The Lost Art Of Reading

Zusatztext

Excerpt: 'The population of the civilised world to-day may be divided into two classes,millionaires and those who would like to be millionaires. The rest are artists, poets, tramps, and babiesand do not count. Poets and artists do not count until after they are dead. Tramps are put in prison. Babies are expected to get over it. A few more summers, a few more winterswith short skirts or with down on their chinsthey shall be seen burrowing with the rest of us. One almost wonders sometimes, why it is that the sun keeps on year after year and day after day turning the globe around and around, heating it and lighting it and keeping things growing on it, when after all, when all is said and done (crowded with wonder and with things to live with, as it is), it is a comparatively empty globe. No one seems to be using it very much, or paying very much attention to it, or getting very much out of it. There are never more than a very few men on it at a time, who can be said to be really living on it. They are engaged in getting a living and in hoping that they are going to live sometime. They are also going to read sometime. When one thinks of the wasted sunrises and sunsetsthe great free show of heaventhe door open every nightof the little groups of people straggling into itof the swarms of people hurrying back and forth before it, jostling their getting-a-living lives up and down before it, not knowing it is there,one wonders why it is there. Why does it not fall upon us, or its lights go suddenly out upon us? We stand in the days and the nights like stallssuns flying over our heads, stars singing through space beneath our feet. But we do not see. Every mans head in a pocket,boring for his living in a pocketor being bored for his living in a pocket,why should he see? True we are not without a philosophy for thisto look over the edge of our stalls with. Getting a living is living, we say. We whisper it to ourselvesin our pockets. Then we try to get it. When we get it, we try to believe itand when we get it we do not believe anything. Let every man under the walled-in heaven, the iron heaven, speak for his own soul. No one else shall speak for him. We only know what we knoweach of us in our own pockets. The great books tell us it has not always been an iron heaven or a walled-in heaven. But into the faces of the flocks of the children that come to us, year after year, we look, wondering. They shall not do anything but burrowingmost of them. Our very ideals are borrowings. So are our books. Religion burrows. It barely so much as looks at heaven. Why should a civilised mana man who has a pocket in civilisationa man who can burrowlook at heaven? It is the glimmering boundary line where burrowing leaves off. Time enough. In the meantime the shovel. Let the stars wheel. Do men look at stars with shovels?'

Weitere Details