Bookish Activity: Thumbing Through Thoreau

Thumbing Through Thoreau is a compilation of quotes put together by Kenny Luck and then illustrated by Jay Luke and Ren Adams. It is beautiful. Not for the images, which were wonderfully done, or the words, which are brilliant, but for its ability to make readers think. This was my first experience reading a book of quotations - at least cover-to-cover - and I think one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much is that I was reading an unbound review copy; put simply, I was reading a print out of the book.  So I felt no guilt whatsoever about putting pen to page and annotating.

My annotations are not intellectual, well thought-out, or particularly well written; they are just the phrase or question that popped into my head while reading a quotation. Some examples:

Thoreau: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
My note: Pink Floyd

Thoreau: If it were not for death and funerals, I think the institution of the church would stand no longer.
My  note: a definite possibility, except that humans seem to need greater meaning...perhaps we wouldn't without death.

Thoreau: Be not simply good; be good for something.
My note: The point where so many fall short.

Thoreau: It is only a reflecting mind that sees reflections.
My note: Why did Donnie Darko just pop into my head?

Thoreau: We are one virtue, one truth, one beauty.
My note: Sounds like a Black Eyed Peas song.

Thoreau: Love and lust are as far asunder as a flower-garden is from a brothel.
My note: YA lit would do well to learn this.

Thoreau: ...not till we are lost do we begin to realize where we are..
My note: sad but true; I found my vocation when I realized I had absolutely no idea what job to get and decided to teach part-time until I found one


About half-way through the book I had an idea: Wouldn't it be neat to pass this "book" along to others, let them annotate in it as well, and then get the book back? So that's what I'm going to do if any of you are interested.

Your task would be to read the book, adding in annotations where you'd like, and then pass the book on to someone else (who will be assigned). Once all interested parties have received the book and added their doodles, I'd like the book back, and I will put up a post with images of the annotated pages. With media mail offering pretty cheap shipping, I'm hoping a bunch of you will sign up!

Tweet this! Blog about this! Do whatever you'd like and let me know you promoted this event, and I'll enter you into a drawing for a free book from this list!

Books Speak of Books

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

~Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose

Can you think of a time when a book you were reading "spoke to" another book, whether directly or indirectly? Let's hear about it.

Getting Old

...when I ask questions, they clam right up. Mustn't upset Grandpa, you know.

Why? That's what I want to know. I hate this bizarre policy of protective exclusion, because it effectively writes me off the page...

I've decided it's not about me at all. It's a protective mechanism for them, a way of buffering themselves against my future death.

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My platitudes don't hold their interest and I can hardly blame them for that. My real stories are all out of date. So what if I can speak firsthand about the Spanish flu, the advent of the automobile, world wars, cold wars, guerrilla wars, and Sputnik - that's all ancient history now. That's the reality of getting old, and I guess that's really the crux of the matter. I'm not ready to be old yet.

~Sara Gruen
Water for Elephants

What's the best thing about growing old?

A Proper Start

There are two great powers...and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

We've had nothing but lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history. It's time we started again, but properly this time...

~Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials: The Subtle Knife

Can we ever truly start over or are we always bound to our past?

Oo La La

I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince Of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without a doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo la la! - to tell all.

~ Glen Duncan
I, Lucifer

Do you have titles you like to call yourself (or would like other people to call you)? Let's hear them.

Terrifying

A mother answering her child who wonders why she must prostitute herself if they are not so very poor:

'Child, be reasonable,' she smiles. 'Why should my downfall be your rise? Why should I burn in Hell while you flap around in heaven? In short, why should the world be a better place for you than it has been for me?'

~Michel Faber
The Crimson Petal and the White

Why should the world be better for our children than it has been for us?

The Second Sex

[Aristotle] thought he could prove scientifically that women's bodies and women's minds ('souls' as he called them) were categorically, naturally, that is unalterably, inferior to men's. Women were, in other words, the second sex in the fullest sense: physically, they were deformed males, and intellectually, they lacked the capacity to make their reasoning powers, such as they were, authoritative.

~Paul Cartledge
The Spartans

*emphasis mine, because it's funny.

What are some other interesting beliefs of the past that have been proven false in the present?

Countless Cowboys

Rally was obsessed with what made people wonderful. It was usually what she least expected, but she knew the truth when she found it. In Dublin she'd hoped to meet blue-eyed men, raconteurs who would buy her pints and tell her stories. Instead, it was the Irishwomen who fascinated Rally, the young ones with babies, or the ones with pale skin and cigarettes.

In Montana, Rally had talked to countless cowboys - men with blue jeans and money - hoping to sniff out the spirit of the West for a piece she was writing. But it was in Glacier National Park, listening to a park ranger named Russ, a little barrel of a fellow with a lisp, that Rally felt the stubborn inconsequence of men in the wild. What startled Rally, and kept her traveling, was this: when the wonder of an individual human being struck her - when an Irishwoman took smoke in her mouth, or a park ranger's voice broke - Rally felt a throb of loneliness and wanted to kiss that person...to entwine her solitude with his.

~David Schickler
Kissing in Manhattan

Has anything seemingly mundane ever made you feel an extreme emotion?

Ge-go, I pee!

...for a second Gregor succeeded in thinking of himself as a warrior. A bold, brave, powerful warrior that the Underlanders would tell stories about for centuries. He could almost see himself leading a squadron of bats into battle, stunning the rats, saving the Underland from -

'Ge-go, I pee!' announced Boots.

And there he stood, a boy in a goofy hard hat with a beat-up flashlight and a bunch of batteries he hadn't even tested to see if they still had juice.

The mighty warrior excused himself and changed a diaper.

~Suzanne Collins
Gregor the Overlander

Where's the strangest place you've changed a diaper?

Logic

You can't change the world just by describing it differently, or replacing nasty old words with nice new ones. If your shithouse stinks, you won't make it smell any better by calling it a public convenience. You need to clean it. And a cripple won't stand and walk because you call him alternatively-abled.

~ Jamie Whyte
Crimes Against Logic

Do you have any funny examples of this logic (a la shithouse and cripple)?

The Right Thing to Do

"And you don't put stock in gods."

"We give credence only to that which we can prove exists. Since we cannot find evidence that gods, miracles, and other supernatural things are real, we do not trouble ourselves about them. If that were to change...then we would accept the new information and revise our position."

“It seems a cold world without something…more.”

“On the contrary,” said Oromis, “it is a better world. A place where we are responsible for our own actions, where we can be kind to one another because we want to and because it is the right thing to do instead of being frightened into behaving by the threat of divine punishment. I won’t tell you what to believe Eragon. It is far better to be taught to think critically and then be allowed to make your own decisions than to have someone else’s notions thrust upon you.”

~Christopher Paolini
Eldest

Are there any beliefs you had growing up that you dropped as an adult? Any ideas you thought about and reversed your opinion on?

Better Men Than I

Nor can we...judge what [History's] use and powers were, at a time, when all a man could know, was what he could remember. To which we may add, that in a rude and unlettered state of society the memory is loaded with nothing that is either useless or unintelligible; whereas modern education employs us chiefly in getting by heart, while we are young, what we forget before we are old.

~Robert Wood
Essays on the Original Genius of Homer

Do you think that ancient humans were more or less intelligent than we are?

Bowl of Petunias

Now it is such a bizarrely impossible coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," say Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that" and promply vanishes in a puff of logic.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

~Douglas Adams
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

If you could choose your dieing words, what would they be?

Better Men Than I 2

My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons, and quants are to a modern man. In that sense, I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.

~ Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Do you have any true ghost stories?

The Brightest Thing

I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.

For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks - accidentally - and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you are alive.

~Augusten Burroughs
Running with Scissors

Have you ever loved somebody that didn't deserve it?

A Whole World of Things

But only in order to know if you, as you really are now, see yourself as you once were with all the illusions that were yours then, with all the things both inside and outside of you as they seemed to you - as they were then indeed for you. Well, sir, if you think of all those illusions that mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don't even seem to you to exist any more, while once they were for you, don't you feel that...the very earth under your feet is sinking away from you when you reflect that in the same way this you as you feel it today - all this present reality of yours - is fated to seem a mere illusion to you tomorrow?

Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

~Luigi Pirandello
Six Characters in Search of an Author

What is something you thought you were that you weren't or no longer are? Did you believe you were an athlete when you were younger but don't play a single sport now? Or perhaps you thought you were extremely brave when in fact you aren't?

The Black Worm

Buddy still did not know for sure if the black worm really existed in the form that he imagined, sleek and black in its plated carapace, vestigial eyes buried at either side of its pointed head, its mouth little more than a ridged wound; or if it was merely his mind's way of picturing the corrosion within himself, the foulness that had always been intrinsic to him. If the worm was present within him then it was evil, and some part of the pleasure that he felt was shared, or even generated by that alien presence. But even if it did not exist, there was still evil inside Buddy, evil beyond the worst atrocities he had witnessed on his TV screen, and Buddy knew it.

~John Connolly
Nocturnes

Many people think they have an "evil side" even if it's not quite as evil as Buddy's. Do you have an image of your "evil side"? A devil on your shoulder so to speak?

One Life to Live

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

~S.I. Hayakawa

I have heard it said that people should not become so focused on "dreams" that they forget to live. What do you think? Is reading a way to live or is it a way to hide from living?

Me and the World

I am cold tonight. Offices below, headstones marking daily graves of thousands. Inside, across clock faces, as observed as those of celebrities hands commence final laps. Oblivion gallops closer, favoring the spur, sparing the rein. I think we will be gone soon...If reading this now, whether I am alive or dead, you will know truth...For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise, and step into the shadow now without complaint.

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Just me and the world.

~Alan Moore
Watchmen

Do you have any major regret, something you did or didn't do?

El Sur que Corre

El desnudo

Esta raya es el Sur que corre,
este circulo es el Oeste,
las madejas las hizo el viento
cons us capitulos mas claros
y es recto el mediodia como
un mastil que sostiene el cielo
mientras vuelan las lineas puras
de silencio en silencio hasta ser
las aves delgadas del aire,
las direcciones de la dicha.

~Pablo Neruda
Plenos Poderes

Do you read poetry in any foreign languages?