Reading Habits
I’m a slow reader don’t read much fiction mostly poetry and philosophy not that disadvantageous academic stuff but writings that might under other circumstances have been known as music save for an officious card cataloguer somewhere along the way labeling them philosophy: Heraclitus, Chuang Tzu, Plato especially Plato and those who write musically about Plato such as gemlike Water Pater. When I read I hold a Staedtler pencil in my right hand the one I write with because my penmanship is so faulty it needs all the help it can get thus an expensive pencil from Germany don’t judge me. Anyway I make little check marks on the pages next to words or phrases sentences often whole passages even in library books especially library books that snare my interest (is this scandalous?) write the page number down on a 3×5 index card preferably unruled “blank” they call it I like filling them in and have a hard time staying on or in lines anyhow read between as you will I make a little annotation to remind me of what exactly I found so interesting when I go back look at the words again, which occasionally I do. Sometimes I won’t finish a book maybe read just halfway like Walter Pater’s “Plato and Platonism” as happened a couple months ago the book finally returned to the library after erasing my little check marks but I keep the index cards for all my reading throw them into a box heaped with terminated thought-scraps which probably I should just recycle but hey these are my yard cars and you never know when a part is gonna come in handy. This morning the Pater index card turned up after a couple months missing I guess I didn’t really notice found it accidentally filed dust-bunnied under the baseboard at first thought a lost draft of a Gus Kenny poem then maybe it is. Here ya go with page numbers omitted and ending restored.
Form
Pale cast of philosophy
All things give way
Passenger without identity
One’s so hasty passage
Ill-made world
To think of deity
Definition of negation
Natural indolence of mind
The end
