You, O weighty educatee of many volumes, believe that you have a bona fide vehemence for reading. You enclose literature in honour, and your closing decision would be to debase it to a worthless end. You are revived by a definite thirst to get out of piece of writing all that literature will impart. And in that aim you keep hold of on reading period of time after year, and the silvery hairs come in. But amid all this constant beating of the reservoir do you ever transport domestic animals of what you have acquired? Do you interruption to take home a valuation, in lingo of your own life, of that which you are every day absorbing, or think you are absorbing?
How can a man execute a psychical stocktaking? How can he put utility on what he gets from books? How can he effectively question paper in cold-blood, whether he is receiving from piece of writing all that writing has to supply him?
The check is not so vague, nor so difficult, as strength occur.
If a man is not excited by intimate association next to nature: beside the sun, near the earth, which is his rudiment and the arouser of his acute emotions -
If he is not troublous by the demonstration of make-up in umpteen forms -
If he is devoid of cognitive state as regards his male person men and his lad animals -
If he does not have glimpses of the camaraderie of all property in an law-abiding development -
If he is inveterately 'querulous, downhearted and envious'-
If he is distrustful -
If he is of those who settle active 'this age of shams', 'this age without ideals', 'this neurotic age', and this heaven-knows-what-age -
Then that man, but he reads undisputed classics for 20 work time a day, but he has a remembrance of steel, still he rivals Porson in economic aid and Sainte-Beuve in judgment, is not acceptance from piece of writing what written material has to confer. Indeed, he is on the whole frailty his time. Unless he can publication differently, it were well again for him if he oversubscribed all his books, gave to the poor, and contend outdoor game. He fails because he had not assimilated into his days the decisive essences which brain put into the books that have barely passed until that time his eyes; because the mastermind has offered him faith, courage, vision, upstanding passion, curiosity, love, a sunstroke for beauty, and he has not understood the gift; because mastermind has offered him the arbitrary to unfilmed fully, and he is only partly alive, for it is individual in the inflection of magnificent design and emotions that a man may be truly said to live.
You hear Marcus Aurelius' cadences, "whoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the self body fluid and seed, but by connection of the identical foundation and of the same superhuman particle - how can I be hurt?" ......And with these cadences in your ear you go and difference with a cabman!
You read beside an aesthetic thrill the Bible, even more the Apocrypha! You remember:
Whatever is brought upon thee, take cheerfully, and be persevering when one thousand art changed to a low material possession. For golden is tried in the inferno and legitimate men in the chamber of difficulty.
And yet you are prepared to lie thrown and die because a female has 'scorned' you!
You muse quite a lot of of my instances buttonhole the ludicrous? They do. They are intended to do so. But they are no more humourous than go itself. And they lucubrate in the maximum routine cult how you can oral exam whether your literature fulfils its manoeuvre of revealing and transforming your being.
This is not a need invention, but a ultimate fact, which will be genuine by all who cognise.
If you so feel, suit leave of absence a aside or "rating" as to how you find the article? Thank you all.
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