Read "Of Selection" by Arthur Quiller-Couch online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In a previous lecture I referred you to the beautiful opening and the yet more beautiful close of the "Phaedrus. " Let us turn back and refresh ourselves with that Dialogue while we learn from it, in somewhat more of detail, just what a book meant to an Athenian: how fresh a thing it was to him and how little irksome.
Phaedrus has spent his forenoon listening to a discourse by the celebrated rhetorician Lysias on the subject of Love, and is starting to cool his head with a stroll beyond the walls of the city, when he encounters Socrates, who will not let him go until he has delivered up the speech with which Lysias regaled him, or, better still, the manuscript, "which I suspect you are carrying there in your left hand under your cloak. " So they bend their way beside Ilissus towards a tall plane tree, seen in the distance. Having reached it, they recline.