The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [28]
18. ‘But one day the wife found one of the cheap old second-hand books they had bought with such excitement in their youthful days, and had read together with pleasure;
19. ‘And she wept to think what had passed and been lost.’
Chapter 15
1. Charicles said, ‘You remind us that reading profits most when, beside the book, you have someone with whom to talk of it.
2. ‘If it is the book’s author, good; if your teacher, better; if a friend, best of all.
3. ‘The teacher knows he has succeeded when the pupil no longer needs him. But discussion between friends can never exhaust itself.
4. ‘There is a saying: if you would study, find a fellow-student.
5. ‘Those are wise words. Friendship made over a book is enduring, and a great solace.’
6. The stranger said, ‘I would rather read a good book than meet its author. The best of him is, or should be, in the book; in person he might disappoint us, and ruin the book therefore.
7. ‘Someone once said, “Respect the book, or you disrespect its author”;
8. ‘But it is better to respect not the author but the best of his mind from which his book came.
9. ‘In that way we respect an immortality, not a life; lives burden the earth, but a good book is the distillation of something excellent, captured and stored to a use beyond the daily and the passing.’
10. With these conversations and meditations the second day of journeying was passed as lightly as the first, and Charicles and the stranger came to another city, and sought out an inn.
Chapter 16
1. Because he had had travelled two days in the saddle, Charicles was sore, and wondered aloud to the stranger as they settled for the night, why anyone should travel.
2. The stranger said, ‘Some travel because they must, some because they will.
3. ‘Some feel a destiny, which is in fact curiosity and restlessness, and of their own accord take long and arduous journeys.
4. ‘Some love to live in the whole world, and the whole world often responds by refusing to give them anywhere to call their own.
5. ‘And so they wander still; the wood pigeon has a nest, the fox her den, but the wanderer’s home is both nowhere and everywhere.
6. ‘The wise of every culture have their views about how to travel. It is well said that they know nothing of their homelands who know only their homelands, which implies that to travel is to learn;
7. ‘But there are those who travel, and who learn nothing. It is well said that at the farthest point of our journeyings what we meet is ourselves;
8. ‘But there are those who leave themselves behind, and forget themselves enough to err in foreign places, because they believe they are nowhere that matters.
9. ‘The wise say, do not travel with a fool. So the fool had better stay at home, because travel will increase his folly.
10. ‘When the wise travel they take note of customs, of people, of the way things are done differently.
11. ‘By the same token, to receive a traveller in one’s home country is an opportunity to hear news and to learn of far places.
12. ‘The ideal traveller is he who travels with no baggage but his thoughts, eager to learn, ready to speak of what he has seen,
13. ‘But never to speak with exaggeration or falsehood, keeping due respect for all differences and strangeness he has encountered,
14. ‘Knowing that he is himself strange to the stranger, and that he seems different to those who are different from himself.
15. ‘Such a traveller is never more at home than when far from home. He sees with clearer eyes than the rest of mankind what ruins have been made by man,
16. ‘And what works he can be praised for. When he crosses the mountains on his travels, he can see the coming dawn of peace, because he sees further than the rest.
17. ‘The good traveller brings the time of peace nearer. He builds bridges across the seas, he draws nations closer together,
18. ‘He shows men that there are many ways of living and loving. He teaches them