If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
Interpretation
In the past, knowledge was treasured and memorization was crucial due to limited access to books.
This quote highlights the importance of memory and the value placed on knowledge in a time when access to written texts was not as easy as it is today. When scholars could not revisit books at will, they dedicated themselves to remembering the information contained within them, acknowledging that the act of reading was not merely a passive exercise but an essential part of their intellectual survival and growth.
In practice
In a seminar about the importance of literacy, you might quote this to emphasize the value of retaining knowledge.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.
He was beastly tired, but it was hard to stop. One more book, he had told himself, then I'll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I'll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I'll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he'd think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it.
Perhaps we have been misguided into taking too much responsibility from our children, leaving them too little room for discovery
You don't teach morals and ethics and empathy and kindness in the schools. You teach that at home, and children learn by example.
All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes.
Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking.
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