If you’ve ever read to a young child, most anything other than contemporary slop (Mrs piggle wiggle, E Nesbit, Narnia, even frog and toad) you will find they encounter words and ideas on nearly every page that they are unfamiliar with. They will deduce some of it, they will ask you to explain much too, and in this way they acquire a deep and rich vocabulary and language that they would not come by through simple verbal communication. But we can watch the opposite happen in real time too; children who are never read to, adults who also do not read, are lacking this depth, not just of language, but of thought. It is a death, a death of something vital that I think links to our souls, to the very essence of what makes us human.
I love it when a writer ends a powerful, swelling passage on a perfectly oblique, unforeseen word.
Such a rarified trick to pull off; gets me every time.
The most iconic line from this book is: We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.