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- The most important thing any one person can do, right now, relative to the amount of energy required to produce the effect, is to turn off the news. To turn off entertainment. To delete apps. To disconnect (stop reading here if you’re willing to do so).
- Why do I read texts that I know are inferior to the great books? What’s the point? Why are our standards so low that we eat such low calorie fair? Such nutrient-poor ideas?
- I’ve been thinking about Montaigne a lot recently; since I talked about re-reading the classics with a friend last week. My friend took the last year off, lived quietly, talked to no one, read Shakespeare, Montaigne, Tolstoy. Though I still read these authors in fragments — I haven’t really dedicated myself to reading a complete works since college, when I read all of Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Plato during my freshman and sophomore years. Even though I hypothetically read ‘all the time’ — I wonder if I read deeply anymore; if my reading has the quality of meditation.
- Montaigne is very good at admitting his weaknesses; he is the great philosopher of human shortcomings (just ahead of Beckett and Chekhov). He teaches us a self-aware humility that we do not find in contemporary culture. He is like a sample of a rare plant that does not grow in the wild anymore.
- Information is not wisdom. Quite the opposite.
- Humanism means reading with a pencil in hand, in silence.
- I think ‘post’ is a useful term. We are ‘post’ modern, internet, smartphone, capitalism, liberalism, humanism…. I just wonder what we are ‘pre’.
- Cultural humility simply means admitting that culture does not improve but decays; that learning means conserving what is not yet lost.
