Library quote...

[fajrdrako]

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. - Samuel Johnson

I find this interesting because I am not sure what Johnson meant.

Comments

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

Because you never, ever find the book that you're looking for? = )

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I do - sometimes. Maybe poor old Johnson couldn't.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Or possibly looking at the kind of people you find hanging around in them, with aspirations that never go anywhere. (Much like self.)

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Or maybe the books themselves were seen as evidence of such aspirations?

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yes: the books waiting there for readers who will never pick them up!

[dewline.livejournal.com]

If only the readers who would pick them up could but know of them...

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Perhaps people should browse more?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

That sounds so sad! It reminds me of the Carleton University Library's old copy of Les Chroniques d'Ernoul. Of course I have checked that book out many times in the course of my life. Not to long ago, after having not read it for about two decades, I checked it out again - and there was a bookmark I'd put in, a comic book postcard mailed to me in 1983, still marking the page where I'd left it.

And it always seems melancholy to me to pick up a book published in the 19th century and find some of the pages still uncut.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

Yes: I've sometimes bought old books and been horrified to find pages uncut, Berrini's 1920s play, Rambaldo di Vaqueiras (I Monferrato) being a case in point.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

At least we are there, to give these books some attention in this century.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

[silverwhistle] Or possibly looking at the kind of people ... (Much like self.)

That's a lot like me too, I'm afraid. It drives me up the wall that I have no time to be catching up on things that I should be doing (as against what must be done).

That's what happens when one spends four hours a day, five days a week, just getting to/from work. [Ugghh.]

[monsieureden.livejournal.com]

LOL. Poor lonely books (and me looking at them all and thinking 'this is the rest of my life'). I really do hope I eventually get back to that novel nonsense!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I really do hope I eventually get back to that novel nonsense!

I think you will. I know you should. I am not a good example in this regard.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

My first thought is that Johnson was referring to the *history* recorded therein. It's a sad (but true) fact that we are always forgetting our history ... and therefore [as the philosopher Santayana pointed out] "are condemned to repeat it."

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure we repeat the history we forget - I don't think any of it is repeatable - but if we forget it, we don't learn from it, either. And so lose a chance to understand ourselves better.