The Lost Art of Reading Part 1

The Lost Art of Reading.

by Gerald Stanley Lee.

Book I

Interferences with the Reading Habit

The First Interference: Civilisation

I

Dust

"I see the s.h.i.+ps," said The Eavesdropper, as he stole round the world to me, "on a dozen sides of the world. I hear them fighting with the sea."

"And what do you see on the s.h.i.+ps?" I said.

"Figures of men and women--thousands of figures of men and women."

"And what are they doing?"

"They are walking fiercely," he said,--"some of them,--walking fiercely up and down the decks before the sea."

"Why?" said I.

"Because they cannot stand still and look at it. Others are reading in chairs because they cannot sit still and look at it."

"And there are some," said The Eavesdropper, "with roofs of boards above their heads (to protect them from Wonder)--down in the hold--playing cards."

There was silence.

"What are you seeing now?" I said.

"Trains," he said--"a globe full of trains. They are on a dozen sides of it.

They are clinging to the crusts of it--mountains--rivers--prairies--some in the light and some in the dark--creeping through s.p.a.ce."

"And what do you see in the trains?"

"Miles of faces."

"And the faces?"

"They are pus.h.i.+ng on the trains."

"What are you seeing now?" I said.

"Cities," he said--"streets of cities--miles of streets of cities."

"And what do you see in the streets of cities?"

"Men, women, and smoke."

"And what are the men and women doing?"

"Hurrying," said he.

"Where?" said I.

"G.o.d knows."

II

Dust

The population of the civilised world to-day may be divided into two cla.s.ses,--millionaires and those who would like to be millionaires. The rest are artists, poets, tramps, and babies--and do not count. Poets and artists do not count until after they are dead. Tramps are put in prison. Babies are expected to get over it. A few more summers, a few more winters--with short skirts or with down on their chins--they shall be seen burrowing with the rest of us.

One almost wonders sometimes, why it is that the sun keeps on year after year and day after day turning the globe around and around, heating it and lighting it and keeping things growing on it, when after all, when all is said and done (crowded with wonder and with things to live with, as it is), it is a comparatively empty globe. No one seems to be using it very much, or paying very much attention to it, or getting very much out of it. There are never more than a very few men on it at a time, who can be said to be really living on it. They are engaged in getting a living and in hoping that they are going to live sometime. They are also going to read sometime.

When one thinks of the wasted sunrises and sunsets--the great free show of heaven--the door open every night--of the little groups of people straggling into it--of the swarms of people hurrying back and forth before it, jostling their getting-a-living lives up and down before it, not knowing it is there,--one wonders why it is there. Why does it not fall upon us, or its lights go suddenly out upon us? We stand in the days and the nights like stalls--suns flying over our heads, stars singing through s.p.a.ce beneath our feet. But we do not see. Every man's head in a pocket,--boring for his living in a pocket--or being bored for his living in a pocket,--why should he see? True we are not without a philosophy for this--to look over the edge of our stalls with. "Getting a living is living," we say. We whisper it to ourselves--in our pockets.

Then we try to get it. When we get it, we try to believe it--and when we get it we do not believe anything. Let every man under the walled-in heaven, the iron heaven, speak for his own soul. No one else shall speak for him. We only know what we know--each of us in our own pockets. The great books tell us it has not always been an iron heaven or a walled-in heaven. But into the faces of the flocks of the children that come to us, year after year, we look, wondering. They shall not do anything but burrowing--most of them. Our very ideals are burrowings. So are our books. Religion burrows. It barely so much as looks at heaven. Why should a civilised man--a man who has a pocket in civilisation--a man who can burrow--look at heaven? It is the glimmering boundary line where burrowing leaves off. Time enough. In the meantime the shovel. Let the stars wheel. Do men look at stars with shovels?

The faults of our prevailing habits of reading are the faults of our lives. Any criticism of our habit of reading books to-day, which actually or even apparently confines itself to the point, is unsatisfactory. A criticism of the reading habit of a nation is a criticism of its civilisation. To sketch a scheme of defence for the modern human brain, from the kindergarten stage to Commencement day, is merely a way of bringing the subject of education up, and dropping it where it begins.

Even if the youth of the period, as a live, human, reading being (on the principles to be laid down in the following pages), is so fortunate as to succeed in escaping the dangers and temptations of the home--even if he contrives to run the gauntlet of the grammar school and the academy--even if, in the last, longest, and hardest pull of all, he succeeds in keeping a spontaneous habit with books in spite of a college course, the story is not over. Civilisation waits for him--all-enfolding, all-instructing civilisation, and he stands face to face--book in hand--with his last chance.

III

Dust to Dust

Whatever else may be said of our present civilisation, one must needs go very far in it to see Abraham at his tent's door, waiting for angels.

And yet, from the point of view of reading and from the point of view of the books that the world has always called worth reading, if ever there was a type of a gentleman and scholar in history, and a Christian, and a man of possibilities, founder and ruler of civilisations, it is this same man Abraham at his tent's door waiting for angels. Have we any like him now? Peradventure there shall be twenty? Peradventure there shall be ten? Where is the man who feels that he is free to-day to sit upon his steps and have a quiet think, unless there floats across the spirit of his dream the sweet and rea.s.suring sound of some one making a tremendous din around the next corner--a band, or a new literary journal, or a historical novel, or a special correspondent, or a new club or church or something? Until he feels that the world is being conducted for him, that things are tolerably not at rest, where shall one find in civilisation, in this present moment, a man who is ready to stop and look about him--to take a spell at last at being a reasonable, contemplative, or even marriageable being?

The essential unmarriageableness of the modern man and the unreadableness of his books are two facts that work very well together.

When Emerson asked Bronson Alcott "What have you done in the world, what have you written?" the answer of Alcott, "If Pythagoras came to Concord whom would he ask to see?" was a diagnosis of the whole nineteenth century. It was a very short sentence, but it was a sentence to found a college with, to build libraries out of, to make a whole modern world read, to fill the weary and heedless heart of it--for a thousand years.

We have plenty of provision made for books in civilisation, but if civilisation should ever have another man in the course of time who knows how to read a book, it would not know what to do with him. No provision is made for such a man. We have nothing but libraries--monstrous libraries to lose him in. The books take up nearly all the room in civilisation, and civilisation takes up the rest. The man is not allowed to peep in civilisation. He is too busy in being ordered around by it to know that he would like to. It does not occur to him that he ought to be allowed time in it to know who he is, before he dies. The typical civilised man is an exhausted, spiritually hysterical man because he has no idea of what it means, or can be made to mean to a man, to face calmly with his whole life a great book, a few minutes every day, to rest back on his ideals in it, to keep office hours with his own soul.

The practical value of a book is the inherent energy and quietness of the ideals in it--the immemorial way ideals have--have always had--of working themselves out in a man, of doing the work of the man and of doing their own work at the same time.