Better Read

Consulting my archived posts, I find that I last wrote about my disdain for employing quotes back in the fall of 2010. That was a while ago, but not so long ago that I hadn't started to find a somewhat more polished style. I still dislike quotes, so it's maybe not so unreasonable to revisit the subject. When I was younger, I was a big fan, and read them out of Bartlett's. I had the notion that I wished to be the most quoted man since Oscar Wilde. I'm still all right with being quoted, because I think I can make money that way. I have no desire to do the quoting.

On social networks, there once was the terrible scourge of games and people who tried to force you into playing them. There were ones about vampires, werewolves, mafioso and farming. Those are mostly gone now, but in their stead is the more insidious problem of quotes embedded in pictures. I hate that. I hate that words seen over a waterfall or a field of wheat are revered as being wisdom itself. One person spends a couple of minutes reading those words, then divorces them from their context and disseminates them to a lot of people who all agree they're terribly wise words.

There's no learning going on there that I can detect. It seems like a bunch of bluffing and self-congratulations on being wise (that being the big bluff). Something I'm reasonably sure of is that where a dozen people are all saying that some line from "Leaves Of Grass" is something to model your life on, several of them, if not most (and maybe all) have never read more than the seven words there in that picture. I'll level with you: I've never read "Leaves Of Grass", so I'd never quote it.

I think that the whole notion of the quote as something of value is a big fallacy. Getting the idea that the one line from a book of four hundred pages can nourish you intellectually or spiritually is preposterous. It would be like claiming that you can see the whole puzzle from one piece. It takes a hell of a lot more time to do anything thoroughly, but it's never more worth it than when you read an entire book or a poem or a speech instead of fancying yourself an authority on the piece's ideas from thirty seconds of effort absorbing just a fragment of the whole. That's dangerous.