The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

It is doubtless true, the common saying of the man of genius in every age, that “everything is grist to his mill,” but it would not be if he could not grind it fine enough. And he is only able to grind it fine enough because he makes his reading bring him power as well as grist. Having provided for energy, stored-up energy for grinding, he guards and preserves that energy as the most important and culminating thing in his intellectual life. He insists on making provision for it. He makes ready solitude for it, blankness, reverie, sleep, silence. He cultivates the general habit not only of rejecting things, but of keeping out of their way when necessary, so as not to have to reject them, and he knows the passion in all times and all places for grinding grist finer instead of gathering more grist. These are going to be the traits of all the mighty reading, the reading that achieves, in the twentieth century. The saying of the man of genius that everything is grist to his mill merely means that he reads a book athletically, with a magnificent play of power across it, with an heroic imagination or power of putting together. He turns everything that comes to him over into its place and force and meaning in everything else. He reads slowly and organically where others read with their eyes. He knows what it is to tingle with a book, to blush and turn pale with it, to read his feet cold. He reads all over, with his nerves and senses, with his mind and heart. He reads through the whole tract of his digestive and assimilative nature. To borrow the Hebrew figure, he reads with his bowels. Instead of reading to maintain a theory, or a row of facts, he reads to sustain a certain state of being. The man who has the knack, as some people seem to think it, of making everything he reads and sees beautiful or vigorous and practical, does not need to try to do it. He does it because he has a habit of putting himself in a certain state of being and cannot help doing it. He does not need to spend a great deal of time in reading for results. He produces his own results. The less athletic reader, the smaller poet or scientist, confines himself to reading for results, for ready-made beauty and ready-made facts, because he is not in condition to do anything else. The greater poet or scientist is an energy, a transfigurer, a transmuter of everything into beauty and truth. Everything having passed through the heat and light of his own being is fused and seen where it belongs, where God placed it when He made it, in some relation to everything else.

I fear that I may have come, in bearing down on this point, to another of the of-course places in this book. It is not just to assume that because people are not living with a truth that they need to be told it. It is of little use, when a man has used his truth all up boring people with it, to try to get them (what is left of the truth and the people) to do anything about it. But if I may be allowed one page more I would like to say in the present epidemic of educating for results, just what a practical education may be said to be.

The indications are that the more a man spends, makes himself able to spend, a large part of his time, as Whitman did, in standing still and looking around and loving things, the more practical he is. Even if a man’s life were to serve as a mere guide-board to the universe, it would supply to all who know him the main thing the universe seems to be without. But a man who, like Walt Whitman, is more than a guide-board to the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it, who becomes a part of the universe to all who live always, who makes the universe human to us—companionable,—such a man may not be able to fix a latch on a kitchen door, but I can only say for one that if there is a man who can lift a universe bodily, and set it down in my front yard where I can feel it helping me do my work all day and guarding my sleep at night, that man is practical. Who can say he does not “come to anything”? To have heard it rumoured that such a man has lived, can live, is a result—the most practical result of all to most of the workers of the world. A bare fact about such a man is a gospel. Why work for nothing (that is, with no result) in a universe where you can play for nothing—and by playing earn everything?

Such a man is not only practical, serving those who know him by merely being, but he serves all men always. They will not let him go. He becomes a part of the structure of the world. The generations keep flocking to him the way they flock to the great sane silent ministries of the sky and of the earth. Their being drawn to them is their being drawn to him. The strength of clouds is in him, and the spirit of falling water, and he knoweth the way of the wind. When a man can be said by the way he lives his life to have made himself the companion of his unborn brothers and of God; when he can be said to have made himself, not a mere scientist, but a younger brother, a real companion of air, water, fire, mist, and of the great gentle ground beneath his feet—he has secured a result.

VI—Reading for Feelings

I
The Passion of Truth

Reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the reader’s mind: