The true beauty of learning stuff, including apparently useless stuff, is that it takes us out of ourselves, reminds us that we are part of a far greater project, one that has been underway for at least as long as human beings have been talking

But to really learn something from a book, one has to cultivate the precarious sort of leisure where there is nothing for us to do but to read it. Usually, our minds scrabble desperately for something we think we already understand, or some maxim we can “take away.” This is not learning so much as strip-mining. We must instead seek to imitate the p