This page is currently undergoing renovations.
In the meantime, please take a look at some selections from one
of my favorite pieces of American literature,
the essay "Reading" from Thoreau's Walden
Reading
"With a little more
deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps
become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature
and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for
ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or
acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are
immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or
Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the
divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon
as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so
bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has
settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was
revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is
neither past, present, nor future."
"The student may
read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or
luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their
heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books,
even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be
in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek
the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than
common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.
The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done
little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem
as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and
curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly
hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are
raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual
suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer
remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men
sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make
way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student
will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written
and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the
noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are
not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in
them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study
Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in
a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader
more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires
a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost
of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately
and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able
to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for
there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written
language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly
transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we
learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is
the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this
is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant
to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.
The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the
Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the
works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written
in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of
literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and
Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste
paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature.
But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though
rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of
their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars
were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of
antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear,
after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars
only are still reading it".
"Those who have not
learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were
written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the
human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever
been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be
regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in
English, nor Aeschylus, nor Virgil even -- works as refined, as solidly
done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers,
say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the
elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors
of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them.
It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the
genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age
will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the
still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the
nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall
be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes
and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively
deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we
may hope to scale heaven at last"
"I aspire to be
acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced,
whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato
and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw
him, -- my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the
wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which
contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I
never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in
this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between
the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the
illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children
and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of
antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a
race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights
than the columns of the daily paper"
--Henry David Thoreau --.
Here's a quote from Machiavelli,
also on reading the Classics:
“I take off my work-day clothes, filled with dust and mud, and don
royal and curial garments. Worthily dressed, I enter into the ancient
courts of the men of antiquity, where warmly received, I feed on that
which is my only food and which was meant for me. I am not ashamed to
speak with them and ask them the reasons of their actions, and they,
because of their humanity, answer me. Four hours can pass and I feel no
weariness; my troubles forgotten, I neither fear poverty nor dread
death. I give myself over entirely to them. And since Dante says that
there can be no science [understanding] without retaining what has been
understood, I have noted down the chief things in their conversation.”
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Contact Information:
Dr. Joseph Leichter (on the left)
with Dr.
David
Pingree
Dr. David Pingree was my Ph.D. advisor, mentor,
friend and guru. One of the
great good fortunes of my life is that he took me on as one of
his few
students. He was
a MacArthur
Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and
of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He was the author
of hundreds of publications on ancient and medieval mathematics and
mathematical astronomy. In addition, he was the editor and translator
of
dozens of texts on these same topics in Persian, Arabic, Latin, Greek,
Sanskrit and Akkadian. He will be sorely missed. Requiescat in pacem.
The Brown University
History of
Mathematics Department Christmas Party, December 1992
(left to right) Dr. Sharma, Dr. Takanori Kusuba (then graduate
student), Dr. David Pingree, Dr. Joseph Leichter (then a graduate
student) and Dr. Kim
Plofker( then a graduate student), and Mrs. Pingree
Dr. Leichter's
Introduction to Classical Greek Class, Brown University 1993
Dr. Joseph Leichter (top row) with the students of his Greek 1
class. Also present is his father, Detective Joseph T. Leichter NYPD
(Ret.), first person, second row. (It
is worth the expense of youthful days and costly
hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language -
Thoreau)
