The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

He intimated that the trouble with me was that I wanted both. I admitted that I had cravings for both. I said I thought I’d be a little easier to get along with, if they were more satisfied.

He intimated that I was easier to get along with than I ought to be, or than I seemed to think I was. He did not put it in so many words. The P. G. S. of M. never says anything that can be got hold of and answered. Finally I determined to answer him whether he had said anything or not.

“Well,” I said, “I may feel superior to other people sometimes. I may even feel superior to myself, but I haven’t got to the point where I feel superior to a newspaper—to a whole world at once. I don’t try to read it in ten minutes. I don’t try to make a whole day of a whole world, a foot-note to my oatmeal mush! I don’t treat the whole human race, trooping past my breakfast, as a parenthesis in my own mind. I don’t try to read a great, serious, boundless thing like a daily newspaper, unfolded out of starlight, gleaner of a thousand sunsets around a world, and talk at the same time. I don’t say, ‘There’s nothing in it,’ interrupt a planet to chew my food, throw a planet on the floor and look for my hat…. Nations lunging through space to say good-morning to me, continents flashed around my thoughts, seas for the boundaries of my day’s delight … the great God shining over all! And may He preserve me from ever reading a newspaper in ten minutes!”

I have spent as much time as any one, I think, in my day, first and last, in feeling superior to newspapers. I can remember when I used to enjoy it very much—the feeling, I mean. I have spent whole half-days at it, going up and down columns, thinking they were not good enough for me.

Now when I take up a morning paper, half-dread, half-delight, I take it up softly. My whole being trembles in the balance before it. The whole procession of my soul, shabby, loveless, provincial, tawdry, is passed in review before it. It is the grandstand of the world. The vast and awful Roll-Call of the things I ought to be—the things I ought to love—in the great world voice sweeps over me. It reaches its way through all my thoughts, through the minutes of my days. “Where is thy soul? Oh, where is thy soul?” the morning paper, up and down its columns, calls to me. There are days that I ache with the echo of it. There are days when I dare not read it until the night. Then the voice that is in it grows gentle with the darkness, it may be, and is stilled with sleep.

IV
On Reading a Newspaper in Ten Minutes

I am not saying it does not take a very intelligent man to read a newspaper in ten minutes—squeeze a planet at breakfast and drop it. I think it does. But I am inclined to think that the intelligent man who reads a newspaper in ten minutes is exactly the same kind of intelligent man who could spend a week reading it if he wanted to, and not waste a minute. And he might want to. He simply reads a newspaper as he likes. He is not confined to one way. He does not read it in ten minutes because he has a mere ten-minute mind, but because he merely has the ten minutes. Rapid reading and slow reading are both based, with such a man, on appreciation of the paper—and not upon a narrow, literary, Boston-Public-Library feeling of being superior to it.

The value of reading-matter, like other matter, depends on what a man does with it. All that one needs in order not to waste time in general reading is a large, complete set of principles to stow things away in. Nothing really needs to be wasted. If one knows where everything belongs in one’s mind—or tries to,—if one takes the trouble to put it there, reading a newspaper is one of the most colossal, tremendous, and boundless acts that can be performed by any one in the whole course of a human life.

If there’s any place where a man needs to have all his wits about him, to put things into,—if there’s any place where the next three inches can demand as much of a man as a newspaper, where is it? The moment he opens it he lays his soul open and exposes himself to all sides of the world in a second,—to several thousand years of a world at once.