold, The Western Canon, The Books and School of the Ages, Harcourt Brace, new York.., 1994 Harold Bloom's WESTERN CANON is outlined conveniently at THE BOOKLIST CENTER (not working in 2019)

[7] Calvino, Italo, Why Read The Classics?, Vintage Books, New York, 2001

There are many other credible sources:

The editors of The Norwegian Book Clubs asked 100 prominent authors to nominate ten books that, in their opinion, are the ten best and most central works in world literature: THE 100 BEST BOOKS  IN THE  HISTORY OF LITERATURE (lost in 2019)
 
Borges, Jorge Luis; Eliot Weinberger (ed.,tr.); Esther Allen (tr.); Suzanne Jill Levine (tr.); Selected Non-fictions Penguin, 2000
http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/amit/books/borges-2000-selected-nonfictions.html


 



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