Here's the money paragraph in full.
When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, discussing the definition of a princedom, the categories of princedoms, how they are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost. And if ever any whimsy of mine has given you pleasure, this one should not displease you. It ought to be welcomed by a prince, and especially by a new prince; therefore I am dedicating it to His Magnificence Giuliano. Filippo da Casavecchia has seen it. He will be able to give you some account of both the work itself and the discussions I have had with him about it, although I am continually fattening and currying it.
[1] http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-lett-ve...
I would, however, cut the the paragraph as follows. Everything after is just an adversisement for the authors blog.
When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study..."
Well... It's one of the many "blogs" worth reading. And a very old one. (sidenote: I'm really not sure you can even call it a "log" of any kind)
Only through the act of imagining a narrator or character's emotional state can you enjoy a book, and doing so brings one to identify with or at the very least understand better the circumstances that individual faces.
Yes you can do this face to face, or by living a life that might be represented in a novel, but literature is a far more efficient way to broaden experience.
Books are not purely about learning facts, figures, dates and fates.
We will never become what we cannot imagine.
Be careful with the only. I've read and enjoyed plenty of books while neglecting sympathy for the characters and their experience; looking at the interplay of ideas and theories, for example.
Sometimes I think it's been due to my lack of context. For instance, I love the little Dostoyevsky I've read, but I'm always perplexed by the social world of his characters. Maybe they're high bourgeois and clashing with the strain on that order in the Russia of his day. Still, I thoroughly enjoy the other elements of his writing that come to life. I was surprised to find the most thrilling so far was the first half of Notes From Underground. It reads like sci-fi to me: all of the talk about everything being calculated and determined in advance.
I think he's one of the most empathetically evocative authors there was - by the end of crime and punishment if you can't identify with Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, you've assuredly missed a beat.
That said, context is all - and it's helpful to also read his contemporaries, understand Russian history of the time on a broader scale (this too one can acquire from books), and then follow through on the trajectory of thought and feeling with the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov, before landing at the post-glasnost world with Pelevin and Kurkov.
With that said, the mind is like other muscles. It has a limited capacity. That is, it also needs recovery. Reading "Your Brain at Work" was a seminal moment for me.
Finally, reading, observing (as mentioned above) and watching (i.e., TV or mobile device) seem to be three different things. They each engage the mind (and thought process differently). Based on my experience, there is a difference in people who read the news, and those who watch it. Reading, to me, is active. Watching is passive. How you think (about the news, for example) effects what you think. Or so it seems.
> A walk in the woods, a pithy tweet, an encouter (a dialog
> -- a communiation -- a discussion -- an interaction --
> an intercourse) with another human (fucking) being can
> also provide that eureka moment.
The Atlantic is usually interesting for me, but this was a major problem before. The way to combat it is to read it anyway. With lots of practice, you'll train yourself to be more focused and ignore that conscious awareness of 'ticking time'.
Edit: language
* Dictated, not read.
I personally have no doubt that the above response was not written by bot. At this current moment in history -- mind this was written on 2017-07-25 (ISO, EDT, YMMV, HHGTTG, etc.) -- bot technology had not yet progressed to the stage that all HN comments were being persused by bots that knew that dead prez was written in lowercase, not uppercase.
I'd like to thank my bot for calling this to my attention so that I could answer personally. He only deploys on special occasions -- I doubt that any more than 0.4% of HN comments have been made by him.
<random quote> For we are the future, and we are the past. We are not the present -- this is not a gift. </random quote>
The death of thinking is threatening the soul.
• Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. • Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. • Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day. • Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day. • Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.
Yup. He didn't get those factoids from reading books. Mayhaps he received these gems of wisdom from:
When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length. My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links. Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather.
I have 20,000 books to the author's 5,000. I'm not kidding. SQL database provided on demand. # books don't matter so much, it's what you do with them.
Reading is a proxy for thinking. Reading is only useful for those eureka moments (now called "a-ha moments" -- I guess it's shorter?) and for information gain. A walk in the woods, a pithy tweet, an encouter (a dialog -- a communiation -- a discussion -- an interaction -- an intercourse) with another human (fucking) being can also provide that eureka moment.
Stop reading, start learning. The best education is observation and participation. I'm all for books, but if they ain't teaching us about how to solve our own problems, then fuck them books. Get the knowledge, get the power. But be conscious, be aware, pay attention, did you miss it? You missed it. That's okay, I did when I wrote it, but if you hash the previous paragraph (algorithm you'll have to figure out), you'll get 2 bitcoins. I hear they might still be worth something. I read that in a book.