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and things you have seen and thought. Instill the awareness that for the interested person days and nights glitter.”
LEARNING ON YOUR OWN
    Nowadays our “self-help books” tend to concentrate on the soul; they teach us how to be happier with the people we are; they urge us to make friends with our inner or spiritual self, sometimes even with our inner child. But in the not-so-distant past “self-help” meant self-education, while “education” usually meant memorization and rote learning. You didn’t learn in order to feel better about yourself; you (crassly) learned how to make people think the better of you. An extensive vocabulary, an “educated” accent, the mastery of rhetorical skills, a ready fund of poetry and snappy anecdotes—these sorts of attainments would convey to prospective employers or possible mates that the speaker was accomplished, intelligent, and personable. To those who could talk well, the world was waiting to listen. Or so implied books like Wilfred Funk’s
Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary
and Dale Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and Influence People
or his
Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking.
    Such rhetorical “surface” learning was even then frequently dismissed as merely a veneer of social grace and smooth talk covering an opportunistic, even slightly shady purpose. Hadn’t SamuelJohnson summed up Lord Chesterfield’s similarly worldly and didactic letters to his son as teaching the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master? Nonetheless, a boy or girl could learn about the beauty of language and the power of words from the vocabulary-builder Funk, and if you studied the Carnegie manual diligently, you could give a speech people would pay heed to. Moreover, all the self-help mahatmas urged their acolytes to read the Bible for its prose, to memorize famous poems and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to practice reciting the speeches of Hamlet and Rosalind, Portia and Prospero.
    Ultimately, these manuals underscored the esteem still attached to erudition. By stressing how to acquire the appearance of deep and extensive learning, they implicitly taught the importance of the real thing. But our values have altered: Today, anybody with a fair knowledge of world literature and history is commonly regarded as a kind of innocent fool or harmless fuddy-duddy. To possess humanistic learning, once widely aspired to, often seems elitist, unimportant, or simply eccentric. Who would be a scholarly E. R. Curtius or earnest Hannah Arendt in the edgy age of Microsoft? Quote a verse from the Bible or a line from William Wordsworth, mention the date of a battle or a character out of Charles Dickens, and expect to be regarded with a mixture of awe and suspicion. Erudition makes people feel uneasy; at worst it can seem vaguely undemocratic. Better to talk about last night’s episode of the latest sitcom, something we can all enjoy equally.
    Or is it?
    Long ago, Aristotle proclaimed that all men and women desire to know. We instinctively want to learn things. In essence, this iswhat makes us who we are, distinct from the other animals around us. And it is this passion that brings us our deepest happiness. To gain new knowledge of the world, the past, and our selves, to understand our place in the universe or discover the laws that govern it, these are the activities of human beings at their best. Most humanistic learning, however, builds on the achievements of the past. For instance, all Western philosophy has been called—by Alfred North Whitehead—a series of footnotes to Plato. But if you don’t know Plato, the footnotes will make little sense. In San-tayana’s much repeated aphorism, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Worse still, those who don’t remember where they’ve been will soon find themselves utterly lost. Men and women who read and study and learn may