"SCHOLAR" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to
read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth
of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is
then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is
braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read
becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly
significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision
is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record,
perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read,
in his Plato or Shakspeare, only that least part, -- only the
authentic utterances of the oracle; -- all the rest he rejects, were
it never so many times Plato's and Shakspeare's.

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to
a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious
reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,
-- to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they
aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray
of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated
fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge
are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns,
and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never
countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and
our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst
they grow richer every year.

III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should
be a recluse, a valetudinarian, -- as unfit for any handiwork or
public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical
men' sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or
_see_, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy,
-- who are always, more universally than any other class, the
scholars of their day, -- are addressed as women; that the rough,
spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing
and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and,
indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is
true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is
with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is
not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst
the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even
see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar
without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition
through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is
action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know
whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

The world, -- this shadow of the soul, or _other me_, lies wide
around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and
make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding