David Barnett Lurie
Assistant Professor of Japanese History and Literature
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
| The people of bygone ages seem infinitely remote from
us. We do not feel justified in ascribing to them any underlying
intentions beyond those they formally express; we are amazed when we
come upon a sentiment more or less akin to what we feel today
in a Homeric hero, or a skillful tactical feint by Hannibal during
the battle of Cannae, where he let his flank be driven back in order
to take the enemy by surprise and encircle him; it is as though we
imagined the epic poet and the Carthaginian general to be as remote
from ourselves as an animal seen in a zoo.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way
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| Philology is that venerable art which demands of its
votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become
still, to become slow--it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of
the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work
to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento.
But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by
precisely this means does it enchant and entice us most, in the midst
of an age of 'work,' that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and
perspiring
haste, which wants to get everything done at once, including every old
or new book:--this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches
to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply,
looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left
open, with delicate eyes and fingers . . .
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak
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