You may have missed it but in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius quotes dozens and dozens of other writers and philosophers. He just rarely attributes those quotes. Presumably, considering he wrote most of Meditations in a tent on a battlefield, he didn’t have his copies beside him when he was quoting Socrates or Epictetus or Homer or Plato. No, he was transcribing it straight from his memory.
This capacity for recall is indicative of the ancient’s approach to reading. The philosopher Mortimer Adler talked about how the phrase “well-read” has lost its original meaning. We hear someone referred to as “well-read” today and we think someone who has read lots of books.But the ancients would have thought someone who really knows their stuff, who has dived deep in a few classic texts to the point that they truly understand them. “A person who has read widely,” Mortimer says of the modern reader, “but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised.” The early 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes joked similarly, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.”
That’s why, as we talked about the other day, reading and rereading a select few works of a select few authors is so powerful. The insights that came from their minds gradually get permanently implanted in yours. It's not about reading the Stoics once but dozens, even hundreds of times. As Marcus would say, we can't be satisfied with just “getting the gist” of things you read. “Read attentively,” he said. Read deeply. Read repeatedly. Aim for quality, not quantity.
That's what it means to be well read. The test then is not whether you've read a lot...but what you have read a lot.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment