"Arthur, Arthur!"

Our featured author this month is Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), a German philosopher known for his pessimistic view of life. The reading selection, "On the Indestructibility of our Inner Nature," comes from his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation, first published in 1819. The World as Will and Representation did not reach a wide audience at the time.

Schopenhauer did, however, attain literary fame with his 1851 book Parerga and Paralipomena (loosely translated from the Greek as "Bits and Pieces"). It contains a multi-part essay, "The Art of Literature," with subsections entitled "On Authorship," "On Style," "On Thinking for Oneself," and "On Books and Reading." In "The Art of Literature," Schopenhauer critiques the dilettantish literary culture of his day. He spares neither the producers nor the consumers of that culture. He berates readers who read so much they never have time to think, for example. Such men, he says, "read themselves stupid."

Could the author of The World as Will and Representation, which weighs in at 700+ pages, have come to believe that thoughtful reading of expository prose was not a worthy pursuit? Schopenhauer's real beef is with those who live entirely inside a book of text instead of what he calls the "book of nature." The former are mere "men of learning," whereas the latter "have enlightened the world and carried humanity further on its way."

Still and all, Schopenhauer gives us license to indulge the reading habit, but with a caveat.

In "On Books and Reading," Schopenhauer enjoins "[B]e careful to limit your time for reading and devote it exclusively to the works of those great minds of all times and countries, who o'ertop the rest of humanity, those whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone educate and instruct. You can never read bad literature too little, nor good literature too much. Bad books are intellectual poison ; they destroy the mind. Because people always read what is new instead of the best of all ages, writers remain within the narrow circle of the ideas which happen to prevail in their time; and so the period sinks deeper and deeper into its own mire."

Was Schopenhauer a pessimist with a capital "P" or just a curmudgeon? Read "On the Indestructibility of Our Inner Nature," which examines the theme of death we found last month in Tolstoy's "The Death of Iván Illých," and decide for yourself.