What seems to be necessary is to strike a balance, in one’s reading.
It’s all well enough; indeed, there’s nothing better than having one’s originality ridden down. One wants it ridden down half the time. The trouble comes in making provision for catching up, for getting one’s breath after it. I have found, for instance, that it has become absolutely necessary so far as I am concerned, if I am to keep my little mind’s start in the world, to begin the day by not reading the newspaper in the morning. Unless I can get headway—some thought or act or cry or joy of my own—something that is definitely in my own direction first, there seems to be no hope for me all day long. Most people, I know, would not agree to this. They like to take a swig of all-space, a glance at everybody while the world goes round, before they settle down to their own little motor on it. They like to feel that the world is all right before they go ahead. So would I, but I have tried it again—and again. The world is too much for me in the morning. My own little motor comes to a complete stop. I simply want to watch the Big One going round and round. I cannot seem to stop somehow—begin puttering once more with my Little One. If I begin at all, I have to begin at once. In my heart I feel the Big One over me all the while, circling over me, blessing me. But I keep from noticing. I know no other way, and drive on. The world is getting to be—has to be—to me a purely afternoon or evening affair. I have a world of my own for morning use. I hold to it, one way or the other, with a cheerful smile or like grim death, until the clock says twelve and the sun turns the corner, and the book drops. It does not seem to make very much difference what kind of a world I am in, or what is going on in it, so that it is all my own, and the only way I know to do, is to say or read or write or use the things first in it which make it my own the most. The one thing I want in the morning is to let my soul light its own light, appropriate some one thing, glow it through with itself. When I have satisfied the hunger for making a bit of the great world over into my world, I am ready for the world as a world—streets and newspapers of it,—silent and looking, in it, until sleep falls.
It is because men lie down under it, allow themselves to be rolled over by it, that the modern newspaper, against its will, has become the great distracting machine of modern times. As I live and look about me, everywhere I find a great running to and fro of editors across the still earth. Every editor has his herd, is a kind of bell-wether, has a great paper herd flocking at his heels. “Is not the world here?” I say, “and am I not here to look at it? Can I really see a world better by joining a Cook’s Excursion on it, sweeping round the earth in a column, seeing everything in a column, looking over the shoulder of a crowd?” Sometimes it seems as if the whole modern, reading, book-and-paper outfit were simply a huge, crunching Mass-Machine—a machine for arranging every man’s mind from the outside.
Originality may be said to depend upon a balance of two things, the power of being interested in other people’s minds and the power of being more interested in one’s own. In its last analysis, it is the power a man’s mind has of minding its own business, which, even in another man’s book, makes the book real and absorbing to him. It is the least compliment one can pay a book. The only honest way to commune with a real man either in a book or out of it is to do one’s own share of talking. Both the book and the man say better things when talked back to. In reading a great book one finds it allows for this. In reading a poor one the only way to make it worth while, to find anything in it, is to put it there. The most self-respecting course when one finds one’s self in the middle of a poor book is to turn right around in it, and write it one’s self. As has been said by Hoffentotter (in the fourteenth chapter of his great masterpiece): “If you find that you cannot go on, gentle reader, in the reading of this book, pray read it backwards.”
The original man, the man who insists on keeping the power in a mind of minding its own business, is much more humble than he looks. All he feels is, that his mind has been made more convenient to him than to anybody else and that if anyone is going to use it, he must. It is not a matter of assuming that one’s own mind is superior. A very poor mind, on the premises, put right in with one’s own body, carefully fitted to it, to one’s very nerves and senses, is worth all the other minds in the world. It may be conceit to believe this, and it may be self-preservation. But, in any case, keeping up an interest in one’s own mind is excusable. Even the humblest man must admit that the first, the most economical, the most humble, the most necessary thing for a man to do in reading in this world (if he can do it) is to keep up an interest in his own mind.
IV—Reading for Facts
I
Calling the Meeting to Order
Reading for persons makes a man a poet or artist, makes him dramatic with his mind—puts the world-stage into him.