As far as adding to intended projects for later this year, I think this picture will provide a clue as to what will keep me busy for some time to come.
If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
4 comments:
Oooh, nice Eliot set. Did you luck out and stumble upon those in person or find them online?
Let me guess--your next project is moldy books? All kidding aside, have fun with the Eliots. I'd hoped to get to Middlemarch last year, but it never worked out despite my best intentions. Anyway, Happy New Year to you as well!
I stumbled upon them a couple of days ago. I'm going to try and keep spending on books under control this year, so I guess I felt the need to squeeze this in before the new year (although at $75 for the set I also felt I couldn't NOT pass them up, either).
Thanks Richard. I still have a lot of books cluttering up my half of our office so I'm going to try and put a dent in those before I get started on any of the Eliot. Plus I want to do some reading on her before I start.
Interesting project. Great set also.
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