The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
George Steiner
The meaning of the quote
On 4 December 1734, the French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin finished a painting of a man reading at his table, with a feather quill standing upright beside the book.
In 1978, George Steiner opened his essay The Uncommon Reader by studying that painting. To him, the quill showed a man who reads to respond, ready to write back to the book at any moment.
“To read well is to answer the text.”
Steiner listed the ways a reader answers. You can argue in the margin, add notes at the foot of the page, fix a misprint or copy out a passage that hit you hard. He believed a full reading ends with the urge to write a whole book in reply.
So Steiner’s intellectual is anyone who talks back to the book, whatever their job or schooling. A plumber who fills a history book’s margins with questions fits his description better than a professor who skims it on the train.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks read this way. After he died in 2015, his partner Bill Hayes shared photos of his books, their pages full of Sacks’s thoughts, arguments with the author and small diagrams.
In the book How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren explain why the pencil works. Writing in a book keeps you awake while you read, turns reading into thinking and helps you remember what the author said.
Action steps
A cheap pencil and the book you’re reading now are enough to start.
- Keep a pencil in the book.
Use it as your bookmark so it’s in your hand the moment you start. On a Kindle or phone, use the note button. - Talk back in the margin.
Write “why?”, “no!” or “see page 40” next to the lines that bother you or click with you. - Copy out one passage.
When a page hits you hard, copy it by hand into a notebook. - Write your reply.
When you finish the book, write a page answering the author. Say what you agree with, what you’d argue against and what you’ll do differently.
By Steiner’s measure, the next book you open with a pencil in hand makes you an intellectual.
About the author
George Steiner was born in Paris in 1929 with a withered right arm. His mother had no patience for self-pity, so instead of letting him switch to his left hand, she made him use the right one like any other child.
His father taught him to read the Iliad in ancient Greek at age 6.
In 1940 his father moved the family to New York, and within a month the Nazis occupied Paris. Of the many Jewish children in Steiner’s class, only 2 survived the war.
He was one of them.
Oxford rejected the first draft of his doctoral thesis, so he wrote editorials for The Economist while he reworked it and earned his doctorate in 1955.
At Cambridge, part of the English faculty disliked the fiery lecturer with a foreign accent, and they never made him a full professor.
He taught for 20 years at the University of Geneva in 4 languages and wrote more than 200 reviews for The New Yorker. His best-known book, After Babel, is about translation.
You can find the quote in his essay collection No Passion Spent, at the end of the essay where he studies Chardin’s reader and his quill.
Asked once whether he’d read anything trivial as a boy, he answered Moby-Dick.
Steiner died in Cambridge in 2020, aged 90. His friends said he never read without a pen in his hand.
It was the same right hand his mother refused to let him give up on.
Resources
- The Uncommon Reader (Article)
- No Passion Spent (Book)
- How to Read a Book (Book)
- Reading with a pencil (Article)
- Oliver Sacks, the man who loved words (Article)
- George Steiner, The Art of Criticism No. 2 (Article)
- George Steiner interviewed by Alan Macfarlane (Video)
- Marginalia (Wikipedia)
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