Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WHAT, THEN, should the reader do? Once the tradition has been read through, how should he store up emblems of that other, sublime world? What I propose is that he cultivate esoterica, those unknown, undiscovered volumes which, when we come upon them in libraries, have not been taken out since 1937. Arminius Vambery's Travels in Central Asia, published in 1865, or A.S. Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World, are such examples. These works could be considered autonomous, in that their survivance is related to no specific epoch or lineage. Their titles have been handed...
...just such random encounters consists the reader's true vocation. These works are capital invested in what Cesar Pavese called "this business of living." Obscure testaments to how eclectic our recorded knowledge has become, writers like Eddington and Vambery (I could name Leon Bloy, Jacques Riviere, and Paul Nizan as well) remind the reader that a multitude of others who possess little reputation have written in the same spirit as the reader reads: their interest was in the chronicling, the renovation of their own experience, and all of them wrote in the hope that such an operation would be valuable...
...reader, confronted with two such diverse texts, isn't interested in their differences. Rather, he discerns in them an impulse to decipher existence, to balance what is observable against what is real. This is the essence of the reader's activity: to establish relations between the dissonant elements of consciousness. And this is the reader's advantage as well; because the labor he has chosen is alienated and superfluous, because he inhabits a speculative realm, his life is devoted to those works which secure his own mind in the world, through the revelation of resemblances...
...follows, then, that science is valuable to the reader only as myth, as a metaphor which mirrors the relations drawn in literature between our own experience and its intelligible representation. That Sir Thomas Browne is now studied in universities as a specimen of English 17th century prose doesn't concern the reader, who turns to Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the same spirit that he turns to Wittgenstein or Levi-Strauss: to collect what could be called "taxonomies of natural phenomena." Nostalgia, the sad evocation of our universal angst, episodes which recall a decisive moment in our lives, ontological dread before...
...reader, reputed to have a speculative, even impractical mind, and notorious as a bad scientist, seizes on such sentences and enters them in a notebook crammed with similar apercus. In this act, and in its cause (here, Eddington's observation), the reader's temperament is revealed, a temperament at once impatient and imbued with languor, undiscipfiined and ordered. It conspires to receive all ideas as echoes of other ideas, on a diachronic level. In other words, whenever the reader happens to notice an idea which resonates through time, associations clamor like heirs to be recognized, and a number of them...