Thoreau, Walden, "Reading"

• Curious to note that reading is gendered:

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer the heroic writers of antiquity.

and again,

The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue...

A very old and standard gendering in itself, matter v. intellection. What surprises is the mapping of this onto moderns v. ancients (or perhaps the fact that no one has previously made such an association?)

• Is this just ignorance? Mistake?

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue...Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Aeschylus, nor Virgil even.

Hard to fathom that HDT wouldn't have known of Chapman or Pope at least. And yet this doesn't seem metaphorical.

• How is it that HDT manages to be both radiantly inspiring and insufferably snooty? Nice trick.