Having to ask whether there is any such thing as a natural scholar, or whether it would be desirable for there to be, even; or anyhow what it is, then, that does lead us to read rather than to the various other ways of spending the time--in some people, it begins to look like a kind of pride and pedantry, but this can't be the only thing, because in others it is nowhere near strong enough to have overcome those other claims on our attention, other pastimes or vocations. And sure enough, some of us like to believe we, at least, read in meekness, for the sake of that wonder, and to become better--not better than others, not so as to lord it over them and berate them for shiftless dolts, but better than ourselves, a better being ourselves.
Something halfway between self-knowledge and self-creation, yet not in service of the self meanly, but surely drawn on by that love of the good; it's just that here we have no other vehicle, so to speak, than the body and the self, to go after it. So that we have to say what we mean by those, and in what sense they are ours: the body, the body politic; the self, and its varieties of metamorphosis--moods, as simple as that; feelings, memories, reveries, those voices in books and conversations and conversions. What is meant by those enthusiasts who could so lightly outright reject the self as an efficacy, with all its categories, and call it merely a construct?--because this movement, too, it seems, is still part of what the self is, and among its capabilities, perhaps one of the most devious. And devious for what--or whom is the self helping? Is it out for itself, or does it proceed with irony or with calculation, or are more of its motives buried in its own unconscious, or in the labyrinthine structures of the race, what is past gripping and shaping what is to come, or else in airy concatenations down and up from the divine, a Jacob's ladder, and we participants in those ineffable purposes?
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