★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
What a delightful little book. I read this 36 years ago, so parts of it were vaguely familiar.
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night-there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.Â
Rolling cloud, volleying wind and wheeling sun, the blue tabernacle of sky, the circle of the seasons, the sparkling multitude of the stars-all these are surely part of one rhythmic, mystic whole. Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death … Let us take the road with a light heart. Let us praise the bronze of the leaves and the crash of the surf while we have eyes to see and ears to hear. An honest amazement at the unspeakable beauties of the world is a comely posture for the scholar. Let us all be scholars under Mother Nature’s eye.
What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content — all the great things in life are done by discontented people.