Alain de Botton (The Consolation of Philosophy) suggests that clever people should get their ideas from people even cleverer than they are. “They should spend their time quoting and producing commentaries about great authorities who occupy the upper rungs of the tree of knowledge.”
This is especially so “when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match… What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them… our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our minds are made”.
Of course, we can carry it too far. We may be led “to dismiss aspects of our lives if there is no printed testimony”.
Montaigne knew such a person. “Whenever I ask [him] to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he had scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and arse”.
I sympathise with that acquaintance of the great philosopher. I do it all the time, I’m doing it now.
Of course, it’s not absolutely necessary that there be anything new under the sun.
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