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"I must have read the novel a hundred times, and could recite lengthy passages from memory, without exactly understanding everything."

Says Kenneth Anderson about "Brave New World."

I don't think I've read anything 100 times ? except maybe the Sermon on the Mount and Marbury v. Madison. Have you? Do whole passages reside in your memory simply because you've read them so many times? ("It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department...") Or have you made a point of memorizing pages of text? ("Think not that I am come to destroy the law...")

Anderson, responding to my quoting of Aldous Huxley, gives us his favorite Aldous Huxley quote:

I have been told by an eminent academic critic that I am a sad symptom of the failure of an intellectual class in time of crisis. The implication being, I suppose, that the professor and his colleagues are hilarious symptoms of success. The benefactors of humanity deserve due honor and commemoration. Let us build a Pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of one of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the ossuary I would inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high, the simple words: Sacred to the memory of the world's educators. SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE.

I put the link there for the Latin, which is the punchline. Punchlines in Latin, knocking educators. That in itself is funny.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 20, 2009 (boomark / email).