A Wall Street headline caught my eye: "Required Reading For Human Beings." For me, an almost irresistible order or command, especially so when the article is accompanied by a picture, in this case James Thurber, the author of "The 13 Clocks," that Mr. Neil Gaiman selected for the WSJ Book Club's discussion.
Mr. Thurber is seated in a relaxed pose but attentively writing on some pad.
I am myself wondering why I am, right now, drawn by that headline. Being told that reading to be human is a requirement is not a surprise, of course, but the choice of the book seems puzzling. It's curious to ponder such coincidences, surrounded by hundreds of volumes collected over 6 decades. Arsen and I are in the process of pruning our personal library to fit it into the smaller house we are moving in to. Endless questions "to keep or to toss" need to be answered before boxing books for shipment. The Vietnam Veterans have already taken away 24 book boxes filled with the tossers and we are left with about half still to be judged.
The WSJ article has now added another question to be answered before deciding to toss: was this book or that one perhaps also "required reading for human beings"? If so, is it really fair to toss it now? Perhaps, we should be rereading it just to be absolutely sure? Decisions, decisions...
We're so used to thinking that we live in a material environment, thus surrounded by trees and shelves and furniture and traffic and the chop-chop that comes with cooking, we forget the other cosmos we inhabit, which books indirectly represent -- referring here to the noosphere projected by another favorite of yours, Teilhard de Chardin.
ReplyDeleteHowever did I miss this post when you wrote it, almost a year ago. I guess when the posts are infrequent, we get out of the habit of checking a blog. Your thoughts from June of last year must seem quite old now, so much having changed. Or, perhaps not.
ReplyDeleteYou're right on both counts, Monique: habit forming and the changes over time that take place in us and outside ourselves. We categorize changes by our intuitive perception into frightening or baffling ones and less obvious ones, as for instance, those that recur on predictable schedules. Paying careful attention to the former and surprising ones, but less to those routine changes. At the moment, Prop. One, promising a change for the better, is quite at the forefront of my attention.. Isn't it for you too? .
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