ry garbage and bad men's worst
thoughts.

For what can a book be more than the man who wrote it? The brightest
genius seldom puts the best of his own soul into his printed page; and
some famous men have certainly put the worst of theirs. Yet are all men
desirable companions, much less teachers, able to give us advice, even
of those who get reputation and command a hearing? To put out of the
question that writing which is positively bad, are we not, amidst the
multiplicity of books and of writers, in continual danger of being drawn
off by what is stimulating rather than solid, by curiosity after
something accidentally notorious, by what has no intelligible thing to
recommend it, except that it is new? Now, to stuff our minds with what
is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low
nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and
enlarging, and spiritually sustaining. Whether our neglect of the great
books comes from our not reading at all, or from an incorrigible habit
of reading the little books, it ends in just the same thing. And that
thing is ignorance of all the greater literature of the world. To
neglect all the abiding parts of knowledge for the sake of the
evanescent parts is really to know nothing worth knowing. It is in the
end the same, whether we do not use our minds for serious study at all,
or whether we exhaust them by an impotent voracity for desultory
"information"--a thing as fruitful as whistling. Of the two evils I
prefer the former. At least, in that case, the mind is healthy and open.
It is not gorged and enfeebled by excess in that which cannot nourish,
much less enlarge and beautify our nature.

But there is much more than this. Even to those who resolutely avoid the
idleness of reading what is trivial, a difficulty is presented--a
difficulty every day increasing by virtue even of our abundance of
books. What are the subjects, what are the class of books we are to
read, in what order, with what connection, to what ultimate use or
object? Even those who are resolved to read the better books are
embarrassed by a field of choice practically boundless. The longest
life, the greatest industry, joined to the most powerful memory, would
not suffice to make us profit from a hundredth part of the world of
books before us. If the great Newton said that he seemed to have been
all his life gathering a few shells on the shore, whilst a boundless
ocean of truth still la