THE SEVENTH PAGE

The difference between a schooled person and an auto-didact is that the former’s education eventually comes to a stop and the poor old self-educated never stops learning because it’s all he has ever known to do.

Anyone expecting to receive a college education by any means other than cobbling one together out of ones own reading eventually must be rudely surprised.

Each semester’s official reading list serves a purpose, but one must remember that it is the pathetic work of one person’s lifetime and it is usually a hand-me-down with a scent of the gravesite about them.

After a few weeks of school, I realized that if I were to be educated, I’d need to do it myself. The instructors seemed not to be reading anything that they had not read before; they didn’t realize that the novel was something constantly reinventing itself and giving off new pleasures in reading. I couldn’t figure out why these people refused to leave the campus after four years and chose to stay and go on to--get this: “higher education.”

The university library is all right for scholars, but it ill serves the serious reader, who must be fed a festive variety of the raw and the cooked. Paperbacks, even pulpy-reputed original works are a good supplement to a long evening’s dose of George Eliot or Henry James scholarship.