The Lost Art of Reading Part 17

The P. G. S. of M. wanted to know what I meant by that.

I said I thought there were thousands of people--one sees them everywhere in Ma.s.sachusetts--fairly intelligent people, people who are capable of changing their minds about things, but who can't change their consciences. Their consciences seem to keep hanging on to them, in the same set way--somehow--with or without their minds. "Some people's consciences don't seem to notice much, so far as I can see, whether they have minds connected with them or not." "Don't you know what it is," I appealed to the P. G. S. of M., "to get everything all fixed up with your mind and your reason and your soul; that certain things that look wrong are all right,--the very things of all others that you ought to do and keep on doing,--and then have your conscience keep right on the same as it always did--tatting them up against you?"

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not spending very much time thinking about his conscience.

I said I didn't believe in it, but I thought that if a man had one, it was apt to trouble him a little off and on--especially if the one he had was one of these left-over ones. "If you had one of these consciences--I mean the kind of conscience that pretends to belong to you, and acts as if it belonged to some one else," I said "one of these dead-frog-leg, reflex-action consciences, working and twitching away on you day and night, the way I have, you'd _have_ to think about it sometimes. You'd get so ashamed of it. You'd feel trifled with so. You'd----"

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not being very much surprised--over my case. He said that people who changed their minds as often as I did couldn't reasonably expect consciences spry enough.

His general theory seemed to be that I had a conscience once and wore it out.

"It's getting to be so with everybody nowadays," he said. "n.o.body is settled. Everything is blown about. We do not respect tradition either in ourselves or in the life about us. No one listens to the Voice of Experience."

"There she blows!" I said. I knew it was coming sooner or later. I added that one of the great inconveniences of life, it seemed to me, was the Intolerance of Experienced People.

II

On the Intolerance of Experienced People

It is generally a.s.sumed by persons who have taken the pains to put themselves in this very disagreeable cla.s.s, that people in general--all other people--are as inexperienced--as they look. If a man speaks on a subject at all in their presence, they a.s.sume he speaks autobiographically. These people are getting thicker every year. One can't go anywhere without finding them standing around with a kind of "How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says something he knows by--well--by seeing it--perfectly plain seeing it.

One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives, submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look, are always calling out to the man who sees a thing as he is going by--sees it, I mean, with his mind; sees it without having to put his feet in it--they are always calling out to him to come back and be with them, and know life, as they call it, and duck under to Experience. Now, to say nothing of living with such persons, it is almost impossible to talk with them. It isn't safe even to philosophise when they are around.

If a man ventures the a.s.sertion in their presence that what a woman loves in a lover is complete subjugation they argue that either he is a fool and is a.s.serting what he has not experienced, or he is still more of one and has experienced it. The idea that a man may have several principles around him that he has not used yet does not occur to them.

The average amateur mother, when she belongs to this type, becomes a perfect bigot toward a maiden aunt who advances, perhaps, some harmless little Froebel idea. She swears by the shibboleth of experience, and every new baby she has makes her more disagreeable to people who have not had babies. The only way to get acquainted with her is to have a baby. She a.s.sumes that a motherless woman has a motherless mind. The idea that a rich and bountiful womanhood, which is saving its motherhood up, which is free from the absorption and the haste, keenly observant and sympathetic, may come to a kind of motherly insight, distinctly the result of not being experienced, does not occur to her. The art of getting the result--the spirit of experience, without paying all the cost of the experience itself--needs a good word spoken for it nowadays.

Some one has yet to point out the value and power of what might be called The Maiden-Aunt Att.i.tude toward Life. The world has had thousands of experienced young mothers for thousands of years--experienced out of their wits--piled up with experiences they don't know anything about; but, in the meantime, the most important contribution to the bringing-up of children in the world that has ever been known--the kindergarten--was thought of in the first place by a man who was never a mother, and has been developed entirely in the years that have followed since by maiden aunts.

The spiritual power and manifoldness and largeness which is the most informing quality of a really cultivated man comes from a certain refinement in him, a gift of knowing by tasting. He seems to have touched the spirits of a thousand experiences we know he never has had, and they seem to have left the souls of sorrows and joys in him. He lives in a kind of beautiful magnetic fellowship with all real life in the world. This is only possible by a sort of unconscious economy in the man's nature, a gift of not having to experience things.

Avoiding experience is one of the great creative arts of life. We shall have enough before we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even select it, most of it. But, in so far as we can select it,--in one's reading, for instance,--it behooves a man to avoid experience. He at least wants to avoid experience enough to have time to stop and think about the experience he has; to be sure he is getting as much out of his experience as it is worth.

III

On Having One's Experience Done Out

"But how can one avoid an experience?"

By heading it off with a principle. Principles are a lot of other people's experiences, in a convenient form a man can carry around with him, to keep off his own experiences with.

No other rule for economising knowledge can quite take the place, it seems to me, of reading for principles. It economises for a man both ways at once. It not only makes it possible for a man to have the whole human race working out his life for him, instead of having to do it all himself, but it makes it possible for him to read anything he likes, to get something out of almost anything he does not like, which he is obliged to read. If a man has a habit of reading for principles, for the law behind everything, he cannot miss it. He cannot help learning things, even from people who don't know them.

The other evening when The P. G. S. of M. came into my study, he saw the morning paper lying unopened on the settle by the fireplace.

"Haven't you read this yet?" he said.

"No, not to-day."

"Where are you, anyway? Why not?"

I said I hadn't felt up to it yet, didn't feel profound enough--something to that effect.

The P. G. S. of M. thinks a newspaper should be read in ten minutes. He looked over at me with a sort of slow, pitying, Boston-Public-Library expression he has sometimes.

I behaved as well as I could--took no notice for a minute.

"The fact is, I have changed," I said, "about papers and some things. I have times of thinking I'm improved considerably," I added recklessly.

Still the same pained Boston-Public-Library expression--only turned on a little harder.

"Seems to me," I said, "when a man can't feel superior to other people in this world, he might at least be allowed the privilege of feeling superior to himself once in a while--spells of it."

He intimated that the trouble with me was that I wanted both. I admitted that I had cravings for both. I said I thought I'd be a little easier to get along with, if they were more satisfied.

He intimated that I was easier to get along with than I ought to be, or than I seemed to think I was. He did not put it in so many words. The P.

G. S. of M. never says anything that can be got hold of and answered.

Finally I determined to answer him whether he had said anything or not.

"Well," I said, "I may feel superior to other people sometimes. I may even feel superior to myself, but I haven't got to the point where I feel superior to a newspaper--to a whole world at once. I don't try to read it in ten minutes. I don't try to make a whole day of a whole world, a foot-note to my oatmeal mush! I don't treat the whole human race, trooping past my breakfast, as a parenthesis in my own mind. I don't try to read a great, serious, boundless thing like a daily newspaper, unfolded out of starlight, gleaner of a thousand sunsets around a world, and talk at the same time. I don't say, 'There's nothing in it,' interrupt a planet to chew my food, throw a planet on the floor and look for my hat.... Nations lunging through s.p.a.ce to say good-morning to me, continents flashed around my thoughts, seas for the boundaries of my day's delight ... the great G.o.d shining over all! And may He preserve me from ever reading a newspaper in ten minutes!"

I have spent as much time as any one, I think, in my day, first and last, in feeling superior to newspapers. I can remember when I used to enjoy it very much--the feeling, I mean. I have spent whole half-days at it, going up and down columns, thinking they were not good enough for me.

Now when I take up a morning paper, half-dread, half-delight, I take it up softly. My whole being trembles in the balance before it. The whole procession of my soul, shabby, loveless, provincial, tawdry, is pa.s.sed in review before it. It is the grandstand of the world. The vast and awful Roll-Call of the things I ought to be--the things I ought to love--in the great world voice sweeps over me. It reaches its way through all my thoughts, through the minutes of my days. "Where is thy soul? Oh, where is thy soul?" the morning paper, up and down its columns, calls to me. There are days that I ache with the echo of it.

There are days when I dare not read it until the night. Then the voice that is in it grows gentle with the darkness, it may be, and is stilled with sleep.

IV

On Reading a Newspaper in Ten Minutes

I am not saying it does not take a very intelligent man to read a newspaper in ten minutes--squeeze a planet at breakfast and drop it. I think it does. But I am inclined to think that the intelligent man who reads a newspaper in ten minutes is exactly the same kind of intelligent man who could spend a week reading it if he wanted to, and not waste a minute. And he might want to. He simply reads a newspaper as he likes.

He is not confined to one way. He does not read it in ten minutes because he has a mere ten-minute mind, but because he merely has the ten minutes. Rapid reading and slow reading are both based, with such a man, on appreciation of the paper--and not upon a narrow, literary, Boston-Public-Library feeling of being superior to it.

The value of reading-matter, like other matter, depends on what a man does with it. All that one needs in order not to waste time in general reading is a large, complete set of principles to stow things away in.

Nothing really needs to be wasted. If one knows where everything belongs in one's mind--or tries to,--if one takes the trouble to put it there, reading a newspaper is one of the most colossal, tremendous, and boundless acts that can be performed by any one in the whole course of a human life.

If there's any place where a man needs to have all his wits about him, to put things into,--if there's any place where the next three inches can demand as much of a man as a newspaper, where is it? The moment he opens it he lays his soul open and exposes himself to all sides of the world in a second,--to several thousand years of a world at once.

A book is a comparatively safe, unintelligent place for a mind to be in.

There are at least four walls to it--a few scantlings over one, protecting one from all s.p.a.ce. A man has at least some remotest idea of where he is, of what may drop on him, in a book. It may tax his capacity of stowing things away. But he always has notice--almost always. It sees that he has time and room. It has more conveniences for fixing things.

The author is always there besides, a kind of valet to anybody, to help people along pleasantly, to antic.i.p.ate their wants. It's what an author is for. One expects it.

But a man finds it is different in a morning paper, rolled out of dreams and sleep into it,--empty, helpless before a day, all the telegraph machines of the world thumping all the night, clicked into one's thoughts before one thinks--no man really has room in him to read a morning paper. No man's soul is athletic or swift enough.... Nations in a sentence.... Thousands of years in a minute, philosophies, religions, legislatures, paleozoics, church socials, side by side; stars and gossip, fools, heroes, comets--infinity on parade, and over the precipice of the next paragraph, head-long--who knows what!

Reading a morning paper is one of the supreme acts of presence of mind in a human life.

V

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