The Lost Art of Reading Part 15

had little to say to this, and after he had said how intelligent he was awhile, the conversation was dropped.

The question that concerns me is, What shall a man do, how shall he act, when he finds himself in the hush of a great library,--opens the door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched soul all by himself before IT,--and feels the books pulling on him? I always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on G.o.d's earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in Heaven's name why not let him? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I shall know soon enough--G.o.d forgive me! When it is given to a man to stand in the a.s.sembly Room of Nations, to feel the ages, all the ages, gathering around him, flowing past his life; to listen to the immortal stir of Thought, to the doings of The Dead, why should a man interrupt--interrupt a whole world--to know what he is about? I stand at the junction of all Time and s.p.a.ce. I am the three tenses. I read the newspaper of the universe.

It fades away after a little, I know. I go to the card catalogue like a lamb to the slaughter, poke my head into Knowledge--somewhere--and am lost, but the light of it on the spirit does not fade away. It leaves a glow there. It plays on the pages afterward.

There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this fas.h.i.+on, a sense of s.p.a.ciousness of joy in it, which one is almost always sure to miss in libraries--most libraries--by staying in them.

The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays there is no help for it. One is soon standing before the card catalogue, sorting one's wits out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in one's self and everybody else--the thing a library is for--is fenced off for ever.

At least it seems fenced off for ever. One sees the universe barred and patterned off with a kind of grating before it. It is a card-catalogue universe.

I can only speak for one, but I must say for myself, that as compared with this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a library--mere reading in it, sitting down and letting one's self be tucked into a single book in it--is a humiliating experience.

II

How It Feels

I am not unaware that this will seem to some--this empty doting on infinity, this standing and staring at All-knowledge--a mere dizzying exercise, whirling one's head round and round in Nothing, for Nothing.

And I am not unaware that it would be unbecoming in me or in any other man to feel superior to a card catalogue.

A card catalogue, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for one's mind in a library--for working one's way through it--is useful and necessary to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists on having infinity in a convenient form--infinity in a box--it would be hard to find anything better to have it in than a card catalogue.

But there are times when one does not want infinity in a box. He loses the best part of it that way. He prefers it in its natural state. All that I am contending for is, that when these times come, the times when a man likes to feel infinite knowledge crowding round him,--feel it through the backs of unopened books, and likes to stand still and think about it, wors.h.i.+p with the thought of it,--he ought to be allowed to. It is true that there is no sign up against it (against thinking in libraries). But there might as well be. It amounts to the same thing. No one is expected to. People are expected to keep up an appearance, at least, of doing something else there. I do not dare to hope that the next time I am caught standing and staring in a library, with a kind of blank, happy look, I shall not be considered by all my kind intellectually disreputable for it. I admit that it does not look intelligent--this standing by a door and taking in a sweep of books--this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks.

It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus--foolish enough; but if I go out of the door to the hills again, refreshed for them and lifted up to them, with the strength of the ages in my limbs, great voices all around me, flocking my solitary walk--who shall gainsay me?

III

How a Specialist can Be an Educated Man

It is a sad thing to go into a library nowadays and watch the people there who are merely making tunnels through it. Some libraries are worse than others--seem to be made for tunnels. College libraries, perhaps, are the worst. One can almost--if one stands still enough in them--hear what is going on. It is getting to be practically impossible in a college library to slink off to a side shelf by one's self, take down some gentle-hearted book one does not need to read there and begin to listen in it, without hearing some worthy person quietly, persistently boring himself around the next corner. It is getting worse every year.

The only way a readable library book can be read nowadays is to take it away from the rest of them. It must be taken where no other reading is going on. The busy scene of a crowd of people--mere specialists and others--gathered around roofing their minds in is no fitting place for a great book or a live book to be read--a book that uncovers the universe.

On the other hand, it were certainly a trying universe if it were uncovered all the time, if one had to be exposed to all of it and to all of it at once, always; and there is no denying that libraries were intended to roof men's minds in sometimes as well as to take the roofs of their minds off. What seems to be necessary is to find some middle course in reading between the scientist's habit of tunnelling under the dome of knowledge and the poet's habit of soaring around in it. There ought to be some principle of economy in knowledge which will allow a man, if he wants to, or knows enough, to be a poet and a scientist both.

It is well enough for a mere poet to take a library as a spectacle--a kind of perpetual Lick Observatory to peek at the universe with, if he likes, and if a man is a mere scientist, there is no objection to his taking a library as a kind of vast tunnel system, or chart for burrowing. But the common educated man--the man who is in the business of being a human being, unless he knows some middle course in a library, knows how to use its Lick Observatory and its tunnel system both--does not get very much out of it. If there can be found some principle of economy in knowledge, common to artists and scientists alike, which will make it possible for a poet to know something, and which will make it possible for a scientist to know a very great deal without being--to most people--a little underwitted, it would very much simplify the problem of being educated in modern times, and there would be a general gratefulness.

Far be it from me to seem to wish to claim this general gratefulness for myself. I have no world-reforming feeling about the matter. I would be very grateful just here to be allowed to tuck in a little idea--no chart to go with it--on this general subject, which my mind keeps coming back to, as it runs around watching people.

There seem to be but two ways of knowing. One of them is by the spirit and the other is by the letter. The most reasonable principle of economy in knowledge would seem to be, that in all reading that pertains to man's specialty--his business in knowledge--he should read by the letter, knowing the facts by observing them himself, and that in all other reading he should read through the spirit of imagination--the power of taking to one's self facts that have been observed by others.

If a man wants to be a specialist he must do his knowing like a scientist; but if a scientist wants to be a man he must be a poet; he must learn how to read like a poet; he must educate in himself the power of absorbing immeasurable knowledge, the facts of which have been approved and observed by others.

The weak point in our modern education seems to be that it has broken altogether with the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon the spirit or the imagination of a man is the one method possible to employ in educating him in everything except his specialty. It is the one method possible to employ in making even a powerful specialist of him; in relating his specialty to other specialties; that is, in making either him or his specialty worth while.

Inasmuch as it has been decreed that every man in modern life must be a specialist, the fundamental problem that confronts modern education is, How can a specialist be an educated man? There would seem to be but one way a specialist can be an educated man. The only hope for a specialist lies in his being allowed to have a soul (or whatever he chooses to call it), a spirit or an imagination. If he has This, whatever it is, in one way or another, he will find his way to every book he needs. He will read all the books there are in his specialty. He will read all other books through their backs.

IV

On Reading Books through Their Backs

As this is the only way the majority of books can be read by anybody, one wonders why so little has been said about it.

Reading books through their backs is easily the most important part of a man's outfit, if he wishes to be an educated man. It is not necessary to prove this statement. The books themselves prove it without even being opened. The mere outside of a library--almost any library--would seem to settle the point that if a man proposes to be in any larger or deeper sense a reader of books, the books must be read through their backs.

Even the man who is obliged to open books in order to read them sooner or later admits this. He finds the few books he opens in the literal or unseeing way do not make him see anything. They merely make him see that he ought to have opened the others--that he must open the others; that is, if he is to know anything. The next thing he sees is that he must open all the others to know anything. When he comes to know this he may be said to have reached what is called, by stretch of courtesy, a state of mind. It is the scientific state of mind. Any man who has watched his mind a little knows what this means. It is the first incipient symptom in a mind that science is setting in.

The only possible cure for it is reading books through their backs. As this scientific state of mind is the main obstacle nowadays in the way of reading books through their backs, it is fitting, perhaps, at this point that I should dwell on it a little.

I do not claim to be a scientist, and I have never--even in my worst moments--hoped for a scientific mind. I am afraid I know as well as any one who has read as far as this, in this book, that I cannot prove anything. The book has at least proved that; but it does seem to me that there are certain things that very much need to be said about the scientific mind, in its general relation to knowledge. I would give the world to be somebody else for awhile and say them--right here in the middle of my book. But I know as well as any one, after all that has pa.s.sed, that if I say anything about the scientific mind n.o.body will believe it. The best I can do is to say how I feel about the scientific mind. "And what has that to do with it?" exclaims the whole world and all its laboratories. What is really wanted in dealing with this matter seems to be some person--some grave, superficial person--who will take the scientific mind up scientifically, shake it and filter it, put it under the microscope, stare at it with a telescope, stick the X-ray through it, lay it on the operating table--show what is the matter with it--even to itself. Anything that is said about the scientific mind which is not said in a big, bow-wow, scientific, impersonal, out-of-the-universe sort of way will not go very far.

And yet, the things that need to be said about the scientific mind--the things that need to be done for it--need to be said and done so very much, that it seems as if almost any one might help. So I am going to keep on trying. Let no one suppose, however, that because I have turned around the corner into another chapter, I am setting myself up as a sudden and new authority on the scientific mind. I do not tell how it feels to be scientific. I merely tell how it looks as if it felt.

I have never known a great scientist, and I can only speak of the kind of scientist I have generally met--the kind every one meets nowadays, the average, bare scientist. He always looks to me as if he had a grudge against the universe--jealous of it or something. There are so many things in it he cannot know and that he has no use for unless he does.

It always seems to me (perhaps it seems so to most of us in this world, who are running around and enjoying things and guessing on them) that the average scientist has a kind of dreary and disgruntled look, a look of feeling left out. Nearly all the universe goes to waste with a scientist. He fixes himself so that it has to. If a man cannot get the good of a thing until he knows it and knows all of it, he cannot expect to be happy in this universe. There are no conveniences for his being happy in it. It is the wrong size, to begin with. Exact knowledge at its best, or even at its worst, does not let a man into very many things in a universe like this one. A large part of it is left over with a scientist. It is the part that is left over which makes him unhappy. I am not claiming that a scientist, simply because he is a scientist, is any unhappier or needs to be any unhappier than other men are. He does not need to be. It all comes of a kind of brutal, sweeping, overriding prejudice he has against guessing on anything.

V

On Keeping Each Other in Countenance

I do not suppose that my philosophising on this subject--a sort of slow, peristaltic action of my own mind--is of any particular value; that it really makes any one feel any better except myself.

But it has just occurred to me that I may have arisen, quite as well as not, without knowing it, to the dignity of the commonplace.

"The man who thinks he is playing a solo in any human experience," says this morning's paper, "only needs a little more experience to know that he is a member of a chorus." I suspect myself of being a Typical Case.

The scientific mind has taken possession of all the land. It has a.s.sumed the right of eminent domain in it, and there must be other human beings here and there, I am sure, standing aghast at learning in our modern day, even as I am, their whys and wherefores working within them, trying to wonder their way out in this matter.

All that is necessary, as I take it, is for one or the other of us to speak up in the world, barely peep in it, make himself known wherever he is, tell how he feels, and he will find he is not alone. Then we will get together. We will keep each other in countenance. We will play with our minds if we want to. We will take the liberty of knowing rows of things we don't know all about, and we will be as happy as we like, and if we keep together we will manage to have a fairly educated look besides. I am very sure of this. But it is the sort of thing a man cannot do alone. If he tries to do it with any one else, any one that happens along, he is soon come up with. It cannot be done in that way.

There is no one to whom to turn. Almost every mind one knows in this modern educated world is a suspicious, unhappy, abject, helpless, scientific mind.

It is almost impossible to find a typical educated mind, either in this country or in Europe or anywhere, that is not a rolled-over mind, jealous and crushed by knowledge day and night, and yet staring at its ignorance everywhere. The scientist is almost always a man who takes his mind seriously, and he takes the universe as seriously as he takes his mind. Instead of glorying in a universe and being a little proud of it for being such an immeasurable, unspeakable, unknowable success, his whole state of being is one of worry about it. The universe seems to irritate him somehow. Has he not spent years of hard labour in making his mind over, in drilling it into not-thinking, into not-inferring things, into not-knowing anything he does not know all of? And yet here he is and here is his whole life--does it not consist in being baffled by germs and bacilli, crowed over by atoms, trampled on by the stars? It is getting so that there is but one thing left that the modern, educated scientific mind feels that it knows and that is the impossibility of knowledge. Certainly if there is anything in this wide world that can possibly be in a more helpless, more pulp-like state than the scientific mind in the presence of something that cannot be known, something that can only be used by being wondered at (which is all most of the universe is for), it has yet to be pointed out.

He may be better off than he looks, and I don't doubt he quite looks down on me as,

A mere poet, The Chanticleer of Things, Who lives to flap his wings-- It's all he knows,-- They're never furled; Who plants his feet On the ridge-pole of the world And crows.

Still, I like it very well. I don't know anything better that can be done with the world, and as I have said before I say again, my friend and brother, the scientist, is either very great or very small, or he is moderately, decently unhappy. At least this is the way it looks from the ridge-pole of the world.

VI

The Romance of Science

Science is generally accredited with being very matter-of-fact. But there has always been one romance in science from the first,--its romantic att.i.tude toward itself. It would be hard to find any greater romance in modern times. The romance of science is the a.s.sumption that man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring, mere-observing being and that in proportion as his brain is educated he must not use it.

"Deductive reasoning has gone out with the nineteenth century," says The Strident Voice. This is the one single inference that the scientific method seems to have been able to make--the inference that no inference has a right to exist.

So far as I can see, if there are going to be inferences anyway, and one has to take one's choice in inferring, I would rather have a few inferences on hand that I can live with every day than to have this one huge, voracious inference (the scientist's) which swallows all the others up. For that matter, when the scientist has actually made it,--this one huge guess that he hasn't a right to guess,--what good does it do him? He never lives up to it, and all the time he has his poor, miserable theory hanging about him, d.o.g.g.i.ng him day and night.