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boygenius_'s review against another edition
4.0
“¿Y entonces? ¿El libro no era más que eso? Aquellos seres a los que habíamos prestado más atención y ternura que a las personas de carne y hueso (…) aquellas personas por las que habíamos temblado de emoción y sollozado, no las veríamos nunca más, no sabríamos nada más de ellas (…) Hubiésemos deseado tanto que el libro continuara y, de ser eso imposible, tener otras noticias de todos aquellos personajes, enterarnos de algo de su vida, emplear la nuestra en cosas que no fueran totalmente ajenas al amor que nos habían inspirado y cuyo objeto de pronto echábamos en falta, no haber amado en vano, durante una hora, a unos seres que mañana no serían más que un nombre en una página olvidada”.
flavioreads's review against another edition
5.0
"Talvez não haja dias da nossa infância que tenhamos vivido tão plenamente como aqueles que cremos ter deixado sem os viver, aqueles que passamos com um livro preferido. Tudo o que os preenchia para os outros, era por nós afastado como um vulgar obstáculo perante um prazer divino: o jogo para o qual um amigo vinha buscar-nos na passagem mais interessante, a abelha ou o raio de sol perturbadores que nos forçavam a levantar os olhos da página ou a mudar de lugar, as provisões da merenda que nos tinham obrigado a trazer e que deixávamos ao nosso lado no banco, sem lhes tocar, enquanto, por cima da nossa cabeça, o sol ia perdendo força no céu azul, o jantar que nos obrigara a voltar para casa e durante o qual só pensávamos em subir de novo as escadas para acabarmos, logo a seguir, o capítulo interrompido;"
É assim que Proust inicia este seu pequeno texto. Inicialmente um prefácio, acabou por se tornar numa obra por si só. Numa linguagem por vezes labiríntica e recorrendo ao poderoso sentimento de nostalgia o autor exalta o prazer da leitura. Mas não só o prazer, como também a ferramenta que pode vir a constituir. Proust afirma que a leitura é essencial para despertar a procura da verdade no íntimo de cada um de nós. Assim sendo, a leitura e a literatura são patamares que permitem uma espécie de transcendência: na solidão da leitura, esta permite a formação de um pensamento original no leitor
A leitura, para o autor, constitui também a perfeita forma de amizade. Longe está o medo de desiludir. Quando passamos um serão com um livro, é porque verdadeiramente o queremos fazer. Possui a nossa inteira atenção. Nada mais queremos do que estar ali, naquele momento, a ler o livro, a dialogar com o autor numa inteira, mas pura solidão.
A leitura deste livro foi, na verdade, uma releitura. Foi uma preparação para os próximos meses de leitura de "Em Busca do Tempo Perdido" e gostei muito!
É assim que Proust inicia este seu pequeno texto. Inicialmente um prefácio, acabou por se tornar numa obra por si só. Numa linguagem por vezes labiríntica e recorrendo ao poderoso sentimento de nostalgia o autor exalta o prazer da leitura. Mas não só o prazer, como também a ferramenta que pode vir a constituir. Proust afirma que a leitura é essencial para despertar a procura da verdade no íntimo de cada um de nós. Assim sendo, a leitura e a literatura são patamares que permitem uma espécie de transcendência: na solidão da leitura, esta permite a formação de um pensamento original no leitor
A leitura, para o autor, constitui também a perfeita forma de amizade. Longe está o medo de desiludir. Quando passamos um serão com um livro, é porque verdadeiramente o queremos fazer. Possui a nossa inteira atenção. Nada mais queremos do que estar ali, naquele momento, a ler o livro, a dialogar com o autor numa inteira, mas pura solidão.
A leitura deste livro foi, na verdade, uma releitura. Foi uma preparação para os próximos meses de leitura de "Em Busca do Tempo Perdido" e gostei muito!
nunuseli's review against another edition
4.0
El único libro de Proust que he podido terminar es este librito sobre el placer de la lectura. Una delicia recomendable para todos los que disfrutan de la lectura. La leí en la facultad y me ayudó a entender realmente por qué leía.
cryo_guy's review against another edition
5.0
“The configuration of something is not simply the image of its nature, it is the clue to its destiny and the transcript of its history.”
*
“The power of genius is to make us love a beauty we feel to be more real than ourselves, in those things which in the eyes of others are as particular and as perishable as ourselves.”
*
“But if we are unable to relight the fires of the past, we would like at least to gather up their ashes.”
**
This book is a part of Penguin's series, Great Ideas, which collects short works or excerpts from different widely influential authors. But really I'm more interested in the series because all of the slim volumes have beautiful covers often with indented patterns. This one by Proust was no exception-its cover a lovely flowering ivy pattern with an art nouveau styling. I must have over 10 or 15 in the series by now; although I haven't gotten around to reading more than 5. I picked this one out because I was ruminating on what to add to my book queue and I thought well I should pick a series to have running on in the background since I'm reading 4 or 5 books at a time and my mind immediately turned to the completely redoubtable and daunting Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time). I had been gifted all the volumes of the series quite a few years ago by a family friend who seemed to think I was up to the challenge. And I foolishly decided to cart the first volume with me through grad school thinking I might start it at any moment. Well anyway, here we are at the very beginnings of the impossible journey again. Except we aren't! I was thinking, mulling it over, I found my copy of Swann's Way again, I admired the cover-also coincidentally an art nouveau inspired minimalist type-and then set it in the soon-to-be-read pile. That was when I chanced upon this book at a cozy bookstore called Cloud & Leaf Bookstore in Manzanita, OR (a really wonderful and worthwhile small store from which I also bought a book of Ashbery's collected prose). I took it home and said to myself, “ah yes” looking at the two books side by side “I know just what to do. I shall set aside the long series once again in favor of the more temperate choice of reading this slender tome.” For some reason I speak to myself in this manner. I continued, “Yes, indeed, I will exercise the appropriate amount of moderation in choosing this, without sacrificing the experience of reading Marcel Proust, esteemed French author and (so I was soon to learn) art critic!” It was in that way that I convinced myself to read this book instead of Proust's other, more famous series.
So let's get to it! First off let's talk about how ignorant I am-I don't even know that much about Proust! I had no idea he was an art critic; I thought he was just a hugely influential French author known for his extremely detailed and languid prose-memories spawn more memories. When I saw the title “Days of Reading” I thought oh hey some meditation on what reading is like-but in fact, the first essay is one of art criticism about an art critic, John Ruskin. It's a great read because it comments on the nuances of Ruskin's perspective on art criticism while also generating Proust's own. And there are some really wonderful bits that come out of it. There are two anecdotal quotes about Turner and I looove Turner. In talking about how influential Ruskin is, Proust amusingly imagines what it would be like to see all of French art through the eyes of an Englishman like Ruskin (Ha!). He articulates a crucial part of Ruskin's angle-that of reverence. He says of Ruskin:
“But he liked the attitude 'reverence' which believes it 'insolent to throw light on a mystery'”
(which is really a fantastic insight into Ruskin and articulation of his attitude toward art)
And then adds his own modification:
“It is not that I fail to recognize the virtues of reverence, it is the very condition of love. But where love ceases, it must never be substituted for it, so enabling us to believe without examination and to admire on trust.”
I really appreciate something like this because it seems applicable more widely than just to art. Anyway, the essay is full of great stuff like this. Part of what's appealing about Proust's commentary is exactly that. One of the above quotes is another great example of that: that the power of genius enables us to see a beauty greater than ourselves. I think it's not a stretch of the imagination to see that Proust intended for his comments to have more breadth than to be confined merely to art criticism. But I think you get my point here; the commentary is doubly interesting for it. I could continue by laying out some more specific passages and saying what I like about it, but Proust is truly a poignant and insightful writer than it would be better for you to just read his graceful prose rather than hear me condense it and summarize it.
Days of Reading I+II:
These are exactly what you might suppose they are: thoughtful meditations on reading full of Proust's memories and his delicate prose. He talks about the joys he had reading in childhood, the difference between a conversation and reading, and also, interestingly, when reading becomes dangerous: when it replaces the personal life og the mind, “when truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.” This isn't just talking about the pure escapism style reading, but of a deeper worry, one in which readers don't engage with the content of a book at all. He previously talks about how reading a book is in some ways the opposite of a conversation because there isn't a living entity espousing their own thoughts and opinions-one that can change and respond to your input. But there is still a crucial element in which one engages one's own intellect in conversation with the book. A book cannot be an interlocutor, but there is a relationship formed. I think when he speaks of this danger, it is to read without forming a relationship with the book, or to view it merely In terms of the pleasure it provides you. Surely this, too, as in the previous essay on Ruskin has wider applicability than just to one's relationship to a book. And he goes on to detail those innumerable joys of having a proper relationship with a book. That in that conversation there is a silence, pure in it's inability to judge and its parallel ego to ours-one we imbue with life.
There are two other very short sections at the end one, extracts from an unfinished collection of essays “Contre Sainte-Beuve,” which is mainly about critiquing Sainte-Beuve and two, “Swann explained by Proust,” a three page overview of the perspective Proust used to write the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. Neither one was particularly inspiring to me, but they're so short why not finish them off?
I would recommend this to...anyone who has a passing interest in Proust? If you're at that point you probably have the requisite knowledge to understand the references Proust makes. Although, perhaps not, if by some chance you've assiduously avoided art altogether. I wouldn't say it's a great replacement for reading In Search of Lost Time, simply because that's a novel and these are essays. But I will say it's certainly whetted my appetite for Proust's prose, which I'm now fairly confident is as good as history as deemed it. Aside from that, if you have interests in Ruskin, Turner, art criticism, or thoughts on the activity of reading, I'd say it's probably well worth your time. At a 120 pages (small ones), I doubt it would take you that long anyway.
My selected quotes, as always:
“But, for reasons the wholly metaphysical search for which would go beyond a mere essay on art, Beauty cannot be loved in a fruitful manner if one loves it simply for the pleasures it affords. And just as to seek for happiness for its own sake leads only to tedium, and to find it one must seek for something other than it, so aesthetic pleasure is given to us in addition if we love Beauty for its own sake, as something real existing outside of ourselves and infinitely more important than the joy it affords us.”
*
“Ruskin it is true might answer us back by repeating on his own account the words of Turner which he quotes in The Eagle’s Nest and which M. de la Sizeranne has translated: ‘…Turner, in his early life, was sometimes good-natured, and would show people what he was about. He was one day making a drawing of Plymouth harbour, with some ships at the distance of a mile or two, seen against the light. having shown this drawing to a naval officer, the naval officer observed with surprise, and objected with very justifiable indignation, that the ships of the line had no port-hols. “No,” said Turner, “certainly not. If you will walk up to Mount Edgecumbe, and look at the ships against the sunset, you will find you can’t see the port-holes.” “Well, but,” said the naval officer, still indignant, “you know the port-holes are there.” “Yes,” said Turner, “I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there.”’
*
“Admiration for someone’s thought, on the contrary, causes beauty to arise at every step because it is constantly awakening the desire for it. The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgement of part of its independence. ‘What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.’ Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have thus accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralysed. Then we are simply in a state of grace in which all our faculties, our critical sense as much as the others, are enhanced. And so this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom. There is no better way of coming to be aware of what feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his. We are free in life but only if we have an aim: the sophism of an indifferent freedom was exposed long ago. Those writers who are forever emptying their minds, thinking to rid them of all outside influence so as to be quite sure of remaining personal, are obeying, unknowingly, a sophism equally as naive. In point of fact, the only occasions when we can truly call on the full power of our minds are those when we do not believe we are acting independently, when we do not choose an arbitrary objective for our endeavours. The theme of the novelist, the vision of the poet, the truth of the philosopher, impose themselves on them in an almost necessary way, externally to their minds so to speak. And it is by submitting his mind to the conveying of that vision, to the approximation to that truth, that the artist becomes truly himself.”
*
“But in speaking of the passion, somewhat artificial to start with but later so very profound, which I had for Ruskin’s thought, I speak by the light of memory and of a memory which recalls only the facts ‘but can repossess nothing of the deep past’. It is only when certain periods of our lives are forever closed, when, even at those times when we seem to have been granted the power and the freedom, we are forbidden to reopen the doors to them by stealth, when we are incapable of reverting even for an instant to the state in which we were for so long, only then do we refuse to accept that such things should have been entirely abolished. We can no longer sing of them, having failed to heed Goethe’s wise admonition, that there is no poetry but in the things one can still feel. But if we are unable to relight the fires of the past, we would like at least to gather up their ashes. For want of a resurrection of which we are no longer capable, we would like at least, with the frozen memory we have preserved of these things – the memory of the facts which tells us: ‘you were this or that’ without enabling us to become it again, which affirms the reality of a paradise lost instead of restoring it to us in memory, – to describe it and to constitute the knowledge of it. It is when Ruskin is far away from us that we translate his books and try to capture the characteristics of his thought in a close likeness. And so it is not the accents of our faith or of our love that you will come to know, but our piety alone that you will perceive here and there, stealthy and impassive, busied, like the Theban virgin, on the restoration of a tomb.”
*
“The power of genius is to make us love a beauty we feel to be more real than ourselves, in those things which in the eyes of others are as particular and as perishable as ourselves.”
*
“But if we are unable to relight the fires of the past, we would like at least to gather up their ashes.”
**
This book is a part of Penguin's series, Great Ideas, which collects short works or excerpts from different widely influential authors. But really I'm more interested in the series because all of the slim volumes have beautiful covers often with indented patterns. This one by Proust was no exception-its cover a lovely flowering ivy pattern with an art nouveau styling. I must have over 10 or 15 in the series by now; although I haven't gotten around to reading more than 5. I picked this one out because I was ruminating on what to add to my book queue and I thought well I should pick a series to have running on in the background since I'm reading 4 or 5 books at a time and my mind immediately turned to the completely redoubtable and daunting Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time). I had been gifted all the volumes of the series quite a few years ago by a family friend who seemed to think I was up to the challenge. And I foolishly decided to cart the first volume with me through grad school thinking I might start it at any moment. Well anyway, here we are at the very beginnings of the impossible journey again. Except we aren't! I was thinking, mulling it over, I found my copy of Swann's Way again, I admired the cover-also coincidentally an art nouveau inspired minimalist type-and then set it in the soon-to-be-read pile. That was when I chanced upon this book at a cozy bookstore called Cloud & Leaf Bookstore in Manzanita, OR (a really wonderful and worthwhile small store from which I also bought a book of Ashbery's collected prose). I took it home and said to myself, “ah yes” looking at the two books side by side “I know just what to do. I shall set aside the long series once again in favor of the more temperate choice of reading this slender tome.” For some reason I speak to myself in this manner. I continued, “Yes, indeed, I will exercise the appropriate amount of moderation in choosing this, without sacrificing the experience of reading Marcel Proust, esteemed French author and (so I was soon to learn) art critic!” It was in that way that I convinced myself to read this book instead of Proust's other, more famous series.
So let's get to it! First off let's talk about how ignorant I am-I don't even know that much about Proust! I had no idea he was an art critic; I thought he was just a hugely influential French author known for his extremely detailed and languid prose-memories spawn more memories. When I saw the title “Days of Reading” I thought oh hey some meditation on what reading is like-but in fact, the first essay is one of art criticism about an art critic, John Ruskin. It's a great read because it comments on the nuances of Ruskin's perspective on art criticism while also generating Proust's own. And there are some really wonderful bits that come out of it. There are two anecdotal quotes about Turner and I looove Turner. In talking about how influential Ruskin is, Proust amusingly imagines what it would be like to see all of French art through the eyes of an Englishman like Ruskin (Ha!). He articulates a crucial part of Ruskin's angle-that of reverence. He says of Ruskin:
“But he liked the attitude 'reverence' which believes it 'insolent to throw light on a mystery'”
(which is really a fantastic insight into Ruskin and articulation of his attitude toward art)
And then adds his own modification:
“It is not that I fail to recognize the virtues of reverence, it is the very condition of love. But where love ceases, it must never be substituted for it, so enabling us to believe without examination and to admire on trust.”
I really appreciate something like this because it seems applicable more widely than just to art. Anyway, the essay is full of great stuff like this. Part of what's appealing about Proust's commentary is exactly that. One of the above quotes is another great example of that: that the power of genius enables us to see a beauty greater than ourselves. I think it's not a stretch of the imagination to see that Proust intended for his comments to have more breadth than to be confined merely to art criticism. But I think you get my point here; the commentary is doubly interesting for it. I could continue by laying out some more specific passages and saying what I like about it, but Proust is truly a poignant and insightful writer than it would be better for you to just read his graceful prose rather than hear me condense it and summarize it.
Days of Reading I+II:
These are exactly what you might suppose they are: thoughtful meditations on reading full of Proust's memories and his delicate prose. He talks about the joys he had reading in childhood, the difference between a conversation and reading, and also, interestingly, when reading becomes dangerous: when it replaces the personal life og the mind, “when truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.” This isn't just talking about the pure escapism style reading, but of a deeper worry, one in which readers don't engage with the content of a book at all. He previously talks about how reading a book is in some ways the opposite of a conversation because there isn't a living entity espousing their own thoughts and opinions-one that can change and respond to your input. But there is still a crucial element in which one engages one's own intellect in conversation with the book. A book cannot be an interlocutor, but there is a relationship formed. I think when he speaks of this danger, it is to read without forming a relationship with the book, or to view it merely In terms of the pleasure it provides you. Surely this, too, as in the previous essay on Ruskin has wider applicability than just to one's relationship to a book. And he goes on to detail those innumerable joys of having a proper relationship with a book. That in that conversation there is a silence, pure in it's inability to judge and its parallel ego to ours-one we imbue with life.
There are two other very short sections at the end one, extracts from an unfinished collection of essays “Contre Sainte-Beuve,” which is mainly about critiquing Sainte-Beuve and two, “Swann explained by Proust,” a three page overview of the perspective Proust used to write the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu. Neither one was particularly inspiring to me, but they're so short why not finish them off?
I would recommend this to...anyone who has a passing interest in Proust? If you're at that point you probably have the requisite knowledge to understand the references Proust makes. Although, perhaps not, if by some chance you've assiduously avoided art altogether. I wouldn't say it's a great replacement for reading In Search of Lost Time, simply because that's a novel and these are essays. But I will say it's certainly whetted my appetite for Proust's prose, which I'm now fairly confident is as good as history as deemed it. Aside from that, if you have interests in Ruskin, Turner, art criticism, or thoughts on the activity of reading, I'd say it's probably well worth your time. At a 120 pages (small ones), I doubt it would take you that long anyway.
My selected quotes, as always:
“But, for reasons the wholly metaphysical search for which would go beyond a mere essay on art, Beauty cannot be loved in a fruitful manner if one loves it simply for the pleasures it affords. And just as to seek for happiness for its own sake leads only to tedium, and to find it one must seek for something other than it, so aesthetic pleasure is given to us in addition if we love Beauty for its own sake, as something real existing outside of ourselves and infinitely more important than the joy it affords us.”
*
“Ruskin it is true might answer us back by repeating on his own account the words of Turner which he quotes in The Eagle’s Nest and which M. de la Sizeranne has translated: ‘…Turner, in his early life, was sometimes good-natured, and would show people what he was about. He was one day making a drawing of Plymouth harbour, with some ships at the distance of a mile or two, seen against the light. having shown this drawing to a naval officer, the naval officer observed with surprise, and objected with very justifiable indignation, that the ships of the line had no port-hols. “No,” said Turner, “certainly not. If you will walk up to Mount Edgecumbe, and look at the ships against the sunset, you will find you can’t see the port-holes.” “Well, but,” said the naval officer, still indignant, “you know the port-holes are there.” “Yes,” said Turner, “I know that well enough; but my business is to draw what I see, and not what I know is there.”’
*
“Admiration for someone’s thought, on the contrary, causes beauty to arise at every step because it is constantly awakening the desire for it. The mediocre usually imagine that to let ourselves be guided by the books we admire robs our faculty of judgement of part of its independence. ‘What can it matter to you what Ruskin feels: feel for yourself.’ Such a view rests on a psychological error which will be discounted by all those who have thus accepted a spiritual discipline and feel thereby that their power of understanding and of feeling is infinitely enhanced, and their critical sense never paralysed. Then we are simply in a state of grace in which all our faculties, our critical sense as much as the others, are enhanced. And so this voluntary servitude is the beginning of freedom. There is no better way of coming to be aware of what feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought itself that we bring out into the light, together with his. We are free in life but only if we have an aim: the sophism of an indifferent freedom was exposed long ago. Those writers who are forever emptying their minds, thinking to rid them of all outside influence so as to be quite sure of remaining personal, are obeying, unknowingly, a sophism equally as naive. In point of fact, the only occasions when we can truly call on the full power of our minds are those when we do not believe we are acting independently, when we do not choose an arbitrary objective for our endeavours. The theme of the novelist, the vision of the poet, the truth of the philosopher, impose themselves on them in an almost necessary way, externally to their minds so to speak. And it is by submitting his mind to the conveying of that vision, to the approximation to that truth, that the artist becomes truly himself.”
*
“But in speaking of the passion, somewhat artificial to start with but later so very profound, which I had for Ruskin’s thought, I speak by the light of memory and of a memory which recalls only the facts ‘but can repossess nothing of the deep past’. It is only when certain periods of our lives are forever closed, when, even at those times when we seem to have been granted the power and the freedom, we are forbidden to reopen the doors to them by stealth, when we are incapable of reverting even for an instant to the state in which we were for so long, only then do we refuse to accept that such things should have been entirely abolished. We can no longer sing of them, having failed to heed Goethe’s wise admonition, that there is no poetry but in the things one can still feel. But if we are unable to relight the fires of the past, we would like at least to gather up their ashes. For want of a resurrection of which we are no longer capable, we would like at least, with the frozen memory we have preserved of these things – the memory of the facts which tells us: ‘you were this or that’ without enabling us to become it again, which affirms the reality of a paradise lost instead of restoring it to us in memory, – to describe it and to constitute the knowledge of it. It is when Ruskin is far away from us that we translate his books and try to capture the characteristics of his thought in a close likeness. And so it is not the accents of our faith or of our love that you will come to know, but our piety alone that you will perceive here and there, stealthy and impassive, busied, like the Theban virgin, on the restoration of a tomb.”
btmcastro93's review against another edition
3.0
“… reading being the reverse of conversation, consisting as it does for each one of us in receiving the communication of another’s thought while still being on our own, that is, continuing to enjoy the intellectual sway which we have in solitude and which conversation dispels instantly, and continuing to be open to inspiration, with our minds still at work hard and fruitfully on themselves.”
rltinha's review against another edition
3.0
"Na leitura, a amizade é subitamente reduzida à sua primeira pureza. Com os livros não há amabilidade. Estes amigos, se passarmos o serão com eles, é porque realmente temos vontade disso."
davide_logbook's review against another edition
5.0
"O autor de “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu”, encara a leitura como uma peça fundamental que nos adentra na vida espiritual, sendo que esta está situada no seu limiar, i.e., induz-nos nela; não a constitui. Ora, para alcançarmos esse “estado de graça”, não pode existir unilateralidade: o caminho é feito com o livro quando, também, o leitor tem um papel ativo; quando na solidão é estabelecido, ruidosamente, um diálogo em surdina.
Proust diz-nos que “Enquanto a leitura é para nós a iniciadora cujas chaves mágicas nos abrem no fundo de nós mesmos a porta das moradas nas quais não teríamos sabido penetrar, é salutar o seu papel na nossa vida. Torna-se perigoso pelo contrário quando, em vez de nos despertar para a vida pessoal do espírito, a leitura tende a substituir-se a ela (…) como uma coisa material, depositada entre as folhas dos livros, como mel completamente preparado pelos outros e que só temos de nos dar ao trabalho de recolher (…) e de saborear em seguida passivamente num perfeito repouso de corpo e de espírito.” (p.57)"
Pode ler o resto da opinião em: https://pagebpbooks.wordpress.com/
Proust diz-nos que “Enquanto a leitura é para nós a iniciadora cujas chaves mágicas nos abrem no fundo de nós mesmos a porta das moradas nas quais não teríamos sabido penetrar, é salutar o seu papel na nossa vida. Torna-se perigoso pelo contrário quando, em vez de nos despertar para a vida pessoal do espírito, a leitura tende a substituir-se a ela (…) como uma coisa material, depositada entre as folhas dos livros, como mel completamente preparado pelos outros e que só temos de nos dar ao trabalho de recolher (…) e de saborear em seguida passivamente num perfeito repouso de corpo e de espírito.” (p.57)"
Pode ler o resto da opinião em: https://pagebpbooks.wordpress.com/
maliablue's review against another edition
4.0
3.5 Stars
This collection of essays was a bit of a hit or miss read for me. The two essays that actually corresponded to the title--Days of Reading 1 and 2, were wonderful, insightful, relatable and even funny at times. The parts about Ruskin and some other author whose name I cannot recall at the moment were less so... They had their profound moments as well, but most of it seemed rather nitpicky and overall not that interesting to someone who'd never, you know, actually read anything by those authors. Which I guess is more my failing than Prousts, but alas, I can only judge the book with the knowledge I have at the time of reading. Overall a worthwhile read, though in retrospect I might have skipped all the Ruskin worship and Ruskin bashing (yes, you can do both in one essay).
This collection of essays was a bit of a hit or miss read for me. The two essays that actually corresponded to the title--Days of Reading 1 and 2, were wonderful, insightful, relatable and even funny at times. The parts about Ruskin and some other author whose name I cannot recall at the moment were less so... They had their profound moments as well, but most of it seemed rather nitpicky and overall not that interesting to someone who'd never, you know, actually read anything by those authors. Which I guess is more my failing than Prousts, but alas, I can only judge the book with the knowledge I have at the time of reading. Overall a worthwhile read, though in retrospect I might have skipped all the Ruskin worship and Ruskin bashing (yes, you can do both in one essay).