"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off the muddy, sweaty clothes of everyday, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death; I pass indeed into their world."
--Machiavelli, in a letter to Francesco Vettori
I will grant that I have an absurd number of books (not as many as I might wish) . . . I have them everywhere. I keep them around years and years after I've read them. Some I keep around for years before I read them!
One reason they are so important to me, sitting there with all their spines showing, is that they are thus a kind of intellectual biography. They remind me of where I've been and how I've developed as a person and a thinker.
The only time I really don't like them is when it comes time to move.
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