Maverick Philosopher

If you are aiming to do it with wit, style, erudition, and craft, I refer you to Michael Gilleland. Start with his Double Entendres and scroll down. Amazing what he digs up, all from the vasty deeps of his personal library. He must be running out of shelf space because, when I bade him apply his classically trained mind to Simone Weil's "Concerning the Our Father," he told me he has Waiting for God in a box. There is always room for more books. He should commandeer his wife's capacious closets, and if that won't fly, buy a bigger house.

Not much time for philosophy today. Early this morning I spent an hour studying Peter van Inwagen, "Can Mereological Sums Change Their Parts?" (Journal of Philosophy, December 2006, 614-630). But then meditation, a three-hour exercise session (an hour in the weight room, an hour in the pool, an hour on the mountain bike), followed by breakfast, kitchen patrol, and a nap brought me to 12 noon. Then into town to have my spare mountain bike, a Trek 930 hardtail, overhauled. That was followed by a lunch date with wifey, a visit to a used bookstore, shopping, and a return to the bike shop to fetch the bike. Back at the shack, there was e-mail to answer. And that brings me to the present.

One of the pleasures of the bookish life is the 'find,' the occasion on which, whilst browsing through a well-stocked used book store, one lights upon a volume which one would never discover in a commercial emporium devoted to the purveyance of contemporary schlock. Yesterday, after a leisurely lunch, I walked into a book store on Mesa, Arizona's Main Street and stumbled upon Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, a 1978 Octagon Books reprint of the 1950 original. There is something of Jungian synchronicity in this, as I had recently made the acquaintance of Mr. Jackson at Michael Gilleland's erudite salon. The author describes his purpose thusly:

Mike Gilleland here quotes from Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania:

They become natives of a world of books, creatures of the printed word, and in the end cease to be men, as, by a gradual metastasis, they are resolved into bookmen: twice-born, first of woman (as every man) and then of books, and, by reason of this, unique and distinct from the rest.

Mike's library is reputed to be quite extensive and of very high quality. He should consider showing it to us.

I recall an old cartoon from The New Yorker. A housewife opens her door to a door-to-door salesman. "Would you like to buy a book?" "No thank you, we already have one."

Filed under: Bibliophilia

If I were asked about the single most important factor that has contributed to my happiness and well-being, I would reply: the availability of books and my ability to read them. Reading has given me countless hours of intense enjoyment, has made of me the writer that I am, and has made it possible for me to avoid grunt jobs and live by my wits.

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

All things human are ambiguous and so it is with books and bookishness by which I mean their reading, writing, buying, selling, trading, admiring, collecting, cataloging, treasuring, fingering, storing, and protecting. Verbiage, endless verbiage! Dusty tomes and dry paper from floor to ceiling! Whether written or spoken, words appear at one or more removes from reality, assuming one knows what that is.

But what exactly is it, and where is reality to be found? In raw sensation? In thoughtless action? In amoral animal vitality? In the fool's paradise of travel? In the diaspora of entertainment and amusement? In the piling up of consumer goods? In finite competitive selfhood? In the quest for name and fame? Is it to be found at all, or rather made? Is it to be discovered or decided?

It appears that we are back to out 'unreal' questions about reality and the real, questions that are asked and answered at the level of thought and written about in books, books, and more books . . . .

Has anyone read Mathew Stewart's, The Courtier and the Heretic? I can buy it no sweat through the left-leaning Quality Paperback Book Club, which protrays Spinoza as rebel (good!) and Leibniz as reactionary (bad!). Is it worth the money? Here is a review. Here is another, in which the reviewer, a Brit, takes a slam at "the American Christian right."

From the QPBC blurb:

Spinoza, a hermit with few friends, spent his life trying to prove that God didn't exist. Leibniz, an ambitious social climber, saw philosophy as a road to fame and fortune, and denounced Spinoza for his views. Secretly, though, Leibniz believed that Spinoza was right.

Take that cum grano salis, or if that sort of tripe elevates your blood pressure, cum grano salis artificialis.

Learn the meaning of these words from one to whom they apply.

It would be a hard choice, but if I were forced to choose between books and people, I would choose books. In any case, a book is a man at his best. So it is in one sense a false alternative: choose books, and you get people, distilled, reduced to their essence, and in a form that makes it easy to 'close the book' on their irritating particularisms. But people without books? That would be hell.

If you haven't seen the Twilight Zone episode, Time Enough at Last, please do. It's about a harried little man man who can never find time enough for his reading. Holed up in a bank vault with his books on his lunch break one day, he survives a nuclear attack. Emerging intact from the rubble in the vicinity of the public library, he has time enough and books enough at last. But then — but I won't spoil the ending for you.

That's Burgess Meredith (1907 - 1997) above in the role of Henry Bemis, bookworm.

I recommend reading books by and about Communists and former Communists. One reason of several is that it will provide some insight into the related phenomenon of Islamo-fascism, which would not be badly described as the Communism of the 21st century. Indeed, ‘Islamo-bolshevism’ might be a better appellation than ‘Islamo-fascism.’ And given the overuse and flagrant misuse (by the Left) of 'fascism,' perhaps we should avoid this word and its variants when we are not talking about Mussolini and Hitler.

It's a good maxim. But I hear an objection coming. "If you've already read a book, why do you need to buy it?" Because the only books worth owning are the ones worth reading more than once.

Dymphna treats us to a picture of C. S. Lewis and a wonderful poem on marginalia. Her Neighborhood of God is a recommended stop as you make your blogospheric rounds, and a fortiori her joint effort with Baron Bodissey, Gates of Vienna.

Time was when Gates of Vienna lagged far behind MP in the ratings, and I had to advise the good Baron to post more often; but they are cleaning my clock (my counter?) big-time now. They deserve every bit of their success.

Have you noticed that the same people who are morally obtuse enough to underline and annotate library books tend to be the same people who are too intellectually obtuse to make good comments? If they are going to deface public property, they should at least have the decency to stun us with the brilliance of their commentary, the magnificence of their marginalia, the glory of their glosses. I don't believe I have ever read a good marginalium in a library book.

Open library stacks allow for browsing and finding books that otherwise might have gone undetected. I was on the prowl in the BDs recently looking for BonJour's In Defense of Pure Reason and Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction. Searle's book hangs out at BD 418.3.S4. Nearby, at BD 418.3.S78, I spied Leopold Stubenberg, Consciousness and Qualia (1998). Though published by an obscure press, and obviously a reworking of the author's dissertation, it is turning out to be an outstanding resource. I'm glad he wrote it, and I'm glad I found it. But I might not have, had the stacks been closed.

Never preface a book with a justification of its existence. More in need of justification would be such a justification. A book is its own justification, if not by its mere existence, then by its content. Do babies apologize when they appear on the scene? Do their parents and relatives beg our indulgence for their entry into our space? The birth of babies is celebrated, not excused. One breaks out the cigars. Why then apologize for literary birth?

Filed under: Bibliophilia

My expansionist library is committing territorial aggression against my wife's bookshelves. My tomes are coming to occupy her empty spaces thereby establishing facts 'on the ground.'

But it is not yet an 'issue.'

De Tranquillitate Animi, IX, 4 (tr. Basore):

What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can scarcely read through in a whole lifetime? The learner is not instructed, but burdened by the mass of them, and it is much better to surrender yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.

Well said. But Seneca continues with something that strikes me as dubious:

Forty thousand books were burned at Alexandria; let someone else praise this library as the most noble monument to the wealth of kings, as did Titus Livius, who says that it was the most distinguished achievement of the good taste and solicitude of kings. There was no "good taste" or "solicitude" about it, but only learned luxury -- nay, not even "learned," since they had collected the books, not for the sake of learning, but to make a show, just as many who lack even a child's knowledge of letters use books, not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining room.

It was only for learned luxury? The books were collected non in studium sed in spectaculum? And only forty thousand were burned? See here. Excerpt:

The actual number of books destroyed that Seneca gives is matter of some controversy that we will need to briefly address. In ancient manuscripts it is common for large numbers to be expressed as a dot placed above the numeral for each power of ten. Clearly in copying it is easy to make a mistake with the number of dots and errors by a factor of ten are frequent. That may have happened in the case of On the Tranquillity of the Mind. The manuscript from Monte Cassino actually reads 40,000 books but this is usually corrected to 400,000 by editors as other sources such as Orosius give this figure for the number of scrolls destroyed. I have not seen the manuscript, of course, so do not know if this way the number is expressed. However, even if it was given in words the difference between 40,000 and 400,000 is also pretty small. I propose therefore that the number given by Seneca, and indeed all other ancient sources, should be ruled as inadmissible as evidence because we cannot be sure of what it was originally.

If you want to learn about St. Augustine, I recommend Peter Brown's magisterial Augustine of Hippo. But there is a new biography out by James J. O'Donnell. I haven't read it, and I am not inclined to, having just read this review. Another is here. Though less harsh than the first, it too steers me away from O'Donnell:

Sadly, O'Donnell rarely evinces the remotest sympathy for his subject's spiritual aspirations. In fact, he just doesn't seem to like him much. The title "saint and sinner" seems to hint that the "saint" is going to get very little airtime. Augustine is seen as invariably self-serving. It can't be as simple as that.

My advice: Read Peter Brown's masterpiece. That should keep you busy for quite a while. If you want something more poetic and less scholarly, read Giovanni Papini's St Augustine (1930).