“Be careful, however, lest this 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 master-thinkers, 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. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner. Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no wound will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong. There is nothing so efficacious that it can be helpful while it is being shifted about. And in reading of many books is distraction.”
Seneca
I’ve always liked reading – in the hypnotic sense of being lost between pages and the discovery of what lies within the space of thought that is evoked by the words – a kind of magic of meaning evoked by symbols on paper. But it has always been a secret suspicion of mine – much as Seneca writes of – that in reading there is much haste and many details escape us when we could have learned from them.
And insofar as creativity is, as it has been said, being of the notion of ideas having sex and engendering new concepts that rise between them, so it would seem that it is best to allow ideas to develop and hold court in thought so that they may find other ideas to propagate with.
And so, I have found it efficacious to write on what I read. Because, there seems to be something a little bit special that is wrung forth from the beauty of the ideas when they are given their time to find their own space in my my word and in the very least, are not forgotten.
So that is this purpose of this page. And what of me? Well, that’s to discover, isn’t it?