The Thinker 107
Reading can take you away from your fundamental task. Thus
Schopenhauer’s view that most so- called phi los o phers read too
much: they let others think their thoughts for them night and day.
They are, in short, “reading themselves stupid.” (It is safer to read
the newspaper, which is at least self- acknowledged ephemera.) Nietz-
sche rambled across Eu rope seeking precisely the right climate,
precisely the right diet (those grapes! That soup at the trattoria!).
In his trunk he carried his many notebooks, for he wrote all night
and into the morning, but few books, few if any. (The horrible
parody of the thinker is the fearless dispatch runner Adolf Hitler,
navigating the trenches of the First World War with both volumes of
Schopenhauer’s masterwork in his rucksack, misunderstanding
them with a singular fury.) Nietz sche’s memory was astounding,
and after a certain point he probably did not read much; he wrote and
he listened to Wagner— for some time his true inspiration— through
the portals of his inner ear.
Emerson read, as he says, “for the lusters.” He is not disposed to
read consecutively, does not generally “read it through,” as Johnson
liked to say, unless a book enchants and seduces him, drawing him
from his proper task, which is to fi nd what is most original in him-
self. Thoreau reads and rereads Homer and tries to let Homer gloss
Nature at Walden Pond. Hegel reads Kant and is enfl amed to world
historical objection. Books can be ambrosia to the thinker. Or they
can ignite. But books can be delusion too.
Emerson says there is a creative reading as well as a creative
writing. How do you read creatively? Often the fi rst step is to throw
the book away. Reading a book in the morning at the full pitch of
one’s energies is a near crime, Nietz sche suggests. Always live like
it is morning— live! Then ponder. The inspiring premise of the
thinker is that Truth remains unrevealed, so why consult the his-
tory of failure too closely?