🪶Of Studies

Study is for pleasure, for conversation and for judgement, and each has a way of going wrong: too much of it is idleness, showing it off is vanity, and living by its rules alone is the mark of a scholar who has not been outside. Reading has to be finished by experience. Books deserve different speeds, and the three activities make three different people: reading fills you, talking makes you quick, and writing makes you exact.

• One page. Read at lunch on Friday 28 February in ten minutes, at the end of the worst month in a year, and then again before I had finished my soup.
• First printed in 1597 and enlarged for the last edition of the Essays in 1625, the year before he died. I read the 1625 text.
• Every sentence is a balance with three weights on it. It reads like a man who has been asked for advice too often and has decided to give all of it at once.
• I came for the line about tasting and swallowing books and stayed for the last third, where he prescribes subjects like exercises: this study for a wandering mind, that one for a mind that cannot tell things apart.
• Re-read in March, in June and in November. It takes less time than deciding whether to.
• His three speeds are how this vault treats a source: a tasted book gets a record like this one, and a chewed one gets a literature note and, if it earns it, a permanent one. More on the man in 🏛️ Francis Bacon.