Spring XIII. Books continued

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XII. Books

There must be several men of spirit and experiences akin to mine who remember that little book-shop opposite Portland Road Station. It had a peculiar character; the books were of a solid kind -- chiefly theology and classics -- and for the most part those old editions which are called worthless, which have no bibiopolic value, and have been supplanted for practical use by modern issues. The bookseller was very much a gentleman, and this singular fact, together with the extremely low prices at which his volumes were marked, sometimes inclined me to think that he kept the shop for mere love of letters. Things in my eyes inestimable I have purchased there for a few pence, and I don’t think I ever gave more than a shilling for any volume... The zeal of learning is never out of date... In what modern editor shall I find such love and enthusiasm as glows in the annotations of old scholars?

Even the best editions of our day have so much of the mere schoolbook; you feel so often that the man does not regard his author as literature, but simply as text. Pedant for pedant, the old is better than the new.

Alpha.

Yes and no. I’m thinking of Henri Pirenne -- even though, from Gissing’s point of view he must have represented the new, or even the future. I doubt he is much mentioned these days when it comes to the scholarship of Medieval Europe, yet he wrote an amazing book on Medieval History, that he never even bothered to finish, while a prisoner of the Germans during the Great War. He wrote A History of Europe from memory without access to notes or books. (I see that he is credited with being an influence on the founders of the Annales School of French historians.)

Yet I also often find antique scholarship, even into the 20th century, very limited in its perspectives -- especially when it comes to gender. Even when you get the best minds of the 19th century together on a page it often turns into a sausage fest that cries out for a female perspective. And the Annales historians (I have in mind Braudel and Ladurie), if they don’t bore you into a stupor, provide fresh ways of looking at history that make you re-evaluate everything you thought you knew. (Quoting Braudel is harder than quoting Proust. I’ve tried in the past to find something I vaguely recalled and finally gave up finding any kind of needle in his endless haystacks.) Even the Marxists, when they aren’t in an ideological frenzy, often bring a worthwhile perspective to subjects even if you don’t agree with them.

But the main thing this section reminds me of is a quote from Wendell Berry that I’ve always loved.

My point, anyhow, is that we could not consider teaching the Bible “as literature” if we were not already teaching literature “as literature” -- as if we do not care, as if it does not matter, whether or not it is true.

-Wendell Berry - Home Economics

Next: Spring XIV. The Racing Life.