Oct 30 2008
Can I quote you on that?
Another of my ISBN-less books. And it’s kind of the result of my reckless youth, when I used to skip Phys. Ed. or biology in high school and spend the time reading in the library. (Yeah, yeah, my definition of “reckless” is different from yours. There’s a reason I choose Bookishgal as the name of this blog!)
So anyway, I’d wander away to a safe spot where someone would have to look a while if they were trying to find me. For me, that always means somewhere where there are books. Hence, the library.
And one day, while skipping class, I sat near a bunch of reference books, and what did I run into but John Barlett’s Familiar Quotations. And for the next hour (and many hours on other occasions!), I was utterly enthralled and immersed.
There’s barely a page you can flip to, where you don’t find some fascinating tidbit spoken by someone you might never have heard of until then. At the time, I wouldn’t have known who Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington had been, but I would have been interested in the quote, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” And if I’d found Spinoza, I’d have discovered that he was the one who said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
Barlett’s was the first place I read the lines:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
That’s what sent me off to find more of Eliot, and to read the original poem, The Hollow Men. And that’s also where I found one of my favourite quotations, also from Eliot, that I still frequently use at tense moments:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
As soon as I was out of high school and had a job, and my own apartment, what do you suppose was one of the first things I did? I went out and bought my own copy of Familiar Quotations!
What — wouldn’t you??
And I have turned to this book again and again, occasionally to grab a quotation, but most of the time just to sit and read. Marvelous stuff in there. Another treasure.
I loved Bartlett’s. It was one of my favorite go-to books from an early age, even while I was still in single digits. Didn’t need to look up anything, just needed to fill a few minutes which some times ran on well onto the hour mark. Bartlett’s and Webster’s housed as often on the chair in the bathroom as on the bookshelf in the living room in the house where I grew up.
Aha, so I wasn’t alone in that. Heehee!
I had a Webster’s dictionary early on too, and I swear, going into that book to “look up a word” always led to at least a half hour of reading, because I could never stop at one word. Every word led to some other word, which led to another, and so on.
The dictionaries with a bit about the etymology (”derived from oe. blah, meaning blah”) would always lead me to rush over and look up another word that was obviously related through the etymology but which I had never connected to the original word before.