Is A Little Learning Really A Dangerous Thing? Or Does It Mattter?

One of my earliest and indelible memories of my mother is seeing her sitting in a wing backed chair in the living room reading The Des Moines Register and Tribune held out open with both hands.  She didn't just read it, she studied it, every page, every column, maybe not all the sports section, I could measure her progress through the paper by the comments she threw in my direction inspired page by page.  She was my model in this, and from an early age I too read a morning newspaper, first the Register, then moving East, The Boston Globe, and on to The New York Times, with side excursions into the San Francisco Chronicle, and a brief moment communing with Corriere della Sera and La Reppublica when I lived in Italy.  As a child with damaged back I was privileged to sit and read in the living room, alone among my siblings accorded this treat.  On a library table next to "my" chair were laid out Time Magazine, Fortune Magazine, The New Yorker Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and today who remembers what else.  It set a lot of the style of my reading.  So now I sit in a wing backed chair not unlike my mother's, and as I have done all my  life, read and read and read.  From morning to night. In fact since my surgery my immobility is a problem, my balance has grown more unstable, and I struggle to do feeble laps back and forth the length of the gallery outside all the condos on the third floor.  Then back to my chair!  "You're old, for god's sake, you don't need to walk so much."  Once upon a time I read novels, some pretty ambitious, like War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, and then I was a college student and it was texts in ancient Greek and Latin, then later scholarly volumes in German and French on ancient texts as I worked up a dissertation topic, and after that bits and pieces of learning to prop up whatever thesis I was developing for an article.  Morning to night.  Now I still read but it is all addiction, I fear.  The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, The Guardian Weekly, The Economist, and still The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, and--oh, I can't think of them all, my head begins to swim.  But that is just the sad point of this listing.  Everything is of the moment, and so I read notices of the same books, the same films, and on and on, from one point of view after another, and the work that is the focus of these inquiring minds and taste makers is quickly lost and diluted in the swirling broth of critical opinion.  I no longer know what I am reading that is being criticized.  And what is so much worse is that at eighty five and more I tend to forget and thus to re read.  I sometimes think I could take one issue of one of these journals and read it over again for the rest of my life.  But you know, it really doesn't matter.  I am one of those oldsters sitting in the corner near the hearth for warmth who has been given a twisted skein for knitting and told to unravel it and then later it can be knitted up again.  Keeps the old timer busy, you know?