June 21– From “Sesame” by John Ruskin (1865)
Summary: Everything is hard, but all hard work is rewarded.
Commentary: This is really just him rambling versions of this with different metaphors for pages and pages. It's like the most infuriating version of the just world fallacy ever. He beings by claiming that "royalty" from the past all deserve to be there, while much of today's has just bribed their way there. It's obviously ridiculous to claim that everyone from the past who is famous, respected, etc. from the past earned it. Then we get some rambling about how all good books are hard, like mining for gold (obviously it's impossible to write an intelligent but clear book, just like how you can't pan for gold or anything). Then he goes on about how reading ten pages of a good book and memorizing it is better than perusing any number of them, learning one language perfectly is better than several imperfectly, etc.. While there is obviously value to deeply studying a good book, it's pretty impressive to just totally disregard broad learning in favor of deep with almost no reasoning (besides some weird rambling about how one sentence is enough to show whether a person is a scholar or illiterate). Then he spends some time whining about Bible translations, before contradicting himself and saying we all need to learn words in their original languages to really understand them. He tries to explain it away as not needing to really know a language, but it's a weak defense at best.
The final section, an analysis of a Milton poem, is fairly well done at least.
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