Holmes was inconsistent in this: I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge that might be useful to him gets crowded out, or best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilled workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order." But also "I am an omniverous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles."
Like Holmes, Churchill was very much a sort of autodidact, lacking much of the "rounding" a more conventional education might have provided.
Steel true, blade straight
Jonathan Hayes
-------------- Original message from "Editor/Finest Hour" <[email protected]>: --------------
>
> > Anfa's message reminds me that I also read this book when researching the
> > life of T S Eliot. It was in 1960 in Tangiers when Moran introduced WSC to
> > the poet and Winston didn't appear to know of him! I wonder what that says
> > about our man at this time of his life?
>
> Bob: Interesting. Some light is shed on this by Professor David Dilks,
> in his foreword to my second quotations book, "The Definitive Wit of
> Winston Churchill" (autumn; see "books" on richardlangworth.com).
> Dilks's point is one I hadn't fully appreciated:
>
> "With a prodigious memory Churchill could master large tracts of
> Gibbon or Macaulay, and at the same time remain ignorant of much which
> someone more conventionally educated would have been expected to know.
> Thus he had not read many of the great novels, and had neglected many
> notable poets. He was after all a man of a fierce physical energy and
> restlessness, with endless and pressing concerns from early youth to
> old age. His knowledge of literature, and of many other subjects,
> remained patchy. What he did know he knew extremely well, thanks to
> that wonderful power of recall. A couple of weeks after the Prime
> Minister’s severe stroke in the summer of 1953, he recited to his
> doctor Lord Moran long extracts from a poem by Longfellow. Asked when
> he had last read it, Churchill replied 'About fifty years ago.'
>
> “'You will know, or Watson has written in vain, that I hold a vast
> store of out-of-the-way knowledge, without scientific system, but very
> available for the needs of my work. My mind is like a crowded box-room
> with packets of all sorts stowed away therein—so many that I may well
> have but a vague perception of what was there.' Thus Sherlock Holmes;
> while Churchill used to put the point more prosaically by saying that
> he could generally dip his bucket into the well and come up with
> something useful."
>
>
>
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