How to Read/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
THE WORLD OUTSIDE US AND THE
WORLD WITHIN
I
The pursuit of truth as we have just defined it—the searching-out of discoverable relationships between the life within us and the life without—is not a new or a specialized activity that is here being presented as worthy of your attention. On the contrary, it is another of those things that we have all been doing—another of those basic, inevitable, and universal activities that we have all been engaged in, sometimes consciously, but far more often without realizing it, in every hour of our lives and in every paragraph of our reading.
And it is the purpose of the present chapter to do three things: (1) To bring home to each of us, in the familiar and recognizable terms of our common knowledge and experience, the fact that the searching-out of these relationships is, quite simply and literally, the essential reality of what we are actually and constantly doing when we read. (2) To show the immense advantage we can gain for ourselves by reading with this understanding as an operative part of our equipment. And (3) to point out a few practical ways of applying the lever of this advantage in our actual practice.
II
We all realize at once that the investigations and experiments of a Pasteur are searchings for relationships between the life inside us and the life outside.
We see at a glance that the physician, and the bacteriologist, and the organic chemist, and the comparative psychologist, and the philosopher, and the theologian, are all, quite literally, pursuing truth in these terms.
But we do not, as a rule, realize that every man and woman who reads in the morning paper a paragraph describing a tenement fire, or a society ball, or a murder in the slums, is doing the same thing. Indeed, if we happen never to have thought of the matter from this angle, this statement of it appears wholly absurd to us. The idea involved is one that we have never "distilled" and have n't in stock. It is an idea that cannot, by being stated, be put into our heads. But it happens to be a realization the necessary ingredients of which we now have on hand and can therefore proceed to compound.
III
If there is one fact that we have grown thoroughly to understand and accept, it is the fact that we have nothing to read with except our own experience—the seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and touching that we have done; the fearing and hoping and hating and loving that has happened in us; the intellectual and spiritual reactions that have resulted; and the assumptions, understandings, prides, prejudices, hypocrisies, fervors, foolishnesses, finenesses, and faiths that have thereby been precipitated in us like crystals in a chemist's tube.
We are all, therefore, quite ready to nod our heads in agreement over the statement that we read in terms of mental conceptions made out of this accumulated experience, just as a child builds castles from its wooden blocks.
We are, in other words, agreed upon the character of our building-material.
But we have not, as yet, turned the spotlight of our inquiry upon the character of these buildings themselves. We have not yet, except by the vaguest of implications, determined what it is that these outwardly dissimilar structures, that we are forever building up and tearing down again on the nursery floors of our imagination, really represent. And this is the question that we are now about to ask ourselves.
When we rustle the pages of the "Morning Advertiser” or open the "Evening Howl"; when we read the current numbers of our favorite magazines; when we enter the lists with Ivanhoe or camp with Achilles before Troy; when we repeople the cave-man's cave or fore-furnish the mansions of the blessed,—what is the real character of the castles we are rearing with our building-blocks of past experience?
Let us put the cart before the horse and face the answer before we pursue the inquiry: All these structures represent ourselves.
Of course I know that in reading this tence you are setting me down as a cynic. You have an uncomfortable feeling that I am "knocking" human nature. You would like to think that you are a bit bruised in your idealism. But I have hopes of regaining your confidence. For, to begin with, it is not the essential you that is shocked by this statement; it is some of those "assumptions, prejudices, and hypocrisies that have been precipitated in you" that are shocked. The essential you makes an involuntary motion of recognition toward the statement and is shamefacedly ready, somehow, to rejoice in it. And, as we shall see presently, the essential you is eminently right. For it is ourselves—ourselves subdivided and reassembled, ourselves dressed up and disguised and commissioned to play a part, ourselves outfitted and sent forth on adventure-tours of investigation, and then recalled to make reports—that we read with. And in this complex and many-mannered reaching out and harking back it is ourselves that we are, in endless alternation, building into and building out of the world as we go.
But let me introduce you to a young castle-builder that I met the other day.
IV
He was standing, straddle-legged, on Riverside Drive, looking down to one of the jutting piers from which covered carts of ashes were being dumped into waiting scows. He was about five—dressed in a sort of tight-fitting union suit, hand-knitted out of white wool. And as I passed him I heard him announce to his nurse in tones of irrevocable decision, "When I'm big I'm going to be an ashman."
Now the chances are that before the news of his determination reaches you he will have changed his mind. He may even, meanwhile, have made and unmade other choices of profession. And the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of his ultimately turning out something widely different from them all—say a stockbroker. But somewhere, deep down inside the bank president or bookkeeper that he and Life will some day compromise on his becoming, there will remain that ashman possibility—that undeveloped ashman-self—that I recently saw him in the act of realizing. There will remain, also, the policeman possibility, and the possibilities of the engine-driver, the plumber's assistant, the recruiting sergeant, the drum major, and the sandwich man, each of which he will for a while have seen himself capable of being. And there will remain other deep-buried possibilities. Hundreds—thousands—of possibilities and of combinations of them. There will be possibilities that he will have glimpsed and forgotten. There will be possibilities that he will have developed a little and abandoned. There will be possibilities the existence of which he will never have so much as suspected. In short, there will be in him the more or less undeveloped germs of all the innumerable potential selves that life, as he will have lived it, will have given him no chance to be.
And this, at the moment that you read these words, is true of you. It is true of me as I write them. It is true of us all. We are populous with unrealized selves: with might-have-been's; with partially-were's; with some- times-are's; with may-yet-be's. And the character-structures that we rear when we are reading are working models of these potential selves.
V
And yet, this is only half the truth.
For having, out of our own potentialities, made an Ivanhoe to ride into the lists, we retire, as it were, to the side-lines and watch the Ivanhoe we have created and sent forth. Having contrived a personal and heroically sulky Achilles out of our own attributes, we straightway scale the imagined walls of Troy and look down with new eyes upon the ancient world. Having made a murderer and a victim out of the might-have-been's and the may-yet-be's within us, we sit, as it were, in reserved seats at our own movies, and experience (in varying degrees according to our natures and our moods at the moment) the passions of participants and the emotions of onlookers.
In fine, having, at the instigation of the author, explored a new corner of the world within us and made a new synthesis of what we found there, we proceed, in the person of the character thus created, to explore new aspects of the outer world.
VI
Let us pause a moment, here, to draw a subtle yet highly important distinction. In every elaborate narrative, historical, fictional, or what-not, there are figures—men, women, and children—that we visualize, whose words we listen to, whose actions we vitagraph, whose very heft and bulk and, it may be, contact with ourselves, we vividly realize and are aware of; yet with whom we do not at all, in the sense above set forth, identify ourselves. And the fact that we do not, any more than if they were trees or houses or other inanimate portions of the external world, construct these figures as working models of our potential selves, may seem, at first glance, to vitiate the analysis and exposition above arrived at.
But a moment's consideration will suffice to give us the explanation. These figures are mere objects in the external world. The fact that they are animate objects—the fact that they are animate human objects even—does not in the least alter their relation of externality to the character or characters with whom for the moment we are ourselves identified.
But mark the change that may, at any moment, take place in the equilibrium of our attitude. Let one of these figures cease to be a mere animated object in the story's world, and become, for a page or a paragraph even, the experiencing subject of the story's emotions, let one of them change, for so little as two minutes, from being a part of that outer- world-that-is-being-explored and become the explorer, and instantly we begin to "judge him by ourselves," to "put ourselves in his place." In the one case we construct these figures, exactly as we construct the trees and houses, the horses and cattle of the story's requirements, from the stored observation and accumulated materialism of our past experience. In the other we construct them, no matter how fleetingly and sketchily, as vicarious embodiments of our potential selves. In the one case we regard them as a part of that "world outside us" with which we are seeking discoverable relationships. In the other case we regard them as a phase of the "world within us" momentarily dramatized and engaged in the search.
VII
And this brings us to a point where, as the children say, we are "very warm." We are now so near to the idea that we have set out to grasp and make our own that we should only need, if we knew the way, to reach out the fingers of our minds and curl them round it.
We have discovered the character of the buildings that we are constantly erecting, as we read, out of the building-blocks of our past living. We know now that all these structures represent, either phases of the world within us, or phases of the world without. And we know that in all our reading we are in some manner confronting some potentiality of our own with some conceivable situation. As yet, it is true, we have only demonstrated these facts with regard to fiction, history, epic poetry, or some form of narrative composition. But we shall shortly satisfy ourselves that the same conditions hold true in the reading of the driest scientific treatise or of the most abstract philosophical speculation.
It only remains, therefore, for us to convince ourselves—not on the authority of some one's say-so, but from our own criticism of our own experience—that the actual relevancy to ourselves of these constantly varied confrontations, and the source of the enjoyment derived from making them, lies, as we have assumed, in their being seekings-out of discoverable relationships between the two worlds from which they are taken.
Let us see if we can do this.
You and I and almost every American of our generation have, at some flaming moment of realization, thanked God that he or she had not been handicapped as was Helen Keller; and have marveled at the triumph of her almost incredible climbing out of the prison of herself into consciousness of the world and into communion with her fellow men. And it is even possible to ask ourselves whether, had Miss Keller not been vouchsafed the few months of sight and hearing that were hers in infancy, she could later on have been released from her solitary confinement.
But we are less likely to have realized that, at the instant of birth, every one of us is imprisoned, incomunicado, in our undeveloped selves; and that it is not in initial situation, but in means at hand for escape from that situation, that we differ from a child born into eternal darkness and unbreakable silence.
For we, unlike such a misfortunate, are born into a world visibly peopled by our kind. From the first, the instructions of our instincts are supplemented by impulses of imitativeness derived from without. We see, with uncomprehending eyes, long before we are consciously stirred to perception. We suck in explanations through our senses long before we know that we are to have need of them. But such a Helen Keller as we have imagined, having almost no way of recognizing the existence of others, would have almost no way of picking the lock of her own meaning. It would not merely be that the things that touched her body would be non-existent to her except as contacts: the very things that she touched herself with—her own fingers and toes—would be inexplicable to her because she knew no others like them.
We have all, in our time, thrilled at the thought of Robinson Crusoe, discovering in the sand of his island beach a footprint that was not his own. But think of some Helen Keller, marooned before she was born on a far more isolate island, stretching out what she did not know was a human hand and finding in the void a face the facsimile of hers!
That face we can think of as her first book. It would be printed in raised characters for the blind. Slowly, like one spelling out unfamiliar words, we can imagine her reading its features in terms of her own. And then, in the two-edged moment of final realization, we can imagine her first conception of personal identity unfold into her first inkling of an ordered world.
VIII
But let me tell you of an actual experience of my own.
Little by little, when I was a boy, I became conscious of the fact that in learning the alphabet, and in learning to count, I had somehow involuntarily assigned positions in space to the letters and numerals of these series. Indeed I had built these letters and numerals into definite and visualizable structures, which never changed, which were almost always present at the back of my consciousness when I was dealing with letters or numbers, and upon which, as upon a scaffolding, I located say the letter P, or the number 45, when I had occasion to deal with either as a part of a system. Thus the numerals from I to II were to me a set of steps that led up to a platform that was 12. Between this platform and another (which was 20) the teens, like a rope ladder, hung in a sagging curve. And from 20 to 100 the figures climbed in a series of rigid scaling-ladders of nine rungs each, that were set up between platforms that receded as they rose. The alphabet, on the other hand, ran directly away from me, rising and falling like a one-track scenic railway. Even the Lord's Prayer was organized. It ran down, like a trail into some cañon, from "Our Father," at the top in the sun, to a dark, deep bottom where "Amen" echoed in the gloom.
And as I grew older, and no one in my hearing ever mentioned having such notions, I came to assume that no one had them. I began to fancy myself, in this respect, different from my kind—mentally deformed. The consciousness of the thing became a secret trouble of which I was ashamed; and there were even times when I wondered if it might not be the beginning of insanity.
And then, on a happy evening, a young physician of my adolescent acquaintance happened in the course of conversation to mention this almost universal child-habit of contriving space-symbols for mind-sequences. He spoke of the fact that as we grow up we gradually cease to need them, and hence discard and forget them; so that many people in later life are quite unconscious of ever having had or used them. He asked me whether, by chance, I still remembered mine.
Can you not imagine the eagerness with which I described to him my prayer-cañon, my numerical scaling-ladders, my alphabetical scenic railway? Can you not picture the interest with which I leaned over his shoulder while he took pencil and paper and drew for me diagrams of his own symbol-conceptions and of those of others?
For myself, I shall never forget that evening. For on it, like the Helen Keller we have imagined, I reached out into the dark and found a duplicate of myself. On it I got my first inkling of the truth I am here illustrating for you.
IX
For it is only as members of a species that we are comprehensible to our own intelligence.
It is only by our likeness to others that we understand ourselves. It is only by their likeness to us that we understand others. And these two understandings are not independent of each other and separate. They are complementary to each other and reciprocal—like the indrawing and exhaling of our breath. The life within us and the life without are halves of a whole.
Of course it may occur to you to challenge the statement that we only arrive at an understanding either of ourselves or of one another through our mutual resemblances; because, for each one of us, so large a part of these reciprocal understandings consists of estimated differences. But these differences, when we come to sift them, always turn out to be differences of degree and never differences of kind. To you, a ruby lantern suspended in darkness may be a jewel and a joy; while a green lantern, similarly placed, may be almost a matter of indifference. And to me these conditions may be reversed. Yet if we compare notes we readily understand each other. But a man who was color blind, and to whom, in consequence, red and green were utterly and forever undistinguishable, could only make shift to understand our feelings in regard to them by telling himself that, whatever they were, they must be of a nature analogous to his own feelings in regard to blue and orange. And a man born blind, although from repeated assurances he might have come to accept it as a fact that he was somehow different from us others, could never in the remotest sense conceive the nature of the difference.
X
And what we have thus come to realize as true in regard to the life we share with other humans, is equally true of the life we share in a less complete manner with all that is animate on earth. It is through their disclosed resemblances to ourselves, and by our consequent fragmentary ability to "put ourselves in their places," that alone we are able to understand the impulses that move these other lives and to estimate the differences in degree that mark the gulfs between us.
And I hope that at this point you will cry out in protest against my apparent neglect of our manifest ability to know the "facts" about an insect or an animal without in the least understanding it or caring to. For this brings us face to face with the last point necessary to be elucidated for the complete grasping of the idea that we are engaged in introducing "into our heads."
For the only means we have of "knowing the facts" about an insect or an animal, is the noting of the relationships that it bears to the material world—that is to say, to the environment that we share in common with it. And our sole means of acquiring knowledge, understanding, or mastery over this environment—over the world without us—or of instinctively and progressively adapting ourselves to its iron-clad requirements, is the conscious or unconscious seeking-out of its relationships to ourselves—to the world within us. For these two worlds are also halves of a whole.
XI
Just as it is true, then, that it is only as members of a species that we—or it—are comprehensible to our own intelligence; so it is true that it is only as members of the physical universe that we as such members, or it as such a universe, are in any measure to be grasped by us.
And exactly as we read a novel, or a history, or an epic, or any narrative of human activity, by confronting successive "characters,"—successive dramatized syntheses of our own inner selves,—with various aspects of the world and of life, so we read a work on mathematics, or a description of a mechanical device, or a speculation in abstract science or philosophy, by confronting successive syntheses of our previously gathered perceptions and ideas on the subject with the successive new conditions proposed by the author.
We do not read this way because we have studied the matter out and have determined that it is a good way to do. We do it because we are built that way and have to. We read this way because, the world within us and the world without being related as they are, it is the only way we have of reading. And all of our reactions to reading—all our laughter and tears, all our elations and depressions, all our delights and disgusts, our acceptances and rejections, our understandings and perceptions and acquiescences and disagreements—are the direct and sole result of supposedly discovered relationships between these two worlds, made in the course of these mental and imaginative confrontations. Thus laughter is a reaction to relationships discovered where they were least expected, or to relationships appearing to exist, but suddenly discovered to be preposterous.
XII
And now, before we go on to consider the advantages we can gain by making this idea that we have now grasped an operative element in our actual reading, let us pause a moment and look back, with this new understanding in mind, at the separate steps of our earlier inquiry. We shall see that the facts that we have there successively established are beginning to join hands in a ramifying network of significance, and that our previous conclusions are already establishing among themselves cross-references of connection.
When, for example, we recall the first chapter of this book, we see more many-sidedly than at first why it is only through the story that we tell ourselves that an author's story gains meaning for us.
When we remember our examination into the function of the dictionary, we see fresh reasons why we have constantly to contrive new meanings of our own for the words of others.
When we now look back at those vague and egotistical sounding phrases, "a desire to find ourselves" and a desire to "get away from ourselves," we find that we have acquired a more complex but also a more ordered conception of the true meanings of these expressions; and that the sanctions that underlie them have become less questionable to us.
We see, also, more clearly and comprehendingly why it is that only those "meanings" (which is to say those ideas of relationship) that we have first internally felt and then objectively criticized (which is to say measured up with other accepted meanings and relationships) can—whether they be the meanings of words or the meaning of the world—become a part of individual culture for us.
We see new reasons why that sense of direction which we defined for ourselves in the last chapter, and found to coincide with the line of development of the individual and the race, is not a matter of our arbitrary choice, but of inherent necessity—why it is that we must somehow move along it, or somewhere stagnate on the way.
We see, as we could not see at the beginning of the present chapter, that the living that we ourselves do is never really comprehended by us until (with or without the aid of books) we have read and re-read it into other lives; and that the infinitely various livingness of others is never really grasped by us until we have read and re-read it into as many as may be of those potential selves that life has denied us the chance to be.
And we see, finally, that "the adventure of learning to read," that we spoke of on an earlier page,—the lifelong adventure of learning progressively to reemploy the living that we do for the further exploring of these two infinitely interesting worlds,—is not two adventures, but the inseparable halves of one adventure.
XIII
And now we come to the second point of our present discussion—the advantages that will acrue to us if we make deliberate use of this idea in our reading.
We have seen that all our reactions to reading, no matter how momentary or how momentous they may be, are in reality reactions to relationships consciously realized or unconsciously sensed as existing, either directly between some aspect of our inner selves and some aspect of the outer world, or directly between various aspects of the outer world, each of which bears its own relation to our inner selves. And what we are really asking ourselves is how (since we seem to achieve these reactions instinctively and spontaneously and without taking thought about them) it can possibly advantage us deliberately to note their nature and consciously to inquire from time to time into their hidden meanings.
And the answer (which is twofold) is based on the fact that we are forced by the very conditions of our being either to read on into new realizations of relationship, or to read round and round in the worn circle of those we have. And the first half of this answer is that every road of reading, no matter what its character may be or what may be our purpose in following it, will sooner or later be blocked for us by unrealized relationships unless we learn little by little to deal recognizingly and inquiringly with relationships as they arise. And the second half of the answer is that every relationship thus consciously noted and more or less criticized and coördinated with others of its kind, becomes a part of our reading capital—becomes a building-block in itself, employable at need either as a unit in future constructions, or as an entering wedge in future analyses.
XIV
And this brings us to our third point—the problem of method.
How are we to set about developing this seeking-out of relationships into an actively operative factor in our actual reading, without making a labor of what should be an engrossing adventure and a zestful satisfying of our natural appetites?
And before attempting to answer this question—before indicating a practicable approach to a method whose later developments are always individual adaptations of personal means to personal ends—it will be well for us to place before ourselves, on the one hand, a reminder, and, on the other hand, a caution.
Let us be careful to remember, then, that to speak of our inborn and instinctive craving for recognized relationships between our complex selves and our involved environment as a "natural appetite," is by no means a figure of speech. For a natural appetite is exactly what this craving is. It is as basic and as actual an appetite as that for food. And just as we are guided to the seeking of food by hunger, so we are guided to the seeking of relationships by curiosity. And just as we judge the food we find, primarily by our uncriticized likes and dislikes of its taste and smell, so we judge the relationships we discover, primarily by our uncriticized likes and dislikes of their implications. And just as we alter our appreciations and modify our habits in regard to food, and are influenced in our later attitudes toward it by subtle matters of digestive results and gustatory education, so we gradually reorganize our standards of value and extend our range of enjoyment in the seeking of relationships, influenced thereto by the accumulating understandings that are the result of intellectual digestion. And this fact—this appetite-relation that curiosity bears to our reading—it will be well for us to keep in mind.
The caution that we must remember, on the other hand, is that all development, along such lines and by such steps as we are about to examine, is a development and must be gone through stage by stage. The juggler who holds us fascinated by the easy dexterity with which he keeps eleven balls cascading in the air above his hands, did not begin with eleven. He began with two—acquiring, so to say, a muscular familiarity with the relations between them and his hands before adding a third ball and beginning to master the relationships thus complicated. How much more, then, is it necessary for us to be modest in our beginnings in acquiring control over these far more tricksy and more mutually interdependent playthings, the relationships with which we are now dealing?
XV
The first rule, then, that it behooves us to observe for a gradual, unforced, yet effective approach to this better reading, is that we must learn to look upon our curiosity as the prompting of our mental hunger. We must, little by little, learn to value our curiosity just as we learn, little by little, to value "appetite." And we must learn, little by little, to exercise something of the same common sense and common caution in the satisfying of the one that we do in the satisfying of the other.
The French have a proverb which says that the man who does not understand his own stomach at thirty is a fool. Let us be honest enough to apply this aphorism to our minds also.
XVI
It should not, by now, be necessary, but it may none the less be wise, to point out that any reading that we do which is undertaken through some impulse of "wanting to know" is directly motivated by curiosity. And that any reading that we do which is undertaken through some impulse of "wanting to play" is motivated by that form of potential curiosity that we call "keenness" and which is at the very least a readiness to be interested. And that no reading undertaken through any impulse of "wanting to forget" can really become effective of its object unless one or other of these forms of curiosity shall, like hunger aroused by eating, be stirred to life in us by the act of reading.
Curiosity, then, is the only conscious stimulus we have to begin with; and it continues to be, throughout whatever reading development may come to us, the underlying motive-power back of all our seekings, all our findings, and all our passings-on. And the intention of our first rule is the practical applying of this knowledge, by gradually learning to regard as an appetite all curiosity or keenness that impels us toward reading, and to regard all the reading that we do as in some sort a satisfying of an appetite.
But this being understood, it must be noted that overt curiosity and anticipatory keenness, and developing interest, are all, when we begin a book or a magazine article or what-not, apt to be of a general or "blanket" variety; and are apt, in the main, to develop cumulatively along some central and specialized axis; as when, as we frequently say, we become "so interested in a story" that we can "hardly wait to see how it comes out." And we shall have occasion later on to consider the guiding of our curiosity in regard both to the developing relationships involved in a story's unfolding and to the criticizing of indicated conclusions involved in a story's ending. But for the moment we must pass these larger matters by in order to examine certain minor manifestations of curiosity or interest that more immediately concern us.
Please note, then, that, even in reading the most engrossing story in the world, the swift surface of the main stream of our interest is constantly flecked by floating feelings of liking and disliking; is constantly flawed by little upwelling bubbles of inquiry; is constantly dimpled by tiny whirlpools of subsidiary curiosities,— curiosities as to why's and where-fore's and probabilities and fittingness,—all of which, as we now know, are instinctive sensings or half-conscious reachings-out after relationships. And this fact, so universally common in the experience of us all, yet so frequently regarded with impatience or indifference, brings us to the formulation of our second rule.
XVII
Our second rule, therefore, is that we must learn to evaluate our subsidiary curiosities.
How often has it not happened to each of us, in hurrying across some stone-paved station or down some mosaic-floored hallway, to hear a little tinkle as of metal on marble behind us, and to half-wonder for a second what it was, and then, the next day, perhaps, to miss some trinket that we valued and to say, "There! That must have been what dropped when I heard that noise!"
The promptings of our subsidiary curiosities as we read are the tinkling sounds of relationships dropping in our paths.
XVIII
"But," you may exclaim, "if I am to interrupt my reading every time that I am conscious of a like or a dislike, every time I experience a tendency toward inquiry, every time I am conscious of a blur of puzzlement or twinge of curiosity, what is to become of the 'merged series' of my 'mental movies'? I want to read my book. I don't want to run an intellectual detective agency!"
And this objection, if any such procedure were required of us, would be eminently well taken. But happily this is not the case. We must learn to value our subsidiary curiosities, but, as we shall presently see, there is a very simple and practical way of discriminating between them. Moreover, a large majority of these collateral stirrings of our interest and curiosity that are prompted by our reading, are actually dealt with by such instant and hardly noticed mental gestures as that described in the case of our reading of the sentence, "The bond that held them together was thus a spiritual tie."
You will now see, by the way, that the "meaning" problem involved in that sentence was, in reality, a relationship problem.
It is true that the beginner, who is for the first time trying consciously to improve his methods of reading along these lines, will on occasion be rendered self-conscious by his new realization of the multiplicity of such promptings. But in practice he will soon find that most of these matters are being dealt with without, so to put it, his mind's bothering him about them. For in all our activities, mental as well as physical, there is a constantly shifting focus of conscious attention, upborne by a whole sub-system of unconscious adequacy and action. And one of the first things that an observer learns about his mind action in reading is that, while the conscious focus of his intelligence is "reading his book," another, half-conscious portion of his mental activity is engaged in correcting slight errors of understanding, picking up dropped stitches of minor relationship, and generally "redding up" and keeping things decently shipshape behind him as he goes along.
And as this rear-guard portion of one's reading activity is quite as dependent as the other upon one's reading capital of past experience, of already realized relationships, and of previously cross-referenced understandings, the longer one practices the better and more purposeful reading we are considering, the more quick-witted and efficient and joyously industrious does this half-conscious portion of our mind become in the prosecution of its humble yet vastly important work.
XIX
Yet the fact remains that there are many promptings of our subsidiary curiosity with which this half-conscious and essentially cooperative portion of our minds is incapable of dealing. There are, indeed, many more of them than we have either time or need to deal with at all. And so we must discover some touchstone of discrimination.
We do not, as a matter of fact, and because we have lost a few lockets and cigarette cases and knives and gold coins by neglecting the tinkle they made in falling, go about forever after investigating every sound we hear behind us, or eternally slapping all our pockets in turn to make sure that we are missing nothing. We learn, after a while, to discriminate between tinkles. And this discernment is the problem we are now facing. Moreover it involves, and brings down to the test of actual practice (as I hope you will see) some of those shrewd distinctions between conscious and unconscious performance that we have previously discussed, and some of the principles of deliberate criticism and control of spontaneous reactions to what we read that we have already inquired into.
XX
Here, then, is our third rule—a rule upon which, in the beginning, we can safely rely for a conservative yet valid discrimination and for a gradual but effective habit-forming:
Never neglect any prompting of subsidiary curiosity that is, of itself, sharp enough to shift, though only for a few seconds, the conscious focus of your reading attention.
Never, for instance, if you are moved to wonder whether or not you would, in his place, have acted as a character in your story is supposed to act, fail to weigh the query at least roughly in the scales of your own self-knowledge. Never fail, for example, to follow out, to the extent of your actually aroused interest, the side question of an action's effect upon other characters of the tale or upon the tale itself. And if it is a scenario of ideas that you are producing, instead of a fiction scenario, or if it is a story of mechanical or chemical relationships that you are reading, instead of a story of human relationships, never fail to follow up, at least to the momentary sating of your aroused interest, any side issue of causal relationship or of logical sequence that similarly forces itself upon your previously otherwise-engaged attention.
But understand that this advice is not for a moment intended to be taken as an urging to "make yourself do something" because you feel it to be "self-educative" or in any other sense "good discipline." It is, on the contrary, to be understood as an urging to let yourself do something that you have a natural prompting to do, but which other promptings, more habitually indulged, and thus grown into tyrannical spoiled-child promptings, are trying to keep you from doing.
In other words, it is not for a moment a priggish, pedantic, bluestocking, high-brow attitude toward a natural and enjoyable occupation that is demanded of us. We are not asked to keep poking ourselves to see if we are alive; or to keep self-consciously taking our mental temperatures to see if we are functioning normally. The fact is just the opposite of this. For right reading, in the direction established in the last chapter, is the normal result of an intelligent following of our natural promptings; and wrong reading—that is to say, reading into some circle of stagnation—is always the result of their willful or slack-minded suppression.
Of course, however, it goes without saying that, as one cannot control a spoiled child without effort, so one cannot control a clamorous, over-indulged, hurry-along-with-the- main-story curiosity without some exercise of will power. And unless this spoiled-child curiosity is controlled and made to behave, it is impossible for us to give play even to the most immediately alluring and ultimately valuable of our subsidiary curiosities. This much of willing effort we must make, then; this much of "self-discipline" we must practice, and must persevere in in spite of initial failures and forgettings, before we can learn to apply this most obvious and natural rule for getting started on the new road.
XXI
And here, for the moment, we might leave the matter. For once a reader has learned something of the quickly accumulating reading capital that piles up in him through a following of these basic rules, and begins to discover the enhancement of his own enjoyment. in reading (whatever the character of that enjoyment may be) that flows from that capital's automatic reinvestment, he will inevitably begin to develop his personal adaptations to the new method. And as soon as we reach this border-land of personal adaptation, we approach that country of individual likes and dislikes, of personal reachings-out and drawings-back, of temperamental tendencies, and intellectual affinities of affiliation, that can never (unless it be by some "psychoanalyst" dependent on our aid) be mapped out for us in advance by others.
But there is one helpful suggestion that may be made before we go on to the consideration of other aspects of our inquiry.
It is quite evident that in reading any article or essay or book that contains a developed theme,—fictional, argumentative, demonstrational, or what-not,—the intelligent reader, no matter what his personal idiosyncracies of method may be, must maintain some sort of just balance between the mass of subsidiary interests we have been discussing, and the main interest of the theme itself. And, since, the more cross-referenced ideas of relationship a reader possesses, the more numerous will be his incidental promptings toward the indulging of subsidiary curiosities, it follows that he must, more and more as he goes on, pick and choose between these promptings.
And we happen to be so built that our undirected choice is almost certain to fall upon those curiosities that have to do with our reactions of liking; while we are apt to set aside and suppress those curiosities (as to derivations and results, as to "why's" and "what-then's") that have to do with reactions of disliking.
The suggestion that I have to make, then, is that you little by little form the deliberate habit of directing your choice toward the indulging of any curiosities as to the nature and meanings of instinctive dislikes that you may be lucky enough to have.
And the reason for this is very simple.
We have already seen that, sooner or later, any road of reading that we may elect to follow will be blocked for us by unrealized relationships if we have not dealt recognizingly and inquiringly with earlier and underlying relationships as these presented themselves. And it so happens that the hidden relationships involved in our reactions of liking will, comparatively speaking and in the long run, take care of themselves. For when we experience a reaction of liking, we welcome it. And when we reëxperience it we re-welcome it; and even savor the recognition and, as it were, roll it for an instant under the tongue of our intelligence. So that little by little we tend, without any other effort on our parts and by the unconscious chemic of our minds, to resolve it into its component elements.
But with a reaction of dislike it is very different. The first few times that we experience it we may have a prompting of curiosity as to its nature and as to the relationships involved in our recoil from it. But if we continue to ignore these, we soon form the habit of dodging the reaction. Instead of savoring it and rolling it under our tongue, we spit it out at the first taste. And in the end (since some kind of a "reason why" our minds must have to be happy) we are as like as not to substitute a prejudice for an understanding, and to accept some cant phrase of our own or of some one else's in lieu of an explanation, and thus to establish once for all an "unrealized relationship" that may block some future road for us with stagnating results.
XXII
We constantly and as a matter of common caution establish for ourselves in our everyday living such arbitrary reminders as this, of things that we know it would be well for us to do, but which we are prone to neglect.
The "shifting focus of our attention," even in such matters as going down town and coming back again, cannot safely be left to work out its own salvation. It is because of this—because each one of the two hundred hurrying humans who are crowding into a subway express is consciously hurrying, or consciously keeping himself from being crushed, or consciously thinking out some left-over business problem, or consciously forecasting some evening pleasure, instead of consciously putting one foot in front of the other—that we keep a guard on the subway platform to call out to them, "WATCH your step!"—"watch YOUR step!" "WATCH—STEP!" And a device that we thus employ in the machinery of our daily lives may well be adapted for use in the machinery of our daily reading.
Suppose, then, that as a beginning you accustom yourself to regard any prompting of natural curiosity or interest you may have in regard to any feeling of distaste or disliking, as an official cry of "Watch your step!" Later on, you will find it easy and expedient to arrange other signals of predetermined significance and watch-dogs of helpful reminder to suit the individual adaptations that you will develop.
And now, having repeatedly referred to the existence of something that we have called our "intellectual digestion," let us take a closer look at this function of our mind and examine its relation to our reading.