I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.
Reread the quote. Erasmus isn’t just talking about reading. There are multiple relations:
Knowledge is useless sitting there untouched you have to actively make use of it.
to truly understand something you have to make that knowledge your own, write down things, make annotations, work through examples, read and reread the book. You can’t just absorb the knowledge by skimming through.
There are lost purposes here. How many people have books just to look cultured, or read books just to say they have read them. Think of all the famous unread books or Gatsby’s famous library.
Erasmus, Letter to an unidentified friend (1489)
What is the relationship to rationality? This seems simply to be a cheer for reading and a jeer for pretentious book-collecting.
Reread the quote. Erasmus isn’t just talking about reading. There are multiple relations:
Knowledge is useless sitting there untouched you have to actively make use of it.
to truly understand something you have to make that knowledge your own, write down things, make annotations, work through examples, read and reread the book. You can’t just absorb the knowledge by skimming through.
There are lost purposes here. How many people have books just to look cultured, or read books just to say they have read them. Think of all the famous unread books or Gatsby’s famous library.
I agree with each of your bullet points, and they do help clarify the Erasmus quotation’s relationship to rationality. Thanks.