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The Outside Intervention

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Andrew Orange

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“Together they read plays and poems by William Shakespeare and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and Bianca translated some of Ovid's poetry for her as well as parts of Homer's great works. They relished the poems of Andrew Marvell, John Dryden and John Milton. They read excerpts from the King James Bible, as well as passages from books of history, gardening, medicine and more. The closet wasn't much, but it was Rosamund's, especially now it bore no resemblance to its former owner. It was her cave in which, like Ali Baba, she kept her trove of treasured ideas and growing knowledge, but could open and close it at will with the key hanging around her neck. It was in this room that Rosamund finally started to feel a sense of belonging.”

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Book:The Chocolate Maker's Wife
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“She had devoted time to improving her reading and was now more than proficient. The shelf she'd first cleared with Bianca overflowed with tales of King Arthur and his knights, Ovid's poetry, plays by Sophocles, Aristotle and Aeschylus, Apuleius, names she loved repeating in her mind because the mere sound of them conjured the drama, pageantry, passion, transformations and suffering of their heroes and heroines. One of her favorite writers was Geoffrey Chaucer-- his poems of pilgrims exchanging stories as they traveled to a shrine in Canterbury were both heart aching and often sidesplittingly funny. Admittedly, one of the reasons she loved Chaucer was because she could read him for herself. It was the same reason she picked up Shakespeare over and over, and the works of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne. They all wrote in English. Regarded as quite the eccentric, the duchess was a woman of learning who, like Rosamund, was self-taught. Her autobiography, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life, a gift from Mr. Henderson, gave Rosamund a model to emulate. Here was a woman who dared to consider not only philosophy, science, astronomy and romance, but to write about her reflections and discoveries in insightful ways. Defying her critics, she determined that women were men's intellectual equal, possessed of as quick a wit and as many subtleties if only given the means to express themselves-- in other words, access to education.”

ReadingBooksWritersAutobiographyIdealistPhilosophersChaucerCavendish
Book:The Chocolate Maker's Wife
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“આપણે ગમ્મે તેટલા સાચા હોઈએ, કેટલીક લડાઈઓ જીતવી નિરર્થક હોય છે. જેમને અજ્ઞાનતામાં અજવાળું દેખાતું હોય, એમની પાસે જ્ઞાનની વાતો કરવી મૂર્ખામી છે. જેઓ પોતાની અજ્ઞાનતાને વફાદાર હોય, એમની સામે જ્ઞાનનું પ્રદર્શન ક્યારેય ન કરવું.”

QuotesGujaratiNimit Oza
Author:Dr. Nimit Oza
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“Let’s have a look at the books. The first thing noticed, at least on looking at those you have most prominent, is that the function of books for you is immediate reading; they are not instruments of study or reference or components of a library arranged according to some order. Perhaps on occasion you have tried to give a semblance of order to your shelves, but every attempt at classification was rapidly foiled by heterogeneous acquisitions. The chief reason for the juxtaposition of volumes, besides the dimensions of the tallest or the shortest, remains chronological, as they arrived here, one after the other, anyway you can always put your hand on any one. …and perhaps you don’t find yourself hunting for a book you have already read.”

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Book:If on a winter's night a traveler
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“You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift the file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt your chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it: the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited. But doesn’t this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect that is, not for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element n the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the book. Worse still if you belong—willingly or unwillingly—to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed. In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home.”

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Book:If on a winter's night a traveler
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“So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let’s see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. But you go on and you realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book itself that arouses your curiosity, in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.”

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Book:If on a winter's night a traveler
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