Crying, ‘Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!’”
I
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It is good to rise early in the morning, when the world is still respectable and nobody has used it yet, and sit and look at it, try to realise it. One sees things very differently. It is a kind of yawn of all being. One feels one’s soul lying out, all relaxed, on it, and resting on real things. It stretches itself on the bare bones of the earth and knows. On a hundred silent hills it lies and suns itself.
And as I lay in the morning, soul and body reaching out to the real things and resting on them, I thought I heard One Part of me, down underneath, half in the light and half in the dark, laughing softly at the Other. “What is this book of yours?” it said coldly, “with its proffered scheme of education, its millenniums and things? What do you think this theory, this heaven-spanning theory of reading of yours, really is, which you have held up objectively, almost authoritatively, to be looked at as truth? Do you think it is anything after all but a kind of pallid, unreal, water-colour exhibition, a row of blurs of faintly coloured portraits of yourself, spread on space? Do you not see how unfair it is—this spinning out of one’s own little dark, tired inside, a theory for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling with one temperament a star?”
Then I made myself sit down and compose what I feared would be a strictly honest title-page for this book. Instead of:
THE LOST ART OF READING
A STUDY
OF
EDUCATION
BY
ETC.
I wrote it: