THE HONOURABLE GEORGE LAMMING gave the keynote address at this year’s Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Awards and, except for a brief few lines of reportage in the Press, precious little was noticed of The Politics Of Reading.
Mr Lamming was at it again when he spoke to primary students at the school that carries his name. He likened reading to nourishment. He told the boys and girls that their minds need food in much the same way their bodies do. That food, he suggested, comes through reading regularly.
Today, I thought I would put together some comments in support of reading.
Author George Saintsbury, when asked how to interest the young in good literature, replied: “Leave books around.”
Simeon Potter, English lecturer in language and linguistics, said: “The sentence is the most important unit of English speech. The sentence is more important even than the word. Revelling in the exercise of its imitative faculty, a child will attempt, however imperfectly, to babble whole sentences.”
He’s right. I once heard a toddler say: “Mummy,
I didn’t did it!”
Many misunderstand fiction; they think it is antithetical to fact. Trinidadian novelist Vidia Naipaul put them right with this: “An autobiography can distort, facts can be realigned, but fiction never lies. It reveals the writer totally.”
Then, this gem on historical revisionism, by Gerald White Johnson: “Nothing in life changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.”
Lord Salisbury, British prime minister, describing an early aversion to democracy, which he termed a virus, once said: “First rate men will not canvass mobs, and if they did, the mobs would not elect the first rate men.”
The late Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned: “Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.”
“Knowledge,” said Lord Chesterfield, “is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in an advanced age; and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old.”
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote: “By shrewd and constant application of propaganda, Heaven can be presented to the people as Hell and, vice versa.”
“The greatest writers in English aren’t those who have mastered the dictionary; they are those, like Wodehouse, with a profound feeling for the music of the language.” – Philip Hensher on The Everyman Wodehouse.
“The principle of ‘keep them excited’ is thought to be the only answer to boredom. It is a great mistake to implant the idea that learning can be steadily exciting, or that excitement is a good frame of mind for acquiring knowledge. Developing a genuine interest in a subject comes only after some drudgery, and only when the learner gets to the point of seeing its order and continuity, not its intermittent peaks of excitement.” – author Jacques Barzun.
“If any man wishes to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.” – German novelist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
“A book is not a meal; it should not satisfy us but make us hungry for more books.” – Daniel Bell
“Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.” – Maimonides.
Warning about speed reading, John Wickham once made the wry observation that “many people would like to have read”.
Then there is Alexander Pope’s famous admonition about the ill effects of ill-digested books: “A little learning is a dangerous thing/Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator.
