| |
|
When
Archimedes discovered the principle of specific gravity by observing his
own displacement of water in a bathtub, he leaped out with delight, shouting,
"Eureka,Eureka!” ("I have found it, I have found it!") The
instinct which prompted his outburst, and the joy of its
gratification, are possessed by all children.(7)
But if the pleasure of learning
is universal, why are there so many dull, incurious people in the world?
It is because they were made dull, by bad
teaching, by isolation, by surrender to routine, sometimes,
too ,by the pressure of hard work and poverty, or by the toxin of riches,
with all their ephemeral and trivial delights.
(8)With
luck,resolution(9)
and guidance, however, the human mind can survive(10)
not only poverty but even wealth.
This pleasure is not confined
(11)
tolearning from extbooks,which are too often tedious(12).
but it does include learning from hooks. Sometimes, when I stand in a big
library like the Library of Congress, or Butler Library at Columbia, and
gaze round me at the millions of hooks, I feel a sober, earnest delight
hard to convey except(13)
by a metaphor. These are not lumps of lifeless paper,
but minds alive in the shelves.(14)
From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible
as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range
of our hearing, and just as the touch of a button on our stereo will fill
the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into
range a voice far distant in time and space,and hear it speaking,mind to
mind,heart to heart.(15)
But,far beyond books,learning
means keeping the mind open and active to receive all kinds of experience.
|
|
|
English
Intensive Reading 
Introduction
