Book 1 of The Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Lee This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Joseph Tabler. The Lost Art of Reading by Gerald Stanley Lee Book 1. Interferences with the Reading Habit The First Interference. Civilization. 1. Dust I see the ships, 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 ships, I said? Figures of men and women, thousands of figures of men and women. 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.  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 space. And what do you see in the trains? Miles of faces. They are pushing on the trains. What are you seeing now, I said? Cities, he said. Streets of cities. Miles of cities. And what do you see in the streets of cities? Men, women, and smoke. What are the men and women doing? Hurrying, he said. Where, I said, God knows. Too, dust. The population of the civilized world today may be divided into two classes, 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 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 space 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, what 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 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 civilized man, 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 today 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 civilization. To sketch a scheme of defense 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. Civilization waits for him. All unfolding, all instructing civilization and he stands face to face book in hand with his last chance. 3. Dust to dust Whatever else may be said of our present civilization one must needs go very far in it to see Abraham at his tense door waiting for angels and yet from the point of view of reading and from the point of view of the books the world has always called worth reading if ever there was a type of gentleman and scholar in history and a Christian and a man of possibilities founder and ruler of civilization it is the same man Abraham at his tense door waiting for angels. Have we any like him now? Per adventure there shall be ten. Where is the man who feels that he is free today to sit upon his steps and have a quiet think and rest there floats across the spirit of his dream the sweet and reassuring sound of someone 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 civilization a 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 19th 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 civilization but if civilization 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 civilization and civilization takes up the rest the man is not allowed to peep in civilization he is too busy being ordered around by it to know that he would like to it does not occur to him that he ought to be allowed to have time in it to know who he is before he dies the typical civilized 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 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 in as much as ideals are what all real books are written with and read with and in as much as ideals are the only way a human being has of resting in this present world it would be hard to think of any book that would be more to the point in this modern civilization than a book that shall tell men how to read to live how to touch their ideals swiftly every day any book that should do this for us would touch life at more points and flow out on men's minds in more directions than any other that could be conceived it would contribute as the June day or as the night for sleep to all men's lives to all of the problems of all of the world at once it would be a night latch to the ideal whatever the remedy may be said to be one thing is certainly true with regard to our reading habits in modern times men who are habitually shame faced or absent minded before the ideal that is before the actual nature of things cannot expect to be real readers of books they can only be what most men are nowadays merely busy and effeminate running and reading sort of men rushing about propping up the universe men who cannot trust the ideal the nature of things and who think they can do better are naturally kept very busy and as they take no time to rest back on their ideals they are naturally very tired the result stares at us on every hand whether in religion, art, education, or public affairs we do not stop to find our ideals for the problems that confront us we do not even look at them our modern problems are all Jericho's to us most of them paper ones we arrange symposiums and processions around them and shout at them and march up and down before them modern prophecy is the blare of the trumpet modern thought is a crowd hurrying to and fro civilization is the dust and the dust is filled in each other's eyes when the peace and strength of spirit with which the walls of temples are build no longer dwell in them the stones crumble temples are built of eon gathered and eon rested stones infinite nights and days are wrought in them and leisure and splendor wait upon them and visits of suns and stars and when leisure and splendor are no more in human beings lives and visits of suns and stars are as though they were not in our civilization the walls of it shall crumble upon us if fullness and leisure and power of living are no more with us nothing shall save us walls of encyclopedias not even walls of bibles shall save us nor miles of Carnegie library empty and hasty and cowardly living does not get itself protected by laws of nature by tons of paper and ink the only way out for civilization is through the practical men in it men who grapple daily with ideals who keep office hours with their souls who keep hold of life with books who take enough time out of harrying civilization along to live civilization has been long in building and its splendor still hangs over us but Parthenons do not stand when Parthenons are no longer being lived in Greek men's souls only those who have coliseums in them can keep coliseums around them the ideal has its own way it has it with the very stones it was an ideal, a vanished ideal that made a moonlight scene for tourists out of the coliseum out of the dead soul of Rome four ashes there seem to be but two fundamental characteristic sensibilities left alive in the typical callously civilized man one of these sensibilities is the sense of motion and the other is the sense of mass if he cannot be appealed to through one of these senses it is of little use to appeal to him at all in proportion as he is civilized the civilized man can be depended on for two things he can always be touched by a hurry of any kind and he never fails to be moved by a crowd if he can have hurry and crowd together he is capable of almost anything these two sensibilities the sense of motion and the sense of mass are all that is left of the original lusty tasting and seeing and feeling human being who took possession of the earth and even in the case of comparatively rudimentary and somewhat stupid senses like these the sense of motion with the average civilized man is so blunt that he needs to be rushed along at 70 miles an hour to have the feeling that he is moving and his sense of mass is so degenerate that he needs to live with hundreds of thousands of people next door to know that he is not alone he is seen in his most natural state the civilized being with most of his civilization around him in the seat of an elevated railway train with a crowded newspaper before his eyes and another crowded newspaper in his lap and crowds of people reading crowded newspapers standing around him in the aisles but he can never be said to be seen at his best in a spectacle like this until it is rushing over the sky of the street puffing through space in which delectable pale male and carnival of hurry hiss in front of it, shriek under it and dust behind it he finds to all appearances at least the meaning of the present world and the hope of the next hurry and crowd have kissed each other and his soul rests if Abraham sitting in his tent door waiting for angels had been visited by a spectacle like this and invited to live in it all his days would he not have climbed into it cheerfully enough? asks the modern man living in a tent would have been out of the question and waiting for angels waiting for anything in fact forever impossible whatever else may be said of Abraham his waiting for angels was the making of him and the making of all that is good in what has followed since the man who hangs on a strap up in the morning and down at night hurrying between the crowd he sleeps with and the crowd he works with to the crowd that hurries no more even this man such as he with all his civilization roaring about him would have been impossible if Abraham in the stately and quiet days had not waited at his tent door for angels to begin a civilization with or if he had been the kind of Abraham that expected that angels would come hurrying and scurrying after one in a spectacle like this what has a man says blank in his angels of the 19th century what has a man who consents to be a knee bumping elbow jamming foothold struggling strap hanger an abject commuter all his days for no better reason than that he is not well enough to keep still and that there is not enough of him to be alone to do with angels or to do with anything except to get done with it as fast as he can so say we all hanging on straps to say it swaying and swinging to oblivion is there no power says blank in heaven above or earth beneath that will help us stop if a civilization is founded on two senses the sense of motion and the sense of mass one need not go far to find the essential traits of its literature and its daily reading habit there are two things that such a civilization makes sure of in all its concerns hurry and crowd hence the spectacle before us the literary rush and mobs of books five the literary rush are being occasionally addicted like the reader of this book to a seemingly desire to have the opinions of someone besides the author represented has fallen into the way of having interviews held with himself from time to time which are afterwards published at his own request these interviews appear in the public prince as being between a mysterious person and the presiding genius of the state of massachusetts the author can only earnestly hope in thus generously providing for an opposing point of view and taking as it were the words of the enemy upon his lips he will lose the sympathy of the reader the mysterious person is in colloquy with the presiding genius of the state of massachusetts as the PGS of M lives relentlessly at his elbow dogs every day of his life it is hoped that the reader will make allowance for a certain impatient familiarity in the tone of the mysterious person towards so considerable a personage as the presiding genius of the state of massachusetts which we can only profoundly regret the mysterious person there is no escaping from it reading madness is a thing we all are breathing in today whether we will or no and it is not only in the air but it is worse than in the air it is underneath the foundations of the things which we live and on which we stand it has infected the very character of the natural world and the movement of the planets and the world of the globe beneath our feet without its little pailing of books about it there is hardly a thing that is left in this modern world a man can go to for its own sake except by stepping off the globe perhaps now and then practically arranging a world of one's own and breaking with one's kind the life that a man must live today can only be described as a kind of eternal parting with himself there is getting to be no possible way for a man to preserve his five spiritual senses even his five physical ones and be a member in good and regular standing of civilization at the same time if civilization and human nature are to continue to be allowed to exist together there is but one way out apparently an extra planet for all of us one for a man to live on and the other for him to be civilized on PGS of M but as long as we who are the men and women of the world are willing to continue our present fashion of giving up living in order to get a living PGS of M but as long as we who are the men and women of the world are willing to continue our present fashion of giving up living one planet will never be large enough for us if we can only get our living in one place and have it to live with in another the question is to whom does this present planet belong the people who spend their days in living into it and enjoying it or the people who never take time to notice the planet who do not seem to know that they are living on a planet at all PGS of M but I may not be very well informed but I am very sure of one of them said the mysterious person and that is that this present planet this one we are living on now belongs by all that is fair and just to those who are really living on it and that it should be saved and kept as sacred and protected a place a place where men shall be able to belong to the taste and color and meaning of things and to God and to themselves if people want another planet a planet to belong to society on let them go out and get it look at our literature current literature it is a mere headlong helpless literary rush from beginning to end all that one can extract from it is getting to be a kind of general sound of going we began gently enough we began with the annual we had poor Richard's almanac then we had the quarterly a monthly was reasonable enough in course of time so we had monthlies a semi-monthly came to ease our literary nerves and now the weekly magazine stumbles wrapped in wistful on the heels of men of genius it makes contracts with prophecy unborn poems are sold in the open market the latest thoughts that thinkers have the trend of the thoughts they are going to have the public makes demand for these it gets them then it cries more more where is the writer who does not think with the printing press hot upon his track and the sound pulp mill making paper for his poems and the buzz of editors instead of the music of the spheres think of the destruction to American forests the bear and glaring hills that face us day and night all for a literature like this thousands of square miles of it spread before our faces morning after morning week after week through all this broad and glorious land 70 million souls brothers of yours and mine walking through prairies of pictures Sunday after Sunday flickered at by headlines deceived by adjectives each with his long days work column after column sentence after sentence plotting plotting plotting down to my geography may be wrong the general direction is right but don't you believe in newspapers why yes in the abstract news papers but we do not have any news nowadays it is not news to know a thing before it's happened nor is it news to know what might happen or why it might happen or why it might not happen to be told that it doesn't make any difference whether it happens at all would be news perhaps too many people such news as there is but it is hardly worthwhile to pay three cents to be sure of that an intelligent man can be sure of it for nothing he has been sure of it every morning for years it's the gist of most of the newspapers he reads from the point of view of what can be called truly vital information in any larger sense the only news a daily paper has is the date at the top of the page if a man wants to make sure of that if he feels from the bottom of his heart what really good news it is that one more day has come in a world as beautiful as this the rest of it PGS of M but the rest of it is true the rest of it if it's true is hardly worth knowing and if it's worth knowing it can be found better in books and if it's not true every man his own liar is my motto he might as well have the pleasure of it and he knows how much to believe the same lunging garrulous blindly busy habit is the law of all we do take our literary critical journals if a critic cannot tell what he sees at once he must tell what he fails to see at once the point is not his seeing or not seeing nor anybody's seeing or not seeing the point is the imperative at once literature is getting to be the filling of orders time limited orders criticism is out of a car window book reviews are telegraphed across the sea Tennyson's memoirs the blank daily a spectacle for Homer begins a magazine to review in three weeks every book of permanent value that is published one of the gravest and most significant blows at literature one of the gravest and most significant signs of the condition of letters today that could be conceived three weeks man as if a book of permanent value had ever been recognized as yet in three years or reviewed in 30 years in any proper sense or mastered in 300 years with all the meaning of this hurrying world we have no book reviewers why should we criticism begins where a man's soul leaves off it comes from brilliantly defective minds so far as one can see from men of attractively imperfect sympathies nor now working himself into a mighty wrath because mystery is left out of his soul gathering adjectives about his loins stocks his little fluttered modern world puts his huge fumbling hoof upon the blessed Demosel goes crashing through the press he is greeted with a shutter of delight even Matthew Arnold a man who had a way of seeing things almost sometimes criticizes Emerson for a lack of unity because the unity was on so large a scale that Arnold's imagination could not see it and now the chirrup from afar rising from the east and the west why doesn't George Meredith etc. people want him to guide posts in his books apparently or before his sentences to hmm or 10 miles to the nearest verb the inevitable fate of any writer man or woman who dares to ask in this present day that his reader shall stop to think if a man cannot read as he runs he does not read a book at all the result is he ought to run that is natural enough and the faster he runs in most books the better at this point the mysterious person reached out his long arm from his easy chair to some papers that were lying near I knew too well what it meant he began to read he is always breaking over into manuscript when he talks we are forgetting to see looking is a lost art with our poor wistful straining eyes we hurry along the days that slowly out of the rest of heaven move their stillness the more we hurry the more we read night and noon and morning the panorama passes before our eyes by tables on cars and in the street we see them readers readers everywhere drinking their blindness in life is a blur of printed paper we see no more the things themselves we see about them we lose the power to see the things themselves we see in sentences the line of type looks for us the world in columns the sounds of the street are muffled to us and papers up to our ears we whirl along our endless tracks the faces that passes the faces that pass our phantoms in our little woodcut headline dream we go ceaseless on turning leaves days and weeks and months of leaves wherever we go years of leaves boys who have never seen the sky above them women who have never seen it in a face old men never looked out at sea across the crowd nor guessed the horizons there dead men the flicker of life in their hands not yet beneath the roofs of graves all turning leaves the mysterious person stopped nobody said anything it was the better way generally with the mysterious person we were beginning to feel as if he were through when his eye fell on a copy of the hmm lying on the floor it was open at an unlucky page look at that said he he handed the paper to the PGS of M pointing with his finger rather excitedly the PGS of M looked at it read it through then he put it down the mysterious person went on do you not know what it means when you a civilized cultivated converted human being can stand face to face with a list a list like that a list headed books of the week when unblinking and shameless and without a cry of protest you actually read it through without seeing or seeming to see for a single moment that right there right there in that list the fact that there is such a list your civilization is on trial for its life that any society or nation or century that is shallow enough to publish as many books as that has yet to face the most awful the most unprecedented the most headlong coming crisis in the history of the human race the mysterious person made a pause the pause of settling things there are people who seem to think that the only really adequate way to settle a thing in this world is for them to ask a question about it at all events the mysterious person having asked a question at this point everybody might as well have the benefit of it in the meantime it is to be hoped that in the next chapter the exciting genius of the state of Massachusetts or somebody will get a word in and of section one section two of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this LibriVox recording is in the public domain book one interferences with the reading habit civilization part six parentheses to the gentle reader this was a footnote at first it is placed at the top of the page in the hope that it will point at itself more and let the worst out at once I want to say I a little in this book I do not propose to do it very often indeed I am not sure just now that I shall be able to do it at all but I would like to have the feeling as I go along that arrangements have been made for it and that it is understood and that if I am fairly good about it ring a little bell or something and warn people I am going to be allowed right here in my own book at least to say I when I want to I is the way I feel on the inside about this subject anybody can see it and I want to be honest in the first place and in the second place like a good many other people I never have had what could be called a real good chance to say I in this world and I feel that if I had somehow it would cure me I have tried other ways I have tried calling myself he I have stated my experiences in principles called myself it and in the first part of this book I have already fallen into the way page after page of borrowing other people when all the time I knew perfectly well and everybody that I preferred myself at all events this calling one's self names now one and now another working one's way incognito all the way through one's own book is not making me as modest as I had hoped there seems to be nothing for it with some of us but to work through to modesty the other way backward I it out there is one other reason this mysterious person I have arranged with in these opening chapters to say I for me does not seem to be doing it very well I think anyone any fairly observing person would admit that I could do it better it's going to be done at all why should I mere spiritual machine a kind of moral phonograph like this mysterious person be put forward to take the ignominy of it I have set my eye up before me and duly cross examined it I have said to it either you are good enough to say I in a book or you are not and my eye has replied to me if I am not I want everybody to know why and if I am well of course he is not and we will all him to know why we will do as we would be done by if there is ever going to be any possible comfort in this world for me in not being what I ought to be it is the thought that I am not the only one that knows it at all events this feeling that the worst is known even if one takes as I am doing now a planet for a confessional gives one a luxurious sense a sense of combined safety and irresponsibility which would not be exchanged for a world every book should have eye places in it breathing holes places where one's soul can come up to the surface and look out through the ice and say things I do not wish to seem superior and I will admit that I am as respectable as anybody in most places but I do think that if half the time I am devoting and am going to devote to appearing as modest as people expect in this world could be devoted to really doing something in it my little modesty such as it is would not be missed at all events I am persuaded that anything almost anything would be better than this eternal keeping up appearances of all being a little less interested in ourselves than we are which is what literature and society are for mostly we all do it more or less and yet if there were only a few scattered along places public soul open places to rest in and be honest in and tease and things wouldn't we see people rushing to them I would give the world sometimes to believe that it would pay to be as honest with some people as with a piece of paper or with a book I dare say I am wrong in striking out and flourishing about in a chapter like this and in threatening to have more like them but there is one comfort I lay to my soul in doing it if there is one thing rather than another book is for one's own book it is that it furnishes the one good fair safe place for a man to talk about himself in because it is the only place that anyone absolutely anyone at any moment can shut him up this is not saying that I am going to do it my courage will go from me for saying I I mean or I shall not be humble enough for something and it all will pass away I'm going to do it now a little but I cannot guarantee it all of a sudden no telling when or why I shall feel that mysterious person with all his worldly trappings hanging around me again and before I know it before you know it gentle reader with all my I or I shall be swallowed up next time I appear you shall see me decorous trim and in the third person my literary white tie on snooping along these sentences one after the other crossing my eyes out wishing I had never been born post script I cannot help recording at this point for the benefit of reckless persons how saying I in a book feels it feels a good deal like a very small boy in a very high swing a kind of flashing of everything through nothing feeling but it cannot be undone now and so if you please gentle reader and if everybody will hold their breath I'm going to hold on tight and do it seven more parentheses but more to the point I have gotten into a way lately while I am just living along of going out and taking a good square turn every now and then in front of myself it is not altogether in agreeable experience but there seems to be a window in every man's nature on purpose for it arranged and located on purpose for it and I find on the whole that going out around one's window once in so often and standing a while has its advantages the general idea is to stand perfectly still for a little time in a kind of general public disinterested way and then suddenly when one is off one's guard and not looking so to speak take a peek backwards into one's self I am aware that it does not follow because I have just come out and have been looking into my window that I have a right to hold up any person or persons who may be going by in this book and ask them to look into but at the same time I cannot conceal do not wish to conceal even if I could that there have been times standing in front of my window and looking in when what I have seen there has seemed to me to assume a national significance there are millions of other windows like it is one of the daily sorrows of my life that the people who own them do not seem to know it most of them except perhaps in a vague hurried, pained way sometimes I feel like calling out to them as I stand by my window see them go hurrying by on the great street say there stranger hello a stranger want to see yourself come right over here and look at me nobody believes it of course it's a good deal like standing and waving one's arms in the midway being an egotist but I must say I have never got a man yet got him in out of the rush I mean right in front of my window got him once stooped down and really looking in there but he admitted there was something in it this does it come to pass this gentle swelling let me be a warning to you gentle reader when you once get to philosophizing yourself over along the line of your faults into the disputed territory of the first person singular I am not asking you to try to believe my little philosophy of types I am trying to in my humble way to be sure but I would rather on the whole let it go it is not so much my philosophy I rest my case on as my sub philosophy or religion to it I like it and believe in it saying I thank heaven that bad as it is I have struck bottom at last the best I can do under the circumstances I suppose is to beg in a perfectly blank way forgiveness forgiveness of any and every kind from everybody if in this and the following chapters I fall sometimes to talking of people people at large under the general head of myself I was born to read I spent all my early years as I remember them with books peering softly about in them my whole being was hushed and trustful and expectant at the sight of a printed page I lived in the presence of books with all my thoughts lying open about me a kind of still radiant mood of welcome seemed to lie upon them when I looked at a shelf of books I felt the whole world flocking to me I have been civilized now I should say 20 or possibly 25 years at least everyone supposes I am civilized and my whole being has changed I cannot so much as look upon a great many books in a library or any other heaped up place without feeling bleak and heartless I never read if I can help it I never read if I can help it my whole attitude toward current literature is grouty and snappish a kind of perpetual interrupted what are you ringing my doorbell now for attitude I am a disagreeable character I spend at least one half my time I should judge keeping things off in defending my character then I spend the other half in wondering if after all it was worth it what I see in my window has changed when I used to go out around and look into it in the old days to see what I was like I was a sunny open valley with everything running down into it and opening out of it and when I go out suddenly now and turn around in front of myself and look in I am a mountain pass I sift my friends up a trail the few friends that come come a little out of breath God bless them and a book cannot so much as get to me except on a mule's back it is by no means an ideal arrangement a mountain pass but it is better than always sitting in a mountain pass or by pamphlet boy in the street thinks he might just as well come up and ring one's doorbell a while all modern books are book agents at heart around getting subscriptions for themselves if a man wants to be sociable or literary nowadays he can only do it by being a more or less disagreeable character and if he wishes to be a beautiful character he must go off and do it by himself this is a mere choice in suicides in me whose fault is it that a poor, wistful, incomplete human being born into this huge dilemma of a world can only keep on having a soul in it by keeping that is his soul tossed back and forth now in one place where souls are lost and now in another is it your fault or mine, gentle reader that we are obliged to live in this undignified, obstreperous fashion in what is called civilization I cannot believe it nearly all the best how little one knows can be seen sitting in civilization on the edge of their chairs or hurrying along with their souls in satchels there is but one conclusion civilization is not what it is advertised to be every time I see a fresh missionary down at the steamer wharf as I do sometimes starting away for other lands loaded up with our institutions to the eyes church in one hand and school house in the other, trim happy and smiling over them at everybody I feel like stepping up to him and saying what seemed to me a few appropriate words I seldom do it but the other day when I happened to be down at the Umbria dock about sailing time I came across one a foreign missionary I mean pleasant, thoughtless and benevolent looking standing there all by himself by the steamer rail and I thought I would try to speak to him where are you going to be putting those I said pointing to a lot of funny little churches and school houses he was holding in both hands from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand he said I looked at them a minute you don't think do you I said you don't really think you had better wait over a little bring them back and let us finish them for you do you one or two samples he looked at me with what seemed to me at first a kind of blurred helpless look I soon saw that he was pitying me he looked up down to the dining saloon and tried to appreciate two or three tons of flowers I do not wish to say a word against missionaries they are merely apt to be somewhat heedless, morally hurried persons rushing about the world turning people as they think right side up everywhere without really noticing them much but I do think that a great deliberate corporate body like the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions ought to be more optimistic about a little more expect a little more of it it seems to me that it ought to be far less pessimistic than it is also about what we can do in the way of schools and social life in civilization and about civilization's way of doing business is our little knack of Christianity I find myself wondering quite worthy of all this attention it is getting from the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions why should it approve of civilization does anyone really suppose that it is really time to pat it on the back yet to spend a million dollars a year patting it on the back I merely throw out the question 7. More Literary Rush we had been talking along in our club as usual for some time on the general subject of the world fixing the blame for things we had come to the point where it was nearly all fixed on other people when I thought I might as well put forward my little theory that nearly everything that was the matter could be traced to the people who belong to society then the PGS of M who is always shoving a dictionary around in front of him when he talks spoke up and said but who belongs to society all persons who read what they are told to and who call where they can't help it what this world needs just now I went on looking the PGS as much in the eye as I could is emancipation it needs a profit a man who can gather about him a few brave hearted intelligently ignorant man who shall go about with their beautiful feet on the mountains telling the good tidings of how many things there are we do not need to know the prejudice against being ignorant is largely because people have not learned how to do it the wrong people have taken hold of it I cannot remember the exact words of what was said after this but I said that it seemed to me that most people were afraid not to know everything not knowing too much as a natural gift and unless a man can make his ignorance contagious inspire people with the books he dares not read of course the only thing he can do is to give up and read everything and belong to the society he certainly cannot belong to himself unless he protects himself with well selected carefully guarded daring ignorance think of the books the books that are dictated to us the books that will not let a man go and behind every book a hundred intelligent men and women one's friends too one's own kin PGS of M but the cultured man must the cultured man is the man who can tell me what he does not know with such grace that I feel ashamed of knowing it now there's M blank for example other people seem to read to talk but I never see him across a drawing room without an impulse of barbarism I always get him off into a corner as soon as I can if only to rest myself to feel that I have a right not to read everything he always proves to me something that I can get along without he is full of the most choice and picturesque bits of ignorance he is creatively ignorant he displaces a book every time I see him which is a deal better in these days than writing one a man should be measured by his book displacement he goes about with his thinking face and a kind of syllabus over him of never needing to read at all he has nothing whatever to give but himself but I rather have one of his questions about a book I had read than all the other opinions and subtle distinctions in the room or the book itself PGS of M but the cultured man must not it is the very essence of a cultured man that when he hears the word must it is on his own lips it is the very essence of his culture that he says it to himself his culture is his belonging to himself and his belonging to himself is the first condition of his being worth giving to other people one longs for Ilya people know too much and there doesn't seem to be a man living who can charm them from the error of their way knowledge takes the place of everything else and all one can do in this present day as he reads the reviews and goes to his club is to look forward with a tired heart to the prophecy knowledge shall pass away where do we see the old and sweet content of loving a thing for itself now there are flowers the only way to delight in a flower at your feet in these days is to watch with it all alone or keep still about it the moment you speak of it it becomes botany it's a rare man who will not tell you all he knows about it love isn't worth anything without a classic name it's a wonder we have any flowers left half the charm of a flower to me is that it looks demure and talks perfume and keeps its name so gently to itself the man who always enjoys views by picking out the places he knows is a symbol of all our reading habits and of our national relation to books one can glory in a great cliff down in the depths of his heart but if you mention it it is geology and an argument even the birds sing zoologically and as for the sky it has become a blue and gold science and all the wonder seems to be confined to ones not knowing the names of the planets I was brought up wistfully on twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you are but now it has become twinkle twinkle little star teachers told me what you are even babies won't wonder very soon that is to say they won't wonder out loud nobody does another of my poems was where did you come from baby dear out of the everywhere into here I thought of the other day when I stepped into the library with the list of books I had to have an opinion about before Mrs. W's Thursday afternoon I felt like a literary infant where did you come from baby fair out of the here into everywhere and the bookcases stared at me it is a serious question whether the average American youth is ever given a chance to thirst for knowledge he thirsts for ignorance instead from the very first he is hemmed in by knowledge the kindergarten with its suave relentlessness its perfunctory cheerfulness closes in upon the life of every child with himself the dear old fashioned breathing spell he used to have after getting here whether has it gone the rough strong ruthless unseemly grown up world crowds to the very edge of every beginning life it has no patients with trailing clouds of glory flocks of inference every year on the planet who can but watch them sadly huddled closer and closer to the little strip of wonder that has left near the land from which they came no lingering away from us no infinite holiday childhood walks a precipice crowded to the brink of birth we tabulate its moods we register its learning inch by inch we draw its poor little premature soul out of its body breath by breath infants are well informed now sussuckling has nerves a few days more and he will be like all the rest of us it will be poem when I was weaned my first tooth a study the presiding genius of the state of massachusetts with his dazed kind look looked up and said I fear my dear fellow there is no place for you in this world thanks one of the delights of going fishing or hunting is that one learns how small a place in the world is comes across so many accidentally preserved characters preserved by not having a place in the world persons that are interesting to be with persons you can tell things the real object it seems to me and meeting another human being is compliment fitting into each other's ignorances sometimes it seems as if it were only where there is something to be caught or shot or where there is plenty of room that the highest and most sociable useful forms of ignorance were allowed to mature one can still find such fascinating prejudices such frank enthusiasm of ignorance where there is good fishing and then in the stray hamlets there is the grave whimsical nest and the calm superior air of austerity to cultured people ah let me live in the main woods or wander by the Brooks of Virginia and rest my soul in the delights in the pomposity of ignorance ignorance pride and glory and courage and lovableness I never come back from a vacation without a dream of what I might have been if I had only dared to know a little less and even now I sometimes feel I have ignorance enough if like Elia for instance I only knew how to use it but I cannot as much as get over being ashamed of it I am nearly gone I have little left but the gift of being bored that is something but hardly a day passes without my slurring over a guilty place in conversation without my hiding my ignorance under a bushel where I can go later and take a look at it by myself then I know all about it next time and sink lower and lower a man can do nothing alone of course ignorance must be natural and acquired in order to have the true ring and afford the most relief in the world but every wide awake village that has thoughtful people enough people who are educated up to it ought to organize an ignoramus club to defend the town from papers and books it was at about this point that the presiding genius of the state of Massachusetts took up the subject and after modulating a little and then modulating a little more he was soon listening to himself about a book we had not read and I sat in my chair and wrote out this nine the bugbear of being well informed a practical suggestion one this club shall be known as the ignoramus club of four every member shall be pledged not to read the latest book until people have stopped expecting it five the club shall have a standing committee that shall report at every meeting on new things that people do not need to know six it shall have a public library committee appointed every year to look over the books in regular order and report on old things that people do not need to know committee is constructed to keep the library as small as possible eight no member vacations accepted shall read any book that he would not read twice in case he does he shall be obliged to read it twice or pay a fine three times the price of book net eleven the club shall meet weekly twelve any person of suitable age shall be eligible for membership in the club who after a written examination in his deficiencies shall appear in the opinion of the examining board who have selected his ignorance thoughtfully conscientiously and for the protection of his mind thirteen all persons thus approved shall be voted upon at the next regular meeting of the club the vote to be taken by ballot any candidate who has not read when knighthood was in flower or audrey or david harem by acclamation perhaps I have quoted from the bylaws sufficiently to give an idea of the spirit and aim of the club I append the order of meeting one call to order two reports of committees three general confession what members have read during the week four fines five review books I have escaped six essay things Plato did not need to know seven omniscience helpful hints remedies eight the description of evil followed by an illustration nine not traveling on the Nile by one who has been there ten our village street stereopticon eleven what not to know about birds twelve myself through an opera glass thirteen sonnet botany fourteen essay proper treatment of paupers insane and instructive people fifteen the fad for facts sixteen how to organize a club against clubs seventeen paper how to humble him who asks have you read eighteen essay by youngest member infinity an appreciation nineteen review the heavens in a nutshell twenty review wild animals I do not want to know twenty one exercise in silence ten minutes entire club twenty two essay ten minutes encyclopedia britannica summary twenty three exercise in wondering about something selected ten minutes entire club twenty four debate which is more deadly the pen or the sword twenty five things said tonight that we must forget twenty six adjournment each member required to walk home alone looking at the stars I have sometimes thought I would like to go off to some great wide bear splendid place nothing but time to do a minute and read a while I would want it built in the same general style and with the same general effect as the universe but a universe in which everything lets one alone in which everything just goes quietly on its great still round letting itself be looked at no more said about it nothing to be done about it no exclamations required no one standing around explaining things or showing how they appreciated them then after I had looked about a little seen that everything was safe and according to specifications I think the first thing I would do would be to sit down and see if I could not read a great book the way I used to read a great book before I belonged to civilization read it until I felt my soul growing softly toward it reaching up to the day and to the night with it I have always kept on hoping that I would be allowed in spite of being somewhat mixed up with civilization to be a normal man sometime it has always seemed to me that the normal man the highly organized man in all ages is the man who takes the universe primarily as a spectacle this is the main use for it the object of his life is to get a good look at it before he dies to be the kind of man who can get a good look at it how anyone can go through a whole life 60 or 70 years of it with a splendor like this arching over him morning noon and night flying beneath his feet blooming out at him on every side and not spend nearly all his time after the bare necessaries of life in taking it in listening and tasting and looking in it is one of the seven wonders of the world I never look out of my factory window in civilization see a sunset or shore of the universe and remind it again that there is a universe but I wonder at myself and I wonder at it I try to put civilization and the universe together I cannot do it we were afraid to be caught looking at it most of us spending the time to look at it or as if we were ashamed before the universe itself running furiously to and fro in it lest it should look at us it is the first trade of a great book it seems to me that it makes all other books little-currying petulant books wait a kind of immeasurable elemental hunger comes to a man out of it somehow I feel I have not had it out with a great book if I have not faced other great things with it I want to face storms with it hours of weariness and miles of walking with it it seems to ask me to it seems to bring with it something which makes me want to stop my mere reading and doing kind of life my ink and paper imitation kind of life and come out and be a companion with the silence shining with the eternal going on of things it seems to be written in every writing that is worth a man's while that it cannot, that it shall not it is written that a man shall work to read that he must win some great delight to do his reading with many and many a winter day I have tramped with four lines down to the edge of the night to overtake my soul to read four lines with it I have faced a wind for hours been bitterly cold with it before the utmost joy of the book I had lost would come back to me I find that when I am being normal vacations mostly I scarcely know what it is to give myself over to another than an hour or so at a time if a chapter has anything in it I want to do something with it go out and believe it live with it exercise it a while I am not only bored with the book when it does not interest me I am bored with it when it does I want to interrupt it take it outdoors see what the hills and clouds think try it on test it see if it is good enough see if it can come down upon me as rain or sunlight or other real things and blow upon me as the wind it does not belong to me until it has found its way through all the weathers within and the weathers without until it drifts with me through moods events sensations and days and nights faces and sunsets and the light of stars it is a part of life itself I find there is no other or shorter or easier way for me to do with a great book than to greet it as it seems to ask to be greeted as if it were a world that had come to me and sought me out wanted me to live in it hundreds and hundreds of times when I am being civilized have I not tried to do otherwise have I not stopped my poor pale hurried busy soul like a kind of specter flying past me before a great book and tried to get it to speak to it and it would not it requires a world a great book does as a kind of ticket of admission and what I have to do when I am being civilized with a world the one that is running still and godlike over me do I not for days and weeks at a time go about in it guilty shut in and foolish under it slinking about it is emptied miracles all around me mean joyless anxious unable to look the littlest flower in the face unable ah god my soul cries out within me are not all these things mine do they not belong with me and I with them and I go racing about making things up in their presence looking for shadows cutting out paper dolls to live with all the time this earnest splendid wasted heaven shining over me doing nothing with it expecting nothing of it a little more warmth out of it perhaps a little more light not to see in who am I that the grasses should whisper to me that the winds should blow upon me now and then there are days that come when I see a flower when I really see a flower and my soul cries out to it now and then there are days too when I see a book a book that has the universe wrought in it I find my soul feeling it vaguely creeping toward it I wonder if I dare read it I remember how I used to read it I all but pray to it I sit in my factory window and try sometimes but it is all far away at least as long as I stay in my window it's all about someone else a kind of splendid wistful walking in a dream it does not really belong to me to have the universe in it sometimes it almost seems to but it barely faintly belongs to me it is as if the sky came to me and stooped down over me and then went softly away in my sleep and of section 2 book 1 interferences with the reading habit civilization section 10 the dead level of intelligence by Gerald Stanley Lee this LibriVox recording is in the public domain 10 the dead level of intelligence your hostess introduces you to a man in a drawing room Mr. C belongs to a browning club too she says what are you going to do about it are you going to talk about browning not if browning is one of your alive places you will recognize her first James Whitcomb Riley or Ella Wheeler Wilcox you will be aware the enemy will bring you up if you do not he may tell you something about browning you never knew something you have always wanted to know but you will be hurt that he knew it he may be the original grammarian of the grammarians funeral whom Robert Browning took and knew perfectly well that he took at the one poetic moment of his life but his belonging to a browning club the enemy that is does not mean anything to you or to anyone else nowadays either about browning or about yourself there was a time once when if a man revealed in conversation that he was familiar with poetic structure in John Keats it meant something about the man his temperament, his producing or delighting power it means now that he has taken a course in poetics and college or teaches English in a high school and is carrying deadly information about with him wherever he goes it does not mean that he has a spark of the Keats spirit in him room with Keats or Keats could have endured being in the same room with him for 15 minutes if there is one inconvenience rather than another in being born in the latter half of the 19th century it is the almost constant compulsion one is under in it of finding people out making a distinction between the people who know a beautiful thing and are worthwhile and the boors of culture the people who know all about it one sees on every hand today persons occupying positions of importance who have been taken through all the motions of education from the bottom to the top but who always belong to the intellectual lower classes whatever their positions may be because they are not masters they are clumsy and futile with knowledge their culture has not been made over into them selves they have acquired it largely under mob influence the dead level of intelligence to do with it not wanting it is to be teachery with it force it on other people who do not want it whether in the origin processes or results of their learning these people have all the attributes of a mob their influence and force and civilization is a mob influence and it operates in the old and classic fashion of mobs upon all who oppose it it constitutes at present the most important and securely entrenched intimidating force modern society presents against the actual culture of the world whether in the schools or out of them it's voices in every street and it's shout of derision may be heard in almost every walk of life against all who refuse to conform to it there but very few who refuse millions of human beings young and old in meek and willing rows are seen on every side standing before it the dead level anxious to do anything to be graded up to it or to be graded down to it offering their heads to be taken off their necks to be stretched or their wastes willing to live footless all their days anything anything whatever bless their hearts to know that they are on the level the dead level the precise and exact dead level of intelligence the fact that this mob power keeps its hold by using books instead of bricks is merely a matter of form it occupies most of the strategic positions just now in the highways of learning and it does all the things that mobs do and does them in the way that mobs do them it has broken into the gardens into the arts the resting places of nations and with its factories to learn to love in its treadmills to learn to sing in it girdles its belt of drudgery around the world and carries bricks and mortar to the clouds it shouts to every human being across the spaces the outdoors of life who goes there come thou with us dig thou with us root or die every vagrant joy maker and world builder the modern era boasts genius lover singer artist has had to have his struggle with the hod carriers of culture and if a lover of books has not enough love in him to refuse to be coerced into joining the huge intimidator the aggregation of the reading labor unions of the world which rules the world there is little hope for him all true books draw quietly away from him their spirit is a spirit he cannot know it would be hard to find a more significant fact with regard to the ruling culture of modern life than the almost total displacement of temperament in it its blank staring and expressiveness we have lived our lives so long under the situation of the cultured man must theory of education the industry of being well informed has gained such headway with us that out of all of the crowds of the civilized we prefer to live with today one must go very far to find a cultivated man who has not violated himself in his knowledge who has not given up his last chance at distinction his last chance to have his knowledge fit him closely and express him and belong to him the time was when knowledge was made to fit people like their clothes but now that we have come to the point where we pride ourselves on educating people in rows and civilizing them in the bulk if a man has the privilege of being born by himself of beginning his life by himself it is as much as he can expect says the typical board of education the result is so far as his being educated as concerned the average man looks back to his first birthday as his last chance of being treated as God made him a special creation by himself the almighty may deal with a man when he makes him as a special creation by himself he may manage to do it afterward we cannot says the board succinctly drawing its salary it increases the tax rate the problem is dealt with simply enough there is just so much cloth to be had and just so many young and two-legged persons be covered with it and that is the end of it the growing child walks down the years turns every corner of life with vistas of ready main clothing hanging before him closing behind him unless he shall fit himself to these clothes he is given to understand down the pitying staring world he shall go naked all his days like a dream in the night it is a general principle that a nation's life can be said to be truly a civilized life in proportion as it is expressive and in proportion as all the persons in it in the things they know and in the things they do are engaged in expressing what they are a generation may be said to stand forth in history to be a great and memorable generation in art and letters in material and spiritual creation in proportion as the knowledge of that generation was fitted to the people who wore it and the things they were doing in it and the things they were born to do if it were not contradicted by almost every attribute of what is being called an age of special and general culture it would seem to be the first axiom of all culture that knowledge can only be made to be true knowledge by being made to fit people and to express them as their clothes fit them and express them but we do not want knowledge in our civilization to fit people as their clothes fit them we do not even want their clothes to fit them the people themselves do not want it modern life is an elaborate and organized endeavor on the part of almost every person in it to escape from being fitted either in knowledge or in anything else the first symptom of civilization of the fact that a man is becoming civilized is that he wishes to appear to belong where he does not it is looked upon as the spirit of the age he wishes to be learned that no one may find out how little he knows he wishes to be religious that no one may know how wicked he is he wishes to be respectable that no one may know that he does not respect himself the result mocks at us from every corner in life society is a struggle to get into the wrong clothes culture is a struggle to learn the things that belong to someone else black molly who's the cook next door presented her betrothed last week a stable hand on the farm with an eight dollar manicure set she did not mean to sum up the condition of culture in the united states and this simple and tender act but she did michael ohennessy who lives under the hill sums it up also he has just bought a broom in which he and mrs. oh can be seen almost any pleasant sunday driving in the park it is not to be denied that michael ohennessy sitting in his broom is a genuinely happy looking object but it is not the broom itself that michael enjoys is the fact that he's bought the broom and that the broom belongs to someone else mrs. john brown smith who presides at our tubs from week to week and who comes to us in a brilliant silk waist removed for business has just bought a piano to play hold the fort on with one finger when the neighbors are passing by a fact which is not without national significance which sheds light upon schools and upon college catalogs and learning shows and upon educational conditions through the whole united states it would be a great pity if a man could not know the things that have always belonged before to other men to know and it is the essence of culture that he should but his appearing to know things that belong to someone else his desire to appear to know them heaps up darkness the more things there are a man knows without knowing the inside of them the spirit of them the more of an ignoramus he is it is not enough to say that the learned man learned in this way is merely ignorant his ignorance is placed where it counts the most generally at the fountain heads of society and he radiates ignorance there seem to be three objections to the dead level of intelligence getting people at all hazards alive or dead to know certain things first the things that a person who learns in this way appears to know are blighted by his appearing to know them second he keeps other people who might know them from wanting to third he poisons his own life by appearing to know by even desiring to appear to know what is not in him to know he takes away the last hope he can ever have of really knowing the thing he appears to know and unless he is careful the last hope he can ever have of really knowing anything he destroys the thing a man does it is not the least pathetic phase of the great industry of being well informed that thousands of men and women may be seen on every hand giving up their lives that they may appear to live and giving up knowledge that they may appear to know taking pains for vacuums success in appearing to know is success in locking one's self outside of knowledge and all that can be said of the most learned man that lives if he is learned in this way is that he knows more things that he does not know about more things than any man in the world he runs the gamut of ignorance in the meantime as long as the industry of being well informed is the main ideal of living in the world as long as every man's life chasing the shadow of some other man's life goes hurrying by grasping at ignorance there is nothing we can do most of us as educators but to rescue a youth now and then from the rush and wait results both good and evil to work themselves out those of us who respect every man's life and delight in it and in the dignity of the things that belong to it would like to do many things we should be particularly glad to join hands in the practical things that are being hurried into the hurry around us but they do not seem to us practical the only practical thing we know of that can be done with a man who does not respect himself is to get him it is true no doubt that we cannot respect another man's life for him but we are profoundly convinced that we cannot do anything more practical for such a man's life than respecting it until he respects it himself and we are convinced also that until he does respect it himself respecting it for him is the only thing that anyone else can do the beginning and the end of all action for him and of all knowledge democracy today in education as in everything else is facing its supreme opportunity going about in the world respecting men until they respect themselves is almost the only practical way there is of serving them we find it necessary to believe that any man in this present day who shall be inspired to respect his life who shall refuse to take himself the things that do not belong to his life who shall break with the appearance of things who shall rejoice in the things that are really real to him there shall be no withstanding him the strength of the universe shall be with him he shall be glorious in it the man who lives down through the knowledge that he has has all the secret of all knowledge that he does not have the spirit that all truth are known with becomes his spirit the essential mastery over all real things and over all real men is his possession forever when this vital and delighted knowledge knowledge that is based on facts one's own self-respecting experience with facts shall begin again to be the habit of the educated life the days of the dead level of intelligence shall be numbered men are going to be the embodiment of the truths they know some time as they have been in the past when the world is filled once more with men who know what they know learning will cease to be a theory and children will acquire truths as helplessly and inescapably as they acquire parents truths will be learned through the types of men the truths have made a man was meant to learn truths by gazing up and down lives out of his own life when these principles are brought home to educators when they are practiced in some degree by the people instead of merely as they have always been before by the leaders of the people the world of knowledge shall be a new world a knowledge shall be human incarnate expressive artistic whole systems of knowledge shall come to us by seeing one another's faces on the street and of section ten of book one interferences with the reading habit civilization the dead level of intelligence section four of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this LibriVox recording is in the public domain book one interferences with the reading habit civilization chapter 11 the art of reading as one likes most of us are apt to discover by the time we are too old to get over it that we are born with a natural gift for being interested in ourselves we realize in a general way that our lives are not very important that they are being lived on a comparatively obscure but comfortable little planet on a side street in space but no matter how much we study astronomy nor how fully we are made to feel how many other worlds there are for people to live on and how many other people have lived on this one we are still interested in ourselves the fact that the universe is very large is neither here nor there to us in a certain sense it is a mere matter of size a man has to live on it if he had to live on all of it it would be different it naturally comes to pass that when a human being once discovers that he is born in a universe like this his first business in it is to find out the relation of the nearest most sympathetic part of it to himself after the usual first successful experiment a child makes and making connection with the universe the next thing he learns is how much of the universe there is that is not good to eat he does not quite understand it at first the unswallableness of things he soon comes to the conclusion that although it is worthwhile as a general principle in dealing with a universe to try to make the connection as a rule with one's mouth it cannot be expected to succeed except part of the time he looks for another connection he learns that some things in this world are merely made to feel and drop on the floor he discovers each of his senses by trying some other sense work if his mouth waters for the moon and he tries to smack his lips on a lullaby who shall smile at him poor little fellow making his sturdy lunges at this huge impenetrable world he is making his connection and getting his hold on his world of color and sense and sound with infinitely more truth and patience and precision and delight than nine out of ten of his elders are doing or have ever been able to do in the world of books the books that were written to be breathed gravely chewed upon by the literary infants of this modern day who can number them books that were made to live in vast open clearings in the thicket of life chapters like Tenths to dwell in under the wide heaven visited like railway stations by excursion trains of readers books that were made to look down from serene mountain heights criticized because factories are not founded on them in every reading room hundreds of people who has not seen them looking up inspirations and encyclopedias pouring over poems for facts looking in the clouds for seeds digging in the ground for sunsets and everywhere through all the world the whole huddling, crowding mob of those who read hastening on its endless paper paved streets from the pyramids of Egypt and the gates of Greece to pattern us to row in the old corner bookstore nearly all of them trying to make the connections with the right things or the right connections with things they have no connection with and only now and then a straggler lagging behind perhaps at some leftover bookstore who truly knows how to read or some beautiful overgrown child let loose in a library making connections for himself who knows the uttermost joy of a book in seeking for a fundamental principle to proceed upon in the reading of books to assert that the printed universe is governed by the same laws as the real one if a child is to have his senses about him his five reading senses he must learn them in exactly the way he learns his five living senses the most significant fact about the way a child learns the five senses he has to live with is that no one can teach them to him we do not even try to there are still, thanks to a most five things left in the poor experimented on battered, modern child that a board of education cannot get at for the first few months of his life at least it is generally conceded the modern infant has his education that is his making connection with things entirely in his own hands that he learns more of these first few months of his life when his education is in his own hands that he learns in all the later days when he is surrounded by those who hope they are teaching him something it may not be fair to say but while it cannot be said that he learns more perhaps, what he does learn he learns better and more scientifically than he is ever allowed to learn with ordinary parents and ordinary teachers and textbooks in the years that come afterward with most of us this first year or so we are obliged to confess was the chance of our lives some of us have lived long enough to suspect that if we have ever really learned anything at all we must have learned it then the whole problem of bringing to pass in others and of maintaining in ourselves a vital and beautiful relation to the world of books turns entirely upon such success as we may have in calling back or keeping up in our attitude toward books the attitude of the newborn child when he wakes in the sunshine of the earth and little by little on the edge of the infinite groping and slow begins to make his connections with the universe it cannot be over emphasized that this newborn child makes these connections for himself that the entire value of having these connections made is in the fact that he makes them for himself as between the books in a library that ought to be read and a new life standing in it that ought to read them the sacred thing is not the books the child ought to read the sacred thing is the way the child feels about the books and unless the new life like the needle of a magnet trembling there under the whole wide heaven of them all is allowed to turn and poise itself by laws of attraction and repulsion for ever left out of our hands the magnet is ruined it has made a dead thing it makes no difference how many similar books may be placed within range of the dead thing afterward nor how many good reasons there may be for the dead things being attracted to them the poise of the magnet toward a book which is the sole secret of any power that a book can have is trained and disciplined out of it the poise of the magnet the magnet's poising itself is inspiration and inspiration is what a book is for if John Milton had had any idea when he wrote the little book called Paradise Lost that it was going to be used mostly during the 19th century to batter children's minds with it is doubtful if he would ever have had the heart to write it it does not damage a book very much to let it lie on a wooden shelf a little longer than it ought to but to come crashing down into the exquisite filaments of a human brain with it to use it to keep a brain from continuing to be a brain that is an organ with all its reading senses acting and reacting warm and living in it it is a very serious matter it always ends in the same way this modern brutality with books even Bibles cannot stand it human nature stands at least of all that books of all things in this world made to open minds instincts with should be so generally used to shut them up with is one of the saddest signs we have of the caricature of culture that is having its way in our modern world it is getting so that the only way the average dined at educated modern boy shut in with masterpieces can really get to read is in some still overlooked moment when people are too tired of him to do him good then softly, perhaps guiltily left all by himself with a book he stumbles all of a sudden on his soul steals out and loves something it may not be the best but listening to the singing of the crickets while then seeming to listen to the music of the spheres it leads to the music of the spheres all agencies, persons, institutions or customs that interfere with this sensitive self-discovering moment when a human spirit makes its connection in life with its ideal that interfere with its being a genuine instinctive free and beautiful connection living and growing daily of itself all influences that tend to make a formal connection or a merely decorous or borrowed one whether they act in the name of culture or religion or the state are the profoundest, most subtle and most unconquerable enemies of culture in the world it is not necessary to contend for the doctrine of reading as one likes using the word likes in the sense of direction and temperament in its larger and more permanent sense it is but necessary to call attention to the fact that the universe of books is such a very large and various universe a universe in which so much that one likes can be brought to bear at any given point that reading as one likes is almost always safe in it there is always more of what one likes than what one can possibly read it is impossible to like any one thing deeply without discovering a hundred other things to like with it one is infallibly led out if one touches the universe at one point all the rest of the universe flocks to it it is the way a universe is made almost anything can be accomplished with a child who has a habit of being eager with books who respects them enough and who respects himself enough to leave books alone when he cannot be eager with them eagerness in reading counts as much as it does in living a live reader who reads the wrong books is more promising than a dead one who reads the right ones being alive is the point anything can be done with life it is the seed of infinity while much might be said for the topical or purely scientific method in learning how to read it certainly is not claiming too much for the human artistic or personal point of view in reading that it comes first in the order of time in a developing life and first in the order of strategic importance topical or scientific reading cannot be fruitful it cannot even be scientific in the larger sense except as in its own time and in its own way it selects itself in due time in a boy's life buds out and is allowed to branch out from his own interpersonal reading as the first and most important and most far reaching of the arts of reading is the art of reading as one likes the principal's inspirations and difficulties of reading as one likes are the first to be considered in the following chapters the fact that the art of reading as one likes is the most difficult perhaps the most impossible of all the arts in modern times constitutes one of those serial comic problems of civilization a problem which civilization itself with all its swagger of science its literary braggadocio its library cure with all its board schools commissioners of education and specialists and bishops and newsboys all hard at work upon it is only beginning to realize and of section four section five of the lost art of reading by Gerald Stanley Lee this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org book one interferences with the reading habit the second interference the disgrace of the imagination on wondering why one was born the real trouble with most of the attempts that teachers and parents make to teach children a vital relation to books is that they do not believe in the books and that they do not believe in the children it is almost impossible to find a child who in one direction or another the first few years of life is not creative it is almost impossible to find a parent or a teacher who does not discourage this creativeness the discouragement begins in a small way at first in the average family but as the more creative a child becomes the more inconvenient he is as a general rule every time a boy is caught being creative something has to be done to him about it it is a part of the nature of creativeness it involves being creative a large part of the time in the wrong direction half proud and half stupefied parents failing to see that the mischief in a boy is the entire basis of his education the mainspring of his life not being able to break the mainspring themselves frequently hire teachers to help them the teacher who can break a mainspring first and keep it from getting mended is often the most esteemed those who have broken the most secure results the spectacle of the mechanical barren conventional society so common in the present day to all who love their kind is a sign there is no withstanding it is a spectacle we can only stand and watch some of us the huge dreary kinetoscope of it grinding its cogs and wheels and swinging its weary faces past our eyes the most common sight in it and the one that hurts the hardest is the boy who could be made into a man out of the parts of him that his parents and teachers are trying to throw away the faults of the average child as things are going just now would be the making of him if he could be placed in seeing hands it may not be possible to educate a boy by using what has been left out of him but it is more than possible to begin his education by using what ought to have been left out of him so long as parents and teachers are either too dull or too busy to experiment with mischief to be willing to pay for a child's originality what originality costs only the most hopeless children can be expected to amount to anything if we fail to see that originality is worth paying for that the risk involved in a child's not being creative is infinitely more serious than the risk involved in his being creative in the wrong direction there is little either for us or for our children to hope for as the years go on except to grow duller together we do not like this growing duller together very well perhaps but we have the feeling at least that we have been educated and when our children become at last as little interested in the workings of their minds as parents and teachers are in theirs we have the feeling that they also have been educated and willing to admit in a somewhat useless kindly generalizing fashion that vital and beautiful children delight in things in proportion as they discover them or are allowed to make them up but we do not propose in the meantime to have our own children any more vital and beautiful than we can help in four or five years they discover that a home is a place where the more one thinks of things the more unhappy he is in four or five years the more they learn that a school is a place where children are expected not to use their brains while they are being cultivated as long as he has at his mother's breast the typical American child finds that he is admired for thinking of things when he runs around the house he finds gradually that he is admired very much less for thinking of things at school he is disciplined for it in a library if he has an uncommonly active mind and takes the liberty of being as alive there as he is outdoors if he roams through the books vaults over their fences climbs up their mountains and eats of their fruit and dreams by their streams or is caught camping out in their woods he is made an example of he is treated as a tramp and an idler and if he cannot be held down with a dictionary he is looked upon as not worth educating if his parents decide he shall be educated anyway dead or alive if he is being alive the more he is educated the more he wonders why he was born and the more his teachers from behind their dictionaries and the other boys from underneath their dictionaries wonder why he was born while it may be a general principle that the longer a boy wonders why he was born in conditions like these and the longer his teachers and parents wonder the more there is of him it may be observed that a general principle is not of very much comfort to the boy the process of wondering is going on there seems to be no escape from the process and if while he is being educated he is not allowed to use himself he can hardly be blamed for spending a good deal of his time in wondering why he is not someone else in a half seeing half blinded fashion he struggles on if he is obstinate enough he manages to struggle through with his eyes shut sometimes he belongs to a higher kind and opens his eyes and struggles with the average boy the struggle with the school and the church is less vigorous than the struggle at home it is more hopeless a mother is a comparatively simple affair one can either manage a mother or be managed it is merely a matter of time it is soon settled there is something there she is not boundless intangible the school and the church are different what the first fresh breaths of the world tingling in him the youth stands before them they are entirely new to him they are huge immeasurable unaccountable they loom over him a part of the structure of the universe itself a mother can meet one in a door the problem is concentrated the church stretches beyond the sunrise the school is part of the horizon of the earth and what after all is his own life and who is he that he should take account of it out of space out of time out of history they come to him the church and the school they are the assembling of all mankind around his soul each with its cone of ether its desire to control the breath of his life its determination to do his breathing for him to push the cone down over him looms above him and above all in sight before he speaks before he is able to speak it is soon over he lies passive and insensible at last as convenient as though he were dead and the church and the school operate upon him they remove as many of his natural organs as they can put in presbyterian ones perhaps or school board ones instead those that cannot be removed are numbed when the time is fulfilled and the youth is cured of enough life at last to like living with the dead and when it is thought he is enough like everyone else to he is given his degree and sewed up after the sewing up his history is better imagined than described not being interested to himself he is not apt to be very interesting to anyone else and because of his lack of interest in himself he is called the average man the main distinction of every greater or more extraordinary book is that it has been written by an extraordinary man a natural or wild man a man of genius who has never been operated on the main distinction of the man of talent is that he has somehow managed to escape a complete operation it is a matter of common observation in reading biography that in proportion as men have had lasting power in the world there has been something irregular in their education these irregularities whether they happen to be due to overwhelming circumstance or to overwhelming temperament seem to sum themselves up in one fundamental and comprehensive irregularity that penetrates them all namely every powerful mind in proportion to its power either in school or out of it or in spite of it has educated itself the ability that many men have used to avoid being educated is exactly the same ability they have used afterward to move the world with in proportion as they have moved the world they are found to have kept the lead in their education from their earliest years to have had a habit of initiative as well as hospitality to have maintained a creative selective active attitude toward all persons and toward all books that have been brought within range of their lives the top of the bureau principle the experience of being robbed of a story we are about to read by the good friend who cannot help telling how it comes out is an occasional experience in the lives of older people but it sums up the main sensation of life in the career of a child the whole existence of a boy may be said to be a daily almost hourly struggle to escape from being told things it has been found that the best way to emphasize a fact in the mind of a bright boy is to discover some way of not saying anything about it and this is not because human nature but because facts have been intended from the beginning of the world to speak for themselves and to speak better than anyone can speak for them when a fact speaks God speaks considering the way that most persons who are talking about the truth see fit to rush in and interrupt him the wonder is not that children grow less and less interested in truth as they grow older but that they are interested in truth at all human lies about the truth the real trouble with most men and women as parents is that they have had to begin life with parents of their own when the child's first memory of God is a father or mother interrupting him he is apt to be under the impression when he grows up that God can only be introduced to his own children by never being allowed to get a word in if we as much as see a fact coming toward a child most of us we either run out where the child is and bring him into the house and cry over him or we rush to his side and look anxious and stand in front of the fact and talk to him about it and yet it is doubtful if there has ever been a boy as yet worth mentioning who did not wish we would stand a little more at one side let him have it out with things he is very wary if he really amounts to anything of having everything about him prepared for him there has never been a live boy who would not throw a store plaything away in two or three hours for a comparatively imperfect plaything he had made himself he is equally indifferent to a store fact and a boy who does not see through a store God or a store book or a store education sooner than ninety nine parents out of a hundred and sooner than most synods is not worth bringing up no just or comprehensive principle can be found to govern the reading of books that not be made to apply by one who really believes it though in varying degrees to the genius and to the adult it is a matter of history that a boy of fine creative powers can only be taught a true relation to books through an appeal to his own discoveries but what is being especially contended for and what most needs to be emphasized in current education is the fact that the boy of ordinary creative powers can only be taught to read in the way by a slower broader and more patient appeal to his own discoveries the boy of no creative powers whatever if he is ever born should not be taught to read at all creation is the essence of knowing and teaching him to read merely teaches him more ways of not knowing it gives him a wider range of places to be a nobody in takes away his last opportunity for thinking of anything that is getting the meaning of anything for himself if a man's heart does not beat for him why substitute a hot water bottle the less a mind is able to do the less it can afford to have anything done for it it will be a great day for education when we all have learned that the genius and the adult can only be educated at different rates of speed in exactly the same way the trouble with our education now is that many of us do not see that a boy who has been presented with an imitation brain is a deal worse off than a boy who in spite of his teachers has managed to save his real one and has not used it yet it is dangerous to give a program for a principal to those who do not believe in the principal and who do not believe in it instinctively but if a program were to be given it would be something like this it would assume that the best way to do with an uncreative mind is to put the owner of it where his mind will be obliged to create first, decide what the owner of the mind most wants in the world second, put this thing whatever it may be where the owner of the mind cannot get it unless he uses his mind take pains to put it where he can get it if he does use his mind third, lure him on it is education if this principal is properly applied to books there is not a human being living on the earth who will not find himself capable of reading books as far as he goes with his whole mind and his whole body he will read a printed pages eagerly as he lives and he will read it in exactly the same way that he lives with his imagination a boy lives with his imagination every hour of his life except in school the moment he discovers or is allowed to discover that reading a book is very much alike that they are both parts of the same act and that they are both properly done in the same way he will drink up knowledge as Job did scorning like water but it is objected that many children are entirely imitative and that the imagination cannot be appealed to with them and that they cut themselves off from creativeness at every point while it is inevitable in the nature of things that many children are largely imitative there is not a child that does not do some of his imitating in a creative way give the hint to his teachers even in his imitations of where his creativeness would come if it were allowed to his very blunders in imitating point to desires that would make him creative of themselves if followed up some children have many desires in behalf of which they become creative others are creative only in behalf of a few but there is always a single desire in a child's nature through which his creativeness can be called out a boy learns to live to command his body through the desires which make him creative with it hunger and movement and sleep desires for the very vegetables are stirred with and the boy who does not find himself responding to them who can help responding to them does not exist in times when a boy has no desire to fill himself with food and when he has no desire to think but he has kept hungry if he is soon found doing both thinking things into his stomach a stomach in the average boy will all but take the part of a brain itself for the time being to avoid being empty if a human being is alive at all there is always at least one desire he can be educated with prodded into creativeness turns the habit and the pleasure of it the best qualification for a nurse for a child whose creativeness turns on his stomach is a natural gift for keeping food on the tops of bureaus and shelves just out of reach the best qualification for a teacher is infinite contrivance in high bureaus the applying of the top of the high bureau to all knowledge and to all books is what true education is for it is generally considered a dangerous thing to do to turn a child loose in a library it might fairly be called a dangerous thing to do if it were not much more dangerous not to the same forces that brought themselves into the books when they were being made can be trusted to gather and play across them on the shelves these forces are the self propelling and self healing forces of the creative mood the creative mood protects the books and it protects all who come near the books it protects from the inside it toughens and makes supple parents who cannot trust a boy to face the weather in a library should never let him outdoors trusting a boy to the weather in a library may have its momentary embarrassments but it is immeasurably the shortest and most natural way to bring him into a vital connection with books the first condition of a vital connection with books is that he shall make the connection for himself the relation will be vital in proportion as he makes it himself the fact that he will begin to use his five reading senses by trying to connect in the wrong way or by connecting with the wrong books or parts of books is a reason not for action on the part of parents and teachers but for inspired waiting as a vital relation to books is the most immeasurable outfit for living and the most perfect protection against the dangers of life a boy can have the one point to be born in mind is not the book but the boy the instinct of curiosity in the boy a boy who has all his good discoveries in books made for him, spoiled for him if he has any good material in him will proceed to make bad ones the vices would be nearly as safe from interference as the virtues if they were faithfully cultivated in Sunday schools or by average teachers in day schools sin itself is uninteresting when one knows all about it the interest of the average young man in many a more important sin today is only kept up by the fact that no one stands by with a book teaching him how to do it whatever the expression original sin may have meant in the first place it means now that we are full of original sin because we are not given a chance to be original in anything else a virtue may be defined as an act so good that a religiously trained youth cannot possibly learn anything or about it a classic is a pleasure hurried into a responsibility a book read by every man before he has anything to read it with a classical author is a man who if he could look ahead could see the generation standing in rows to read his book towing the line to love it would not read it himself any training in the use of books that does not base its whole method of rousing the instinct of curiosity a wholesale slaughter not only of the minds that might live in the books but of the books themselves to ignore the central curiosity of a child's life his natural power of self-discovery in books is to dispense with the force of gravity in books instead of taking advantage of it