Reading as Rereading (and rereading as reading)

A passage from William Godwin's Thoughts on Man, on study based on careful and active reading, a reading which necessarily involves rereading, or a rereading which is nothing but reading properly for the first time:

Toplady, a celebrated methodist preacher of the last age, somewhere relates a story of a coxcomb, who told him that he had read over Euclid's Elements of Geometry one afternoon at his tea, only leaving out the A's and B's and crooked lines, which seemed to be intruded merely to retard his progress.

Nothing is more easy than to gabble through a work replete with the profoundest elements of thinking, and to carry away almost nothing, when we have finished.

The book does not deserve even to be read, which does not impose on us the duty of frequent pauses, much reflecting and inward debate, or require that we should often go back, compare one observation and statement with another, and does not call upon us to combine and knit together the disjecta membra.

It is an observation which has often been repeated, that, when we come to read an excellent author a second and a third time, we find in him a multitude of things, that we did not in the slightest degree perceive in a first reading. A careful first reading would have a tendeny in a considerable degree to anticipate this following crop.

Nothing is more certain than that a schoolboy gathers much of his most valuable instruction when his lesson is not absolutely before him. In the same sense the more mature student will receive most important benefit, when he shuts his book, and goes forth in the field, and ruminates on what he has read. It is with the intellectual, as with the corporeal eye: we must reitre to a certain distance from the object we would examine, before we can truly take in the whole. We must view it in every direction, "survey it," as Sterne says, "transversely, then foreright, then this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and foreshortenings (13);" and thus only can it be expected that we should adequately comprehend it. 

(13) Tristram Shandy, Vol. IV, Chap. ii

(Thoughts on Man, VII, 176-77)

 

(...)


I remember when I was a boy, looking forward with terror to the ample field of human life, and saying, When I have read through all the books that have been written, what shall I do afterwards? And there is infinitely more sense in this, than in the ludicrous exclamations of men who complain of the want of time, and say that life affords them no space in which to act their imaginings.

On the contrary, when a man has got to the end of one art or course of study, he is compelled to consider what he shall do next. And, when we have gone through a cycle of as many acquisitions, as, from the limitation of human faculties, are not destructive of each other, we shall find ourselves frequently reduced to the beginning some of them over again. Nor is this the least agreeable occupation of human leisure. The book that I read when I was a boy, presents quite a new face to me as I advance in the vale of years. The same words and phrases suggest to me a new train of ideas. And it is no mean pleasure that I derive from the singular sensation of finding the same author and the same book, old and yet not old, presenting to me cherished and inestimable recollections, and at the same time communicating mines of wealth, the shaft of which was till now unexplored.  (Thoughts on Man, VII, 178-79)

Relectura y nuevos significados

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