In moving to a retirement town someone who has read a lot over his lifetime might be influenced by good bookstores or university libraries. But that restricts retirees to a small number of cities. How fortunate we are that the internet and eBook gadgets liberate us from such geographical strictures.
My own town of choice, the Little Pueblo of the southern New Mexico highlands, has a small public university. The library's book collection is disappointing; I've learned to turn that to advantage. When walking through the stacks and not finding anything to read, it's easy to feel frustration develop into surliness; then I walk to the lower numbers in the book numbering scheme.
These are the books of general philosophy and historical overview. They are in the last, northernmost row. I pick out one of these books of the Big Picture, and carry it over to large, tinted windows facing north to the ponderosa covered mountains. The stacks are on the second story of a small campus situated on a hill, so the view from these marvelous windows puts the reader into the right mood. He cares only about the broad sweeps of human history. What a marvelous perspective!
(As much as the architectural glass and the pretty view deserve credit, the thing that really makes it work is the discipline of deliberately torturing yourself first, and then feeling mental release into all that empty mountainous space, with your mind roaming free over human history, while holding a book with the same perspective.)
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, lived in a tower during his exile on Corsica. Fifteen hundred years later, his disciple, Montaigne, probably exploited the same phenomenon when he walked the third story of his stone tower, paced back and forth, and wrote his famous Essays. He had a view of his courtyards and fields. It was his sanctuary, his throne. I wonder if he permitted his wife or daughter to violate this refuge with the fussing and domestic trivia of Woman. (of that era, not ours. Ahem)
There is something about elevation and isolation that might have helped him write and think. I reroofed my house once. Despite being intent on finishing that gruesome job, there were times when I couldn't resist just looking at the neighborhood. From that angle it looked so different. Then I'd forget about the job and just sit there and think.
Montaigne's reading was just as haphazard as his writing. He would read a little and then pace around the library. It was sixteen paces in diameter.
My own town of choice, the Little Pueblo of the southern New Mexico highlands, has a small public university. The library's book collection is disappointing; I've learned to turn that to advantage. When walking through the stacks and not finding anything to read, it's easy to feel frustration develop into surliness; then I walk to the lower numbers in the book numbering scheme.
These are the books of general philosophy and historical overview. They are in the last, northernmost row. I pick out one of these books of the Big Picture, and carry it over to large, tinted windows facing north to the ponderosa covered mountains. The stacks are on the second story of a small campus situated on a hill, so the view from these marvelous windows puts the reader into the right mood. He cares only about the broad sweeps of human history. What a marvelous perspective!
(As much as the architectural glass and the pretty view deserve credit, the thing that really makes it work is the discipline of deliberately torturing yourself first, and then feeling mental release into all that empty mountainous space, with your mind roaming free over human history, while holding a book with the same perspective.)
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher of ancient Rome, lived in a tower during his exile on Corsica. Fifteen hundred years later, his disciple, Montaigne, probably exploited the same phenomenon when he walked the third story of his stone tower, paced back and forth, and wrote his famous Essays. He had a view of his courtyards and fields. It was his sanctuary, his throne. I wonder if he permitted his wife or daughter to violate this refuge with the fussing and domestic trivia of Woman. (of that era, not ours. Ahem)
There is something about elevation and isolation that might have helped him write and think. I reroofed my house once. Despite being intent on finishing that gruesome job, there were times when I couldn't resist just looking at the neighborhood. From that angle it looked so different. Then I'd forget about the job and just sit there and think.
Montaigne's reading was just as haphazard as his writing. He would read a little and then pace around the library. It was sixteen paces in diameter.
"Every place of retirement requires a place to walk. My thoughts fall asleep if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it...Indeed. I can do the same thing as Montaigne back at my college library. This link between the mind, the body, thoughts, books, and altitude might be a microcosm of what I read about in one of those low-numbered books, Francis Bacon, The Philosopher of Industrial Science, by Benjamin Farrington. How significant one of the author's comments was:
The mind is exercised in books, but the body...remains inactive, droops, and grieves."
(Chapter 4, page 60, "It must never be forgotten that Bacon belonged to that tiny minority of writers who make books out of life, not to the immense majority who make books out of books."I wonder if Farrington or Bacon walked around in the upper stories of buildings when they wrote.
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Tom in Orlando