On Oct 9, 2010, at 6:49 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Pamela -
When I hear someone say "I never read fiction," I'm a little
saddened. It comes to my ears like "I never look at art." When one
starts getting all hairy-chested about the greater value of non-
fiction over make-believe, please be reminded of the books you pull
off your shelf to make room for new ones.
Well put. I've always held that Fiction often tells more Truth than
non-Fiction... Important, fundamental truths about Life, the
Universe and Everything... but then so does Poetry...
Not all non-fiction is dated however... as we still read Plato or
Archimedes or Lau Tzu or Sun Tzu or Sappho or Galileo with great
interest and delight and relevance.
Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply that. Not only do I read all of
those above (well, Archimedes not so much), but my signature this week
is from a delightful book called "The Domestic Manners of the
Americans," by Fanny Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony Trollope.
She lived in the U.S. for a couple of years around 1830, and her
observations just hit you between the eyes. De Toqueville gets all the
credit, but my oh my, they saw things eye-to-eye. (De Toqueville
arrived in the U.S. just as Fanny Trollope was going back to England,
and it's unlikely either one read the other--yet they both remarked on
the same things. It would all be quaint, except for how contemporary
the observations of both are.)
Also realize that some of us hairy-chested bibliophiles don't bother
to pull books off our shelves, we just build new ones and then when
one room is lined with books we add on another room and fill *that*
with shelves and fill those with books!
Sigh. Not much of an option in Manhattan. You've gotta discard.
Especially when you calculate what it's costing in rent for each book.
Best of luck with the conversion from pulp to firewood!
P.
"How quickly weeks glide away in such a city as New York, especially
when you reckon among your friends some of the most agreeable people
in either hemisphere."
Fanny Trollope, "Domestic Manners of the Americans"
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