"Good heavens, what a mind my acquaintance had, how stored with knowledge! How admirable equipped! Nothing he had ever put away in his memory seemed to have lost its color or outline; and he knew how to lay his hand upon everything. It seemed like his mind was like an emporium, with everything in the world arranged on shelves, all new and varnished and bright, and that he knew precisely the place of everything.
But I'm quite sure I do not want to possess that kind of knowledge. It is the very sharpness and clearness of outline about it all that I dislike. The things that he knows have not become part of his mind in any way: they are stored away there, like walnuts; and I feel that I have been pelted with walnuts, deluged and buried in walnuts. The things which my visitor knows have undergone no change, they have not been fused and blended by his personality; they have not affected his mind, nor has his mind affected them. I do not wish to despise or to decry his knowledge; as a lecturer, he would be invaluable; but he treats literature as a merchant might -- it has not been food to him, but material and stock-in-trade."
Arthur Benson.
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