How to Read/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
A SENSE OF DIRECTION
I
We have all heard of the Frenchman who, at about forty, discovered, quite by accident and to his great surprise, that in keeping his diary and answering his correspondence and making his business reports and other taken-for-granted uses of pen and paper, he had all his life been writing prose without knowing it.
We have now reached a point in our inquiry where a somewhat similar realization should be ours. All our lives we have been doing the intricate things set forth in the preceding chapters, and have been doing them for the specific reasons therein explained, and yet have never suspected either fact.
It is not true, therefore, as it may possibly appear to some of you, that I am recommending you to learn an unfamiliar game, or to acquire a new and heretofore unpracticed technique. Far from it. The game that I am recommending to you we all began to play, untaught, in the nursery. And the technique that I am urging you to perfect is the same technique that, from inborn necessity, we have all developed and which, in a catch-as-catch-can way, we all employ in our most casual scanning of the most ephemeral print.
All that I am suggesting that you should do is to play this game with a more conscious knowledge of its nature and possibilities; and develop this technique with a more purposeful and personal realization of its re quirements.
II
Nor does this mean that I am urging you to become self-conscious in your reading.
I happened, just now, to speak of reading as a game. Let us consider for a moment the relationship that self-consciousness bears to our performance in those more outward and objective games—games where physical skill as well as mental supervision is involved—such as tennis, golf, billiards.
Many people play tennis, or billiards, or golf, very much as most of us read—by the spontaneous, unanalyzed, and all but undirected exercise of their natural aptitudes. They learn the rules. They flounder round for a time while their hands and eyes are getting the hang of the tools and their tricks. And then they go ahead, hit-or-missedly increasing their speed and accuracy and generalship by the catch-as-catch-can, experimental route of personal practice. And in this sort of play, once the initial awkwardnesses are overcome and so long as one is pitted against players of one's own caliber, self-consciousness seldom figures. But once let such a player determine to "learn the game"; once let him place himself under the guidance of a teacher; and instantly self-consciousness becomes a prime factor to be taken into account—at once the subtlest means, and the deadliest foe, to progress.
At first it is crassly and exaggeratedly present in all the student's efforts. There are so many things that he has to do (things that he has been doing pretty well without knowing it, but now has to do better; things that he has been doing wrong, and now has to make himself do properly; things that he has not been doing at all, and now has to take into account) that for a time he feels as though he were driving sixteen horses abreast, while balancing himself on the bare back of one of them.
But let us skip this phase of his training. It is to a later adjustment that I wish to call your attention. And, moreover, we have already dealt with these initial problems of coördination in comparing the developing of an auto-driver's "unconscious alertness" to that required of the skillful reader.
There comes a time, then, when this learner of a game of skill is dealing with such delicately mixed matters of muscular training and mental control as those involved in a billiard-player's "stroke," or a tennis-player's "delivery" of a fast serve, or a golfer's "follow-through." He now understands the laws that govern the material objects he is manipulating. He knows definitely what it is that he is striving to accomplish. And he has acquired at least an occasional semi-perfection of unconscious performance. But he wants to correct a fault, or to add a cubit to his efficiency, or to turn "occasional perfection" into a more constant and reliable asset of his technical equipment. And either under the direct guidance of a coach, or in self-supervised practice, he is endeavoring to attain this improved status.
Almost every one of us has struggled, in some form of psycho-physical self-training, with this curiously baffling problem. And almost every one of us has discovered in consequence that a deliberate, self-conscious determining of what it is that we wish to do, and of how it is that we propose to do it, is necessary before the undertaking of the act; but that the act itself must, if it is going to "get over" in any way worth mentioning, be performed with the free, untrammeled, unlooked-at play of physical spontaneity.
Let us put it that the only way in which these niceties of skill can possibly be attained is by Self-Consciousness playing teacher to our muscles; by its going over and over for them the things they are to do and to leave undone; and by its then, at the crucial instant of execution, turning its back on them with a nice and considerate delicacy and saying, "Go ahead now, I'm not looking."
III
And the same thing, precisely, is true of the subtler mind-training involved in improving one's reading skill. I am therefore so far from wishing to urge you to self-consciousness in reading that, on the contrary, I would urge you to a more and ever more zestful and complete yielding of yourself, in the actual act of reading, to the full, free, untrammeled play of your natural faculties. But I would have you train these faculties to a suppler and more efficient performance of their unconscious tasks, through a knowledge of the real nature of reading, and through an alert readiness personally to supervise the process on occasion. I would have you gradually develop a growingly intelligent system of individual experimentation in the choice of what you read, based upon your growing understanding of our common and self-serving reasons for reading. And I would have you gradually learn to serve your personal ends more and more fully by concentrating your attention and your interest and your subsequent criticism on what actually happens inside of you when you read the things you have chosen.
IV
We have already considered in some detail the question of personally supervising our reading processes as occasion demands and shall deal with other aspects of the matter later.
In the present chapter we are going to seek out, from our actual experience in reading, a sound basis for a system of individual experiment in the choice of what we read.
And afterward we shall examine more carefully the true character and real importance of what actually happens in us in reading.
But even for our present purpose it is important that we have at least a general idea of the fact that "the things that actually happen in us when we read" form the sole value-basis that reading has for us, as well as the one basic test of all our judgments of its worth for us.
And the proof of this is simple.
Nothing whatever does happen when we read except what happens inside ourselves. And since we read wholly in terms of our past experience, these happenings all consist either of revivifyings of simple items of that experience (revisualized seeings, reawakened emotions, and the like), or of new, never-before-achieved combinings of old experience into new awarenesses, new understandings, new sympathies and prejudices, new thoughts—in fine, into new experiences.
But to know pleasure and pain, to feel delight and disgust, to be moved to sympathy, resentment, pity, and hate, to observe human conduct and approve or deplore it, to judge it by our own and to estimate our own by it, to be stirred to active, self-defining acquiescence in the views of our fellows, or to be roused to an active, self-revealing formulation of our disagreement with them,—are not such things as these of the very essence of being alive? Are they not, indeed, the coefficients of living? And are not such things as these the precise sort of things, and the sole sort of things that happen in us when we read?
But suppose none of them happen?
Our proposition is proved by the absurdity of its converse. What possible value can any reading matter have for us, or what handhold for an estimate of it can we possess, if nothing whatever of all this happens in us when we read it?
V
Reading, then, is a form of living because of the things that happen in us when we read.
And since our mothers sang lullabies to us in our cradles, and repeated Mother Goose to us in the nursery, and read us fairy tales before the fire, and told us stories at bedtime, we began to practice this form of living (we began, let us say, to read by proxy) long before we learned our letters.
Here, by the way, is another chance to distinguish between the two kinds of "knowing how to read"—the kind that we are considering in this book, and the kind that the United States census and the dictionary and the primary school have in mind. In the latter sense, you and I know how to read with our eyes; and a blind man knows how to read with his fingers; and a blind man with both arms amputated cannot know how to read at all. But suppose you were private secretary to an armless blind man. And suppose that you (with your eyes and your vocal chords doing their humdrum tasks, but with your mind and your imagination busy elsewhere) were to read "David Copperfield" aloud to your intensely attentive employer. Which one of you, in the sense of our present inquiry, would you say had read the novel?
VI
We began, then, to live and (with the aid of a private secretary) we began to read, in the nursery. And we have been reading, as well as living, ever since. We read baby books in words of one syllable when we were toddlers. We read childrens' stories in words of two syllables when we were children. As we grew older we read school primers and textbooks. We read "Alice in Wonderland" and "St. Nicholas." We read Sunday-school scenarios, and the "Youth's Companion," and penny-dreadfuls, and "Treasure Island," and "Little Women," and "The Golden Treasury," and so on and so forth; up and out into maturity.
Has there not, perhaps, without our realizing it or thinking anything about it, been a definite and decipherable relationship between our developing selves and this progressive reading? A linked, organic, vital parallelism between them? Is it not possible that these two forms of living have marched, hand in hand, helping each other along, on an uncharted road that both followed, yet that neither took note of?
And if this should prove true, what better way could we have of obtaining what we are seeking—a sense of direction in our reading—than that of diagraming this past relationship, mapping that part of this road that lies behind us, and then sighting ahead along these established lines?
Let us see if we cannot, somehow, find a point of vantage—a mental steeple, or mountain-top, or captive balloon—from which we can get a bird's-eye view of the way we have come.
VII
J. Henri Fabre, that lovable old French savant with the soul of a poet, the attainments of a scientist, and the attitude of a philosopher, tells us, in one of his wonderful chapters on the life of the spider, how the young of the Banded Epira get their start in the world.
The Banded Epira do not weave webs to snare their prey. They stalk their quarry, tiger-like, on foot; or lie in wait behind the petals of a rose and leap, like micro-jaguars, on the backs of bees that come to drink. But each one of them, none the less, has a silk mill in its abdomen. And it is upon the spinnerets of this factory that the mother spider draws when she weaves the fleece-lined pouch in which she lays her eggs—the cocoon-like pellicule that she fastens beneath a twig at the foot of some spindling bush, and from which, later on, the heat of mid-July calls forth some six hundred pin-points of new-hatched life. And it is with the initial contents of these same spinnerets as their sole capital that these newborn mites start in on the business of living.
No sooner have the six hundred emerged than they set out, en masse, to climb the bush. And as this, for such teeny climbers, proves a several days' journey, the tribe, at each day's end, spins itself a shelter which it occupies for the night and abandons in the morning. And thus, alternately climbing and camping, at last they reach the top. And there, with feverish industry, they build a platform of interwoven strands. And upon this for a time they come and go, busily engaged in some work of preparation. And then—mystery or miracle———for all the world like tiny witches traveling on broomsticks—they are seen, one by one, serenely to depart, floating on nothing through the summer air.
And Fabre tells us how, by means of some ingenious experiments conducted in his study, he at last discovered the simple secret of this aerial dispersion—filaments of silk, so fine as to be invisible to the human eye, paid out to the breeze by each tiny spider until buoyant enough to support him; and then embarked upon, air-ship fashion, for the great adventure.
And I have retold the story here because it is upon just such an embarkation that I am now asking you to join me. Like these spider-lets we have journeyed together, camping by the way, from the bottom of our bush. Like them we have built a sort of platform at the top. And now, like them, we are about to set forth, supported, to the eye of the uninitiated, upon nothing, but really borne securely aloft upon two fine filaments of understanding that we have spun.
Let us examine this air-craft.
The first filament is the knowledge that we are makers when we read. That things read are not taken into the mind bodily from without,—sucked in through the eye like soda through a straw, but are built up, brand-new, within us. That we do this building with assorted fragments of our own experience just as literally as a child builds castles with its wooden blocks. And that, just as the child's block-architecture is conditioned by the quantity and variety of its supply, so the scope of our reading capacity depends upon the amount and variousness of living—of physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual living—that we have done.
The second filament is the knowledge that no matter what we read or when, no matter whether we are conscious of it or not, we always read either to "find ourselves" or to "get away from ourselves." Either from the calculated desire, or from the playful joy, of establishing some new order in our individual chaos; or for the comfort of forgetting the disorder that has baffled us by turning to some fresh order-making.
These are the wings of our bi-plane.
VIII
As we look down and back, between these buoyant bits of understanding about the way we read and our reasons for reading, we shall see the past, like a landscape, begin to open out beneath us. We shall see supposedly haphazard choices in our early reading fall into significant relationship to one another. We shall see method emerge from the mix-up. We shall see, finally, that the way we have come stretches, like a straight ribbon of road, visible and comprehensible before our eyes.
IX
We see, for example, why, as little children, we liked to read Mother Goose.
For the youngest child, no less than the wisest savant, reads with its own experience for building-blocks. But the child's experience is very fragmentary. And, what is more, the fragments are as yet unassorted.
Its mind is like a cupboard without partitions, into which all that it finds with its five senses—the pap-spoon and the puppy-dog, the taste of milk and the feel of stomach-ache, the sound of the cat's miaow and the appearance of the moon's disk—are all stowed away, helter-skelter, like loot gathered for a rummage sale.
But though its experience is a jumble, yet already in this jumble the child "knows what it likes." And, moreover, since it lives in a world where there is already "rhyme," though not yet "reason," it already, without knowing it, senses something about "art."
It is not yet equipped to read "Hamlet." It is not even, as yet, equipped to read "Puss in Boots." But it is equipped to "produce" on the stage of its own consciousness—and it does take genuine joy in there "producing"—that famous scenario—
"Hey diddle diddle!
The cat and the fiddle;
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such sport
And the dish ran away with the spoon."
X
We see, again, why it is that the same child, a bit later, reads fairy tales with such gusto.
It has, by now, greatly multiplied its experiences. It has, moreover, begun to discover in others like traits to its own. It has begun to feel pity for others' pain through imagining itself hurt. It has begun to take pleasure in others' joy through imagining itself rejoiced. It has established a tentative (although a largely arbitrary and unwarranted) order in the jumble of its experience. It has grasped the crude principle (although it has not yet learned the hard-and-fast rules) of cause and effect. It has begun to distil ideas, and has developed its instinctive responsiveness to "rhyme" into a budding passion for "poetic justice." And it is, without knowing it, eager for any opportunity or guidance that will enable it to invest this capital; to arrange and rearrange it in explanatory sequences and satisfying symmetry. It is like a housewife with a kettle of simmering jelly, looking round for moulds to pour it into.
And as such scenarios as "Cinderella" and "The Sleeping Princess" are exactly the moulds it needs, it seizes upon them with avidity and pours its accumulated capital into them with a realism of mental stage managership equal to Belasco's. It lives them—quite literally—with round-eyed wonder and palpitant delight; and in the act it is constructively "finding itself" through self-assertion even when we think that it is only forgetting hurt feelings or a burned finger in the fascination of the inner "movies."
XI
Let us glance in passing at boyhood.
Some of you, I know, have before now asked yourselves why your growing boy, leaving the orthodox reading you had so carefully provided for him in the library, has stolen out to the lean-to behind the woodshed and buried himself in "Tomahawk Bill, the Terror of the Tetons." Doubtless you felt that evil communications had corrupted his native manners. But you were wrong. If you will look down from our air-craft you will see that he did it, not from acquired perversity, but from an inner urge.
He did it for the same reason that the guinea hen "steals her nest" in the woodlot behind the barn.
The guinea hen is half domesticated and half wild. When she "steals her nest" she is dramatizing her wild instincts. The boy is half civilized and half a savage. He reads dime novels to dramatize the imagining that the savage in him has done, or—to forget the "civilizing" that is being done to him.
XII
And now let us ask ourselves a subtler question. Let us ask why it is that adolescence—youth ripening toward maturity—reads with such glowing sympathy the visions of the poets, and produces with such zest the lighter scenarios of idealism and romance; while only a little later, the same individuals—new-fledged grown-ups now—are so often found demanding plots of stripped action and tales in which, to use their own expression, there is "something doing."
This, too, viewed from our altitude, is simple.
Youth ripening toward maturity sees itself as the heir to the ages. It conceives the sum of its experience as a completed course of preparation. It is like a hound straining at the leash, or a runner tensed for the start. Its motto is "Just you wait!"
It scorns to use its building-blocks of experience,—the piled-up raw material of its preparedness,—except to build tall towers of what it means to do. It reads romance alternately to dramatize its own intentions, and to forget the tedium of enforced delay.
But it is quite otherwise with new-fledged grown-ups.
From strutting seniors in the University of Youth these have become yelled-at office boys in the department store of Life. From being the "leading citizens" in a land of dreams, they have become tenderfeet on the frontier of Reality.
It is, indeed, almost permissible to say that they have been born again.
For if the boy (a creature physically active in a world of the imagination) is indeed "father to the man" (the average young man being a creature mentally alert in a world of physical endeavor)—then your newborn adult is a baby. And for a time he reads like a child.
"Stories of action" are the Mother Goose rhymes of young maturity. The cows in them make magnificent leaps. The pussy-cats in them face the music. All the young dogs are elated. And in the end the dish always elopes with the spoon. In short, they are scenarios in which the unassorted fragments of a new, chaotic, "practical" experience are arranged in a rhythm of accomplishment.
XIII
So much, then, for what lies definitely behind us. Let us descend from our flight of observation and take stock of our discoveries.
We have seen that the roads of living and of reading do indeed parallel each other. And that in this parallelism they maintain an active, vital, organic relationship. And that, in the past at least, their joint direction hasbeen the direction of our developing lives.
We have seen, moreover that in traveling these linked roads it behooves us not only to live, but to out-live.
Do you, by any chance, doubt this last?
I know a woman of forty-two who still plays at paper dolls, and who still responds with evidently pleasurable shudders to the reading of that earliest of our remembered tragedies,—
The mouse ran up the clock."
But, "Ah!" you are perhaps saying, "this is an extreme example."
So be it. Yet you all know, I am sure, men and women of an age approximate to hers who, having been safely born into maturity, went no further; and who still continue to ask, both of life and of letters, merely that "something shall happen on every page."
Do you not see what has overtaken them?
They have let life cease to be a development and become a treadmill. They have let living cease to be an adventure and become a habit. And their reading has, of necessity, followed suit.
For although our reading ranges, apparently, much further afield than our lives, the moving centers of their activities coincide. Our living and our reading are like a man and his dog. The man walks along his chosen or his given way. The dog puts rings around him as he moves. Now the dog is ahead, nosing the path. Now it is far behind, re-sniffing the back trail. Now it is off to the right, announcing a treed squirrel. Now it is digging frantically for a ground-hog on the left. But always the center of the dog's activities is the man's moving footsteps. And if the man lies down by the side of the road and falls asleep, sooner or later the dog will come and stretch out beside him.
XIV
And now, having traced the course of these joint roads behind us, let us see if we cannot, on the same lines, prefigure their course ahead. Let us see if we cannot forecast the general direction of maturity's living-and-reading development.
Physical activity is, after all, only the basis of living; only the foundation—the root, if you prefer—of our emotional, our intellectual, our spiritual development. And it is along this line—it is in this direction if at all—that our development takes place and that our experiences pile up. And it is in circles round our progress along this line that that sheep-dog of our experiences, our reading, moves.
For a time, as we have seen, scenarios of action engross us. But variety of action is circumscribed. The situations of physical accomplishment, juggle them as we may, are limited in number. The meaning of life, we gradually discover, develops for us less through what happens to us from without than through what, as a direct consequence of this, happens to us from within. Our physical activities become ordered. Our emotional experiences accumulate. Sooner or later, therefore, we take to using these building-blocks of experienced emotion in reading books of an emotional appeal.
But the reading of love-stories may also cease to be an adventure and become a habit.
For the situations of emotion are also, both in life and in literature, limited in number. The real variousness of our common humanity lies, not in the differences of our emotions, but in the infinite variety and conjugation of our personal reactions to emotion. Little by little, therefore, as our experienced realization of differences accumulates, we reach out toward the reading of books that marshal these differences—books of an intellectual appeal. Perhaps we begin with genre studies and move on to tales of character development. Perhaps we begin with local color effects and move on through parochial literature and books of travel to memoirs, autobiographies, and treatises on historical periods. Perhaps we begin with handbooks of science and move on, through the rudiments of abnormal psychology and the outlines of alien theologies, to the beginnings of speculative philosophy. Or perhaps we pick and choose, push out now on this side now on that—read anything and everything, in short, that, overlapping in some measure our familiar lives and extending a bit beyond into the unknown, enables us to orient ourselves a little in an finitely interesting world, or to forget, by constructing these oases of deciphered orderliness, the immediate disorder that baffles us nearer home.
And here, at first glance, it would seem that we are come to the parting of the ways.
Thus far, we will have jogged along together on a common road. But now that the highway breaks up into a maze of cart tracks, now that one of us may take the trail of science, another that of sociology, another that of fiction, or of esthetics, or of history, or of philosophy, it may seem that we shall never meet again.
But this need not be so.
To discover this it is only necessary for us to go on, each in his own way, with the twin adventures of living and reading.
For, choose what by-ways you will, pursue as many of them as you can, you will find at last that they all give over their fanlike dispersing and begin to bend inward toward reunion—a reunion hidden beneath the horizon, but ever more and more definable in location by the simple geometry of this convergence.
For the ultimate meaning of life inheres, not in the multiplicity of differences that superficially distinguish us, but in the deeper oneness of the common humanity that we share and into which these differences coalesce. And the final miracle of existence lies, not in the swarming diversity of living forms, and in the diverse laws of their separate being, but in the final unity of their relationship to the insoluble Purpose of their common Source.
Sooner or later, therefore, the persistent explorers of the by-ways learn to use their accumulated building-blocks of experienced diversity for the reading of books dealing with unifying relationships—books not of analysis, but of synthesis—books which, in a human instead of a theological sense, we must call books of a spiritual appeal:—the great novel scenarios of the deep-seeing, the great philosophic card-castles of the thinkers, the great poetic prophecies of the seers, the many-sided gospels of the elect.
XV
Here, then, is the sense of direction that we have been seeking.
But it is more than a sense of direction. It is the road itself. It is the inclusive highway of all our individual adventures. For it is the unbuoyed but inevitable channel of the mind. Along it, if we are to move at all, we must make our way. And while it is wide enough to accommodate us all, and deep enough to float genius itself, yet no flat-bottomed skiff of human intelligence is of such light draught that it will not ground on the mud flats at the channel's edge if the course be lost.
The woman referred to some pages back, the one of forty-odd who still plays at paper dolls and chortles over nursery rhymes, is hard aground at the very entrance to the fairway—the machinery of her mind, poor soul, disabled in a collision between her head and the carriage-block when the nurse dropped her at the age of two.
But there are more kinds of arrested development than are diagnosed by the doctors.
Those other women—there are thousands of them—who never read anything but love-stories—the same old love-stories with the same old plots and the same old situations, everlastingly ripped and turned and sponged and pressed and refurbished and retrimmed, but always modeled on the same adolescent dream and the same sixteen-year-old idealism—they too are hard aground a few years up the course.
And those men—there are thousands of them—who vary the breakfast business-beer-garden-bed treadmill by reading endless successions of adventure tales and detective yarns and pipe-dreams of exotic action—"because they help to pass the time"—they too are keel-fast: grounded on the bar between an over-ripe adolescence and an undeveloped maturity. They are like mathematicians who spend their skill counting sheep to put themselves to sleep.
XVI
But it is neither the nursery rhymes, nor the love-stories, nor the adventure scenarios that are at fault.
All these things "belong."
No illusion or delusion, no dream or desire, no crude instinct or unfolding impulse or conscious ideal that is native to humanity, is outside the legitimate field of our realization and re-realization through reading—of our repeated "redding up" and of our progressive formulation for ourselves in the constantly accumulating terms of our own experience.
The only fault, the fatal fault, is stagnation—arrested development.
Nor does this mean that we should leave nursery rhymes behind, and love-stories, and adventure tales. We should n't. Not any more than we should kill the "child" in us, or the lover, or the sense of adventure. We should carry these things with us and develop them as we develop. There are nursery rhymes for every mile of the way. There are love-stories for every stage of growth. There are adventures for every enlargement of our consciousness and our understanding.
XVII
But perhaps you will be asking why I have called this channel "unbuoyed" when there are so many guide-marks set up by earlier voyagers, so many charts of the best reading, so many pilot-critics ready to come aboard and steer for us.
I am not for a moment suggesting that you should discard any of these aids to navigation. But if you will recall our discovery as to how we get our meanings for words—by reacting spontaneously to them and subsequently criticizing the reactions; and if you will remember our noting the similar source of all life's meanings for us—the subsequent weighing and valuing of our actual, spontaneous, personal responses to life's stimuli; and if you will remember our final conclusion that "culture" in any form is only derivable from books at all because reading is a form of living in that things actually happen in us when we read,—you will see why I used this word.
All these buoyed courses of reading, all these charts of other voyagings, all these authorities on the shortest routes to selected destinations, invaluable as they are and most needful to be used by us to the fullest of their real power to serve us, are, and can only be, aids to intelligent experimentation on our individual parts.
For what actually happens in us when we read, and the way we combine these actual happenings with all that has previously happened in us both in living and reading—this is the sole, the determining, the final reality for each of us. And when we have studied all the charts there are, when we have listened to all the advice that is offered to us, all actual progress toward our ultimate destination (whatever that may be) is made by our pushing ahead, up channel, and taking soundings as we go.
XVIII
It is no part of the purpose of this book to influence your choice of a goal.
We all start from the same port and none of us are "bound through"—for the channel is longer than our individual lives and lengthens with the life of the race. But we sail, under sealed orders, bound for many havens. No two of us have the same equipment, the same driving power, the same draught, or the same radius of possible attainment. We are all born with a multitude of latent tendencies. We develop, or fail to develop, these in different orders and in different degrees as we go. And as we variously increase this development, we variously enlarge our outlooks and alter our conscious objectives. And there are as many resultant routes as there are points of destination and people moving toward them.
But it is all the same from the standpoint of our present inquiry.
Our aim in reading may be the most aimless pursuit of pleasure. Or it may be the most concentrated utilitarian seeking for knowledge. Or it may be the most many-sided desire for self-enhancement through coördinated understanding. It may all be done through "wanting to forget," or through "wanting to play," or through "wanting to know," or through such alternations or combinations of these reasons as develop with our development. It makes no difference to our present inquiry. For the force behind any one of these urges, or the force behind any possible combination of them, can only expend itself either in driving us along some personal line of development in the direction that we have just determined and have called the inevitable channel of the mind, or in driving us rudderlessly round and round some vicious circle of stagnation.
XIX
Standing at noon with a sextant to his eye, the sailor, by measuring the height of the sun above the ocean's rim, can figure his latitude in mid-Atlantic. And any one of us who will measure, with the glass of honest self-scrutiny, the height of his interest in life above the mean level of new-fledged grown-up-ism, can locate his position on the chart and stick a pin in it.
As for the compass, it is a delicate instrument, but very simple. In reading, as we are now aware, we know but two urges to action. The first of these, the impulse to "find ourselves," no matter how casual or how concentrated its manifesting may be, is always in some shape a seeking for truth. To the second, the impulse to "escape from ourselves," two courses are open. It may turn from a truth-quest that has tired us to a truth-quest that stimulates, amuses, or allures—may seek a change of truth, like a city-dweller seeking the sea, or a hillsman descending to the plains. Or it may turn from the discouragement of living to the anodyne of reading lies about life.
And the arrow of this interest impulse, forever oscillating on the pivot of our mood, is the needle of the compass. When, and only when, it swings toward truth, it points the channel.
And "truth"?
Inevitably at this point the Pontius Pilate in us—the finite in us, saving its face before the infinite—shrugs its shoulders and asks the unanswerable question, "What is Truth?"
But let us not drag this metaphysical anise-seed bag across the trail of our inquiry.
A human philosopher, trying to take in Truth with a capital T in order to define it, is like a Spanish mackerel, trying to swallow the ocean in which it swims in order to comprehend it. Many fishes have drowned and many philosophers gone mad in the frantic gluttony of these ambitions. So let us be at once more moderate and more practical. Let us write "truth" with the lower case t of our mortal limitations and define it in terms of the only pursuit of it that is open to us—a seeking-out of the discoverable relationships between the world inside us and the world without.