...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
Interpretation
Experiencing something only once limits our understanding and appreciation of it.
Anne Fadiman's quote highlights the idea that depth of experience is essential for true appreciation, whether it be through reading a book or listening to music. Just as a listener misses out on the full beauty of a Beethoven symphony by only attending a single performance, a reader can miss the multifaceted insights and joys a book offers by only reading it once.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a book club to emphasize the value of rereading.
Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.
Although simulators are great for building step-by-step knowledge of a procedure, the worst thing that can happen in a sim is that you get a bad grade on your performance.
Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.
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