I don't care how many books someone has read, because I see no clear connection between having read many books and being wise. I know plenty of people who read and read and read, but I don't see that this necessarily makes any change compared to someone who barely reads in terms of how wise someone is. What is the problem? Application. Changing. Taking Action. You can read the smartest books, but if you don't apply anything you've read, then you become a librarian, a catalogue. The people who study Philosophy at University face the same problem. If you do not exercise what you read, you will become a mere collector of knowledge, a philosophy-librarian. If someone calls himself a "Philosopher" because he has a degree in philosophy, I can only raise my eyebrows. The opposite is the religious fanatic. The people who read one book constantly for their whole lives and learn from it and apply. The people who read the Bible, the Quran, the Tora, the Dao De Ching etc. They apply, they change their lives according to the book. How many books you've read means nothing, it means something how much you’ve changed through the books you've read. Reading several books per week for sure leaves no time for application. It is no sign of wisdom.
I add my anti-thesis here, that I wrote two years earlier, taken from the Essay „The Hydra“:
After
you read written words for the first time, you are haunted.
We tend to mistake the permanency
of the written word for truth.
The carefully chosen words of written text dilute us into
nodding our head in appreciation.
Moses had the ten commandments written down on two tablets. Nice
trick.
The impermanence of speech, the immediate disappearance of the word in the same moment you
heard it, leaves the mind in a softer, more cloudy state than the hard metal texture of the written
word.
The most dangerous are the people that have read only one book. To read one book might
make you less wise. To read many, can potentially end up in wisdom. A person who stopped reading after
Revelation 22,21 has become a prisoner.
Books are dangerous. That’s why man can never allow himself
to stop reading. It is a moral imperative that after you have read one book, you have to continue
reading. It is an obligation to read more views that oppose each other. The written word should not be
taken for more valuable than the spoken one. A book has no plasticity, a conversation has, the mind has.
Read. But never stop.
These two seemingly opposing views can now create a reasonable synthesis.
(I have made a few small changes to the original "Hydra"-Essay here, as I don't like some wordings of the original anymore)
Joseph Bartz 2019