Thursday, October 5, 2023

Thursday Thoughts...

"When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before." 

 Clifton Fadiman

There are so many ways to say this and I think a lot of folk say it well.  Here, the emphasis is on a classic, perhaps because they thought that people may only re-read classics, everything else gets read once and sent on its way?

Perhaps the use of the word classic could be personalised - for each of us a book we choose to re-read could in fact be termed a classic for us?

Whichever books we re-read, we are for sure different people when we come to re-read them.  I oftentimes have looked back upon books that captivated me as an older child, or as an adolescent and I wonder what the big draws were. As a young adult some books felt life-defining; whereas to read them now they seem less convincing. The book is word for word the same; it's me who is different.


Rose Rigley, A preserving nature: Family History, 2014

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