1 HEARTy READINg

BY SYDNEY SMITH

Sydney Smith (1771–1845): An English clergyman and author. He published some volumes of sermons characterized by earnestness and moderation, but his reputation rests chiefly on his miscellaneous and critical writings. He was distinguished for his wit, humor, and conversational powers.

This advice about reading is taken from a “Lecture on the Conduct of the Understanding.”

Curiosity is a passion very favorable to the love of study, and a passion very susceptible of increase by cultivation. Sound travels so many feet in a second, and light travels so many feet in a second. Nothing more probable; but you do not care how light and sound travel. Very likely: but make yourself care; get up, shake yourself well, pretend to care, make believe to care, and very soon you will care, and care so much that you will sit for hours thinking about light and sound, and be extremely angry with any one who interrupts you in your pursuits, and tolerate no other conversation but about light and sound, and catch yourself plaguing everybody to death who approaches you with the discussion of these subjects.

I am sure that a man ought to read as he would grasp a nettle: do it lightly, and you get molested; grasp it with all your strength and you feel none of its asperities. There is nothing so horrible as languid study; when you sit looking at the clock, wishing the time was over or that somebody would call on you and put you out of your misery. The only way to read with any efficacy is to read so heartily that dinner-time comes two hoursbefore you expected it.

To sit with yourLivy before you, and hear the geese cackling that saved the Capitol; and to see with your own eyes the Carthaginiansutlers gathering up the rings of the Roman knights after the battle of Cann? and heaping them into bushels; and to be so intimately present at the actions you are reading of that when anybody knocks at the door it will take you two or three seconds to determine whether you are in your own study, or in the plains of Lombardy, looking at Hannibal’s weather-beaten face, and admiring the splendor of his single eye,—this is the only kind of study which is not tiresome, and almost the only kind which is not useless; this is the knowledge which gets into the system and which a man carries about and uses like his limbs, without perceiving that it isextraneous , weighty, or inconvenient.