The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

In the meantime I notice one thing about the philosophic mind. It not only does not do things. It cannot even be talked with. It is not interested in things in particular. There is something garrulously, pedagogically unreal about it,—at least there is about Meakins’s. You cannot so much as mention a real or particular thing to Meakins but he brings out a row of fifteen or twenty principles that go with it, which his mind has peeked around and found behind it. By the time he has floated out about fifteen of them—of these principles back of a thing—you begin to wonder if the thing was there for the principles to be back of. You hope it wasn’t.

As fond as I am of him, I cannot get at him nowadays in a conversation. He is always just around back of something. He is a ghost. I come home praying Heaven, every time I see him, not to let me evaporate. He talks about the future of humanity by the week, but I find he doesn’t notice humanity in particular. You cannot interest him in talking to him about himself, or even in letting him do his own talking about himself. He is a mere detail to himself. You are another detail. What you are and what he is are both mere footnotes to a philosophy. All history is a footnote to it—or at best a marginal illustration. There is no such thing as communing with Meakins unless you use (as I do) a torpedo or battering-ram as a starter. If you let him have his way he sits in his chair and in his deep, beautiful voice addresses a row of remarks to The Future in General—the only thing big enough or worth while to talk to. He sits perfectly motionless (except the whites of his eyes) and talks deeply and tenderly and instructively to the Next Few Hundred Years—to posterity, to babes not yet in their mothers’ wombs, while his dearest friends sit by.

If ever there was a man who could take a whole roomful of warm, vital people, sitting right next to him, pulsing and glowing in their joys and their sins, and with one single heroic motion of an imperious hand drop them softly and lovingly over into Fatuity and Oblivion in five minutes and leave them out of the world before their own eyes, it is Theophilus Meakins. I try sometimes—but I cannot really do it.

He does not really commune with things or with persons at all. He gets what he wants out of them. You feel him putting people, when he meets them, through his philosophy. He makes them over while they wait, into extracts. A man may keep on afterward living and growing, throbbing and being, but he does not exist to Meakins except in his bottle. A man cannot help feeling with Meakins afterward the way milk feels probably, if it could only express it, when it’s been put through one of these separators, had the cream taken off of it. Half the world is skim-milk to him. But what does it matter to Meakins? He has them in his philosophy. He does the same way with things as with people. He puts in all nature as a parenthesis, and a rather condescending, explanatory one at that, a symbol, a kind of beckoning, an index-finger to God. He never notices a tree for itself. A great elm would have to call out to him, fairly shout at him, right under its arms: “Oh, Theophilus Meakins, author of The Habit of Eternity, author of The Evolution of the Ego look at ME, I also am alive, even as thou art. Canst thou not stop one moment and be glad with me? Have I not a thousand leaves glistening and glorying in the great sun? Have I not a million roots feeling for the stored-up light in the ground, reaching up God to me out of the dark? Have I not”—“It is one of the principles of the flux of society,” breaks in Theophilus Meakins, “as illustrated in all the processes of the natural world—the sap of this tree,” said he, “for instance,” brushing the elm-tree off into space, “that the future of mankind depends and always must depend upon——”

“The flux of society be ——,” said I in holy wrath. I stopped him suddenly, the elm-tree still holding its great arms above us. “Do you suppose that God,” I said, “is in any such small business as to make an elm-tree like this—like THIS (look at it, man!), and put it on the earth, have it waving around on it, just to illustrate one of your sermons? Now, my dear fellow, I’m not going to have you lounging around in your mind with an elm-tree like this any longer. I want you to come right over to it,” said I, taking hold of him, “and sit down on one of its roots, and lean up against its trunk and learn something, live with it a minute—get blessed by it. The flux of society can wait,” I said.

Meakins is always tractable enough, when shouted at, or pounded on a little. We sat down under the tree for quite a while, perfectly still. I can’t say what it did for Meakins. But it helped me—just barely leaning against the trunk of it helped me, under the circumstances, a great deal.

No one will believe it, I suppose, but we hadn’t gotten any more than fifteen feet away from the shadow of that tree when “The principles of the flux of society,” said he, “demand——”

“Now, my dear fellow,” I said, “there are a lot more elm-trees we really ought to take in, on this walk. We——”

“I SAY!” said Meakins, his great voice roaring on my little polite, opposing sentence like surf over a pebble, “that the principles——”

Then I grew wroth. I always do when Meakins treats what I say just as a pebble to get more roar out of, on the great bleak shore of his thoughts. “No one says anything!” I cried; “if any one says anything—if you say another word, my dear fellow, on this walk, I will sing Old Hundred as loud as I can all the way home.”