Yet none of these external methods, useful as they may prove, can compare with a habit of thorough attention. We read far too hurriedly, too much in the spirit of the “quick lunch.” No doubt we do so a great deal from the misleading idea that there is so very much to read. Actually, there is very little to read,—if we wish for real reading— and there is time to read it all twice over. We—Americans—bolt our books as we do our food, and so get far too little good out of them. We treat our mental digestions as brutally as we treat our stomachs. Meditation is the digestion of the mind, but we allow ourselves no time for meditation. We gorge our eyes with the printed page, but all too little of what we take in with our eyes ever reaches our minds or our spirits. We assimilate what we can from all this hurry of superfluous food, and the rest goes to waste, and, as a natural consequence, contributes only to the wear and tear of our mental organism.
Books should be real things. They were so once, when a man would give a fat field in exchange for a small manuscript; and they are no less real to-day—some of them. Each age contributes one or two real books to the eternal library—and always the old books remain, magic springs of healing and refreshment. If no one should write a book for a thousand years, there are quite enough books to keep us going. Real books there are in plenty. Perhaps there are more real books than there are real readers. Books are the strong tincture of experience. They are to be taken carefully, drop by drop, not carelessly gulped down by the bottleful. Therefore, if you would get the best out of books, spend a quarter of an hour in reading, and three-quarters of an hour in thinking over what you have read.
THE GUIDE TO DAILY READING
PREPARED BY ASA DON DICKINSON
The elaborate, systematic “course of reading” is a bore. After thirty years spent among books and bookish people I have never yet met anyone who would admit that he had ploughed through such a course from beginning to end. Of course a few faithful souls, with abundant leisure, have done this, just as there are men who have walked from New York City to San Francisco. Good exercise, doubtless! But most of us have not time for feats of such questionable utility.
Yet I myself and most of the booklovers whom I know have started at one time or another to pursue a course of reading, and we have never regretted our attempts. Why? Because this is an excellent way to discover the comparatively small number of authors who have a message that we need to hear. When such an one is discovered, one may with a good conscience let the systematic course go by the board until one has absorbed all that is useful from the store of good things offered by the valuable new acquaintance.
Each one has his idiosyncrasies. If I may be permitted to allude to a personal failing, let me confess that I have never read “Paradise Lost” or “Pilgrim’s Progress.” I have hopefully dipped into them repeatedly, but—I don’t like them. Some day I hope to, but until my mind is ready for these two great world-books, I do not intend to waste time by driving through them with set teeth. There are too many other good books that I do enjoy reading. “In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.”
The “Guide to Daily Readings” which follows makes no claim to be systematic. The aim has been simply to introduce the reader to a goodly company of authors—to provide a daily flower of thought for the buttonhole, to-day a glorious rose of poetic fancy, to-morrow a pert little pansy of quaint humor.
Yet nearly all the selections are doubly significant and interesting if read upon the days to which they are especially assigned. For example, on New Year’s Day it is suggested that one set one’s house in order by reading Franklin’s “Rules of Conduct,” Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” and Lowell’s “To the Future”; on January 19th, Poe’s Birthday, one is directed to an excellent sketch of Poe and to typical examples of his best work, “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado”; and on October 31st, Hallowe’en, one is reminded of Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter” and Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
The references are explicit in each case, so that it is a matter of only a few seconds to find each one. For example, the reference to the “Cask of Amontillado” is 4-Pt. I =67-77; which means that this tale is ten pages long and will be found in Part I of volume 4, at page 67. Excepting volumes 10-15 (Poetry), two volumes are bound in one in this set, so it should be remembered that generally there are two pages numbered 67 in each book.