Comments on: Borges on books and change

By: TIE Institute

TIE Institute — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 23:47:13 +0000

TIE Institute

neo-neocon » Blog Archive » Borges on books and change

By: NJartisr49

NJartisr49 — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:22:53 +0000

Glitch in loading. Should have read:

I found it best to have a wide ranging reading habit: one never knows when an idea or statement found in an out of the way book may resolve a problem in an unrelated field. Picasso once responded to a question regarding what should an artist do when he cannot do art: he responded “Read.”

As an artist, the master artist I honed myself against was Cezanne; not only did I seek to understand what he was doing without replicating him; I also sought to understand his comment “Art is intellect.” I saw this as the golden key. After nearly twenty years, I found the answer in Mortimer Adler’s book Intellect; in the same book, I found a short quote from Aristotle on from: every thing snapped together in a instant.

By: NJartisr49

NJartisr49 — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:20:47 +0000

Okay, there is a complete damn glitch somewhere.

By: NJartisr49

NJartisr49 — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:19:48 +0000

Glitch in loading. Should have read:

By: NJartisr49

NJartisr49 — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:16:57 +0000

By: roc scssrs

roc scssrs — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:58:21 +0000

The great thing about great books is that they can be read over and over, and each time they yield new insights. They seem to change to educate each reader, no matter where he or she is in life. I just learned that Walker Percy, the novelist, read Brothers Karamazov six times.

May I ask what everyone is re-reading?

By: Perfected democrat

Perfected democrat — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:52:03 +0000

One thing leads to another, as Charlie Brown (I believe) once said in Peanuts: “The cosmic implications are staggering…”

By: Data Schlepper

Data Schlepper — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:39:50 +0000

I wonder if Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld stories read that essay a long time ago.
He had a lot of fun with the library at Unseen University, where wizards are educated.
Among other things he wrote that magical books cannot be filed by subject. Their contents, the spells, are so powerful that shelving them together would result in a Critical Black Mass.
He also wrote that books were a state of matter which existed seperately from liquid, solid, or gas. They exerted an influence on the shape of space and time so that every library that ever exist was linked to every other.

By: Sergey

Sergey — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:13:33 +0000

My first non-adapted, “adult” book was “20 Thousand Miles Under Sea” by Jule Verne in Russian translation. It was printed in 1890, in old leather cover, and beatifully illustrated by estampes, probably, reprinted from original French edition. I remember how I read it aloud in kindergarten, surrounded by other boys and girls, who listen to my reading with a great interest. Our nurses were happy that they did not need to watch children playing while I read; I was 6 years old and earned a nickname “snotty professor” because of my chronic running nose and didactic tone, picked up from my mother, an English teacher. I do not remember anything from this book now except illustrations.

By: E.M. Crotchet

E.M. Crotchet — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:16:56 +0000

Books delight us, when prosperity smiles upon us; they comfort us inseparably when stormy fortune frowns on us. They lend validity to human compacts, and no serious judgments are propounded without their help. Arts and sciences, all the advantages of which no mind can enumerate, consist in books. How highly must we estimate the wondrous power of books, since through them we survey the utmost bounds of the world and time, and contemplate the things that are as well as those that are not, as it were in the mirror of eternity. In books we climb mountains and scan the deepest gulfs of the abyss; in books we behold the finny tribes that may not exist outside their native waters, distinguish the properties of streams and springs and of various lands; from books we dig out gems and metals and the materials of every kind of mineral, and learn the virtues of herbs and trees and plants, and survey at will the whole progeny of Neptune, Ceres, and Pluto.

Pichard de Bury, Philobiblon, Ch, XV.