The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

A book is a comparatively safe, unintelligent place for a mind to be in. There are at least four walls to it—a few scantlings over one, protecting one from all space. A man has at least some remotest idea of where he is, of what may drop on him, in a book. It may tax his capacity of stowing things away. But he always has notice—almost always. It sees that he has time and room. It has more conveniences for fixing things. The author is always there besides, a kind of valet to anybody, to help people along pleasantly, to anticipate their wants. It’s what an author is for. One expects it.

But a man finds it is different in a morning paper, rolled out of dreams and sleep into it,—empty, helpless before a day, all the telegraph machines of the world thumping all the night, clicked into one’s thoughts before one thinks—no man really has room in him to read a morning paper. No man’s soul is athletic or swift enough…. Nations in a sentence. … Thousands of years in a minute, philosophies, religions, legislatures, paleozoics, church socials, side by side; stars and gossip, fools, heroes, comets—infinity on parade, and over the precipice of the next paragraph, head-long—who knows what!

Reading a morning paper is one of the supreme acts of presence of mind in a human life.

V
General Information

“But what is going to become of us?” some one says, “if a man has to go through ‘the supreme act of presence of mind in a whole human life,’ every morning—and every morning before he goes to business? It takes as much presence of mind as most men have, mornings, barely to get up.”

Well, of course, I admit, if a man’s going to read a newspaper to toe the line of all his convictions; if he insists on taking the newspaper as a kind of this-morning’s junction of all knowledge, he will have to expect to be a rather anxious person. One could hardly get one paper really read through in this way in one’s whole life. If a man is always going to read the news of the globe in such a serious, sensitive, suggestive, improving, Atlas-like fashion, it would be better he had never learned to read at all. At all events, if it’s a plain question between a man’s devouring his paper or letting his paper devour him, of course the only way to do is to begin the day by reading something else, or by reading it in ten minutes and forgetting it in ten more. One would certainly rather be headlong—a mere heedless, superficial globe-trotter with one’s mind, than not to have any mind—to be wiped out at one’s breakfast table, to be soaked up into infinity every morning, to be drawn off, evaporated into all knowledge, to begin one’s day scattered around the edges of all the world. One would do almost anything to avoid this. And it is what always happens if one reads for principles pell-mell.

All that I am claiming for reading for principles is, that if one reads for principles, one really cannot miss it in reading. There is always something there, and a man who treats a newspaper as if it were not good enough for him falls short of himself.

The same is true of desultory reading so-called, of the habit of general information, and of the habit of going about noticing things—noticing things over one’s shoulder.

I am inclined to think that desultory reading is as good if not better for a man than any other reading he can do, if he organises it—has habitual principles and swift channels of thought to pour it into. I do not think it is at all unlikely from such peeps as we common mortals get into the minds of men of genius, that their desultory reading (in the fine strenuous sense) has been the making of them. The intensely suggestive habit of thought, the prehensile power in a mind, the power of grasping wide-apart facts and impressions, of putting them into prompt handfuls, where anything can be done with them that one likes, could not possibly be cultivated to better advantage than by the practice of masterful and regular desultory reading.

Certainly the one compelling trait in a work of genius, whether in music, painting, or literature, the trait of untraceableness, the semi-miraculous look, the feeling things give us sometimes, in a great work of art, of being at once impossible together, and inevitable together,—has its most natural background in what would seem at first probably, to most minds, incidental or accidental habits of observation.