The Lost Art of Reading

by Gerald Stanley Lee

It seemed that I stood and watched a world awake, the great night still upbearing me above the flood of the day. I watched it strangely, as a changed being, the godlikeness and the might of sleep, the spell of the All upon me. I became as one who saw the earth as it is, in a high noon of its real self. Hung in its mist of worlds, wrapped in its own breath, I saw it—a queer little ball of cooled-off fire, it seemed, still and swift plunging through space. And when I looked close in my heart, I saw cunning little men on it, nations and things running around on it. And when I looked still nearer, looked at the lighted side of it, I saw that each little man was not what I thought—a dot or fleck on the universe. And I saw that he was a reflection, a serious, wondrous miniature of all the rest. It all seemed strange to me at first—to a man who lives, as I do, in a rather weary, laborious, painstaking age—that this should be so. As I looked at the little man I wondered if it really could be so. Then, as I looked, the great light flowed all around the little man, and the little man reflected the great light.

But he did not seem to know it.

I felt like calling out to him—to one of them—telling him out loud to himself, wrapped away as he was, in his haste and dumbness, not knowing, and in the funny little noise of cities in the great still light. And so while the godlikeness and the might of sleep was upon me, I watched him, longed for him, wanted him for myself. I thought of my great cold, stretched-out wisdom. How empty and bare it was, this staring at stars one by one, this taking notes on creation, this slow painful tour of space, when after all right down there in this little man, I said “Is not all I can know, or hope to know stowed away and written up?” And when I thought of this—the blur of sleep still upon me—I could hardly help reaching down for him, half-patronising him, half-worshipping him, taking him up to myself, where I could keep him by me, keep him to consult, watch for the sun, face for the infinite.—“Dear little fellow!” I said, “my own queer little fellow! my own little Kosmos, pocket-size!”

I thought how convenient it would be if I could take one in my hand, do my seeing through it, focus my universe with it. And when the strange mood left me and I came to, I remembered or thought I remembered that I was one of Those myself. “Why not be your own little Kosmos-glass?” I said.

I have been trying it now for some time. It is hard to regulate the focus of course, and it is not always what it ought to be. It has to be allowed for some. I do not claim much for it. But it’s better, such as it is, than a sheer bit of Nothing, I think, to look at a universe with.

II
The Human Unit

It matters little that the worlds that are made in this way are very different in detail or emphasis, that some of them are much smaller and more twisted than others. The great point, so far as education is concerned, is for all teachers to realise that every man is a whole world, that it is possible and natural for every man to be a whole world. His very body is, and there must be some way for him to have a whole world in his mind. A being who finds a way of living a world into his face can find a way of reading a world together. If a man is going to have unity, read his world together, possess all-in-oneness in knowledge, he will have to have it the way he has it in his face.

It is superficial to assume, as scientists are apt to do, that in a world where there are infinite things to know, a man’s knowledge must have unity or can have unity, in and of itself. The moment that all the different knowledges of a man are passed over or allowed to be passed over into his personal qualities, into the muscles and traits and organs and natural expressions of the man, they have unity and force and order and meaning as a matter of course. Infinite opposites of knowledge, recluses and separates of knowledge are gathered and can be seen gathered every day in almost any man, in the glance of his eye, in the turn of his lip, or in the blow of his fist.

It is not the method of science as science, and it is not in any sense put forward as the proper method for a man to use in his mere specialty, but it does seem to be true that if a man wants to know things which he does not intend to know all of, the best and most scientific way for him to know such things is to reach out to them and know them through their human or personal relations. I can only speak for myself, but I have found for one that the easiest and most thorough, practical way for me to get the benefit of things I do not know, is to know a man who does. If he is an educated man, a man who really knows, who has made what he knows over into himself, I find if I know him that I get it all—the gist of it. The spirit of his knowledge, its attitude toward life, is all in the man, and if I really know the man, absorb his nature, drink deep at his soul, I know what he knows—it seems to me—and what I know besides. It is true that I cannot express it precisely. He would have to give the lecture or diagram of it, but I know it—know what it comes to in life, his life and my life. I can be seen going around living with it afterwards, any day. His knowledge is summed up in him, his whole world is read together in him, belongs to him, and he belongs to me. To know a man is to know what he knows in its best form—the things that have made the man possible.

A great portrait painter, it has always seemed to me, is a kind of god in his way—knows everything his sitters know. He knows what every man’s knowledge has done with the man—the best part of it—and makes it speak. I have never yet found myself looking at great walls of faces (one painter’s faces), found myself walking up and down in Sargent’s soul, without thinking what a great inhabited, trooped-through man he was—all knowledges flocking to him, showing their faces to him, from the ends of the earth, emptying their secrets silently out to his brush. If a man like Sargent has for one of his sitters a great astronomer, an astronomer who is really great, who knows and absorbs stars, Sargent absorbs the man, and as a last result the stars in the man, and the man in Sargent, and the man’s stars in Sargent, all look out of the canvas.