journal of science education

Back Issues

Reflections

Books I Remember

Dr K S Krishnan

Many of you would be familiar with the quotation “Of making many books there is no end.” It sounds like an exclamation from an exasperated modern scholar trying to cope with the overwhelming stream of new publications. On the other hand the quotation, as you know, is from Ecclesiastes, and the sentiment expressed in it might well be much older. “What one learns in a lifetime is a handful and what is left unlearnt is a whole Universe” is a Tamil proverb which is nearly as old. An even earlier episode in the life of Bharadwaja with which we are all familiar, emphasises pointedly the same sentiment. What is even more significant is that the quotation from Ecclesiastes does not stop there, but adds “and much study is a weariness of the flesh” which makes the quotation much more profound. I shall have occasion to refer to it in a later part of my talk. But consistently with our taking the first half of the sentence to imply a certain exasperation at having to make an impossible choice, the second half of the sentence would vaguely suggest that the author has almost got reconciled to the inevitable. If these were the rightful feelings of scholars twenty centuries ago, how is one to describe the predicament in which we find ourselves today,” How would, for example, the author of Ecclesiastes feel if he were to find himself in our position?

A distinguished professor of English literature who taught us rhetoric many years ago had occasion once to estimate the number of plays of the Elizabethan period which he had himself read, and he found that the figure was well over a thousand.

Read full article (19 Kb)

Indian Academy of Sciences
C.V.Raman Avenue, Post Box No. 8005,
Sadashivanagar Post, Bangalore 560 080