November 2025
dizzardry
2 November 2025, around 15.11.
Quis tam avidus librorum helluo, who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
Trying to do too much background reading, with only a feeble sense of what it is I am trying to understand. It is like going for a walk on a foggy morning, when piles of leaves and fallen branches, to say nothing of parked cars and the remnants of the neighbors’ verge gardens, loom from the darkness with the offer of danger and confusion (contusion?). An owl plunges past, large and unnerving – a warning, perhaps, from Minerva, about the dangers of distraction.
under a bushel
9 November 2025, around 13.46.
Do not, therefore, think that you can learn drawing, any more than a new language, without some hard and disagreeable labor. But do not, on the other hand, if you are ready and willing to pay this price, fear that you may be unable to get on for want of special talent. It is indeed true that the persons who have peculiar talent for art, draw instinctively, and get on almost without teaching; though never without toil. It is true, also, that of inferior talent for drawing there are many degrees: it will take one person a much longer time than another to attain the same results, and the results thus painfully attained are never quite so satisfactory as those got with greater ease when the faculties are naturally adapted to the study.