How to Read/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
INTELLECTUAL DIGESTION
I
Some wise wag, hiding a parable in a parody, has said that "to eat is human; to digest, divine." And when we come to think about it, we realize that it is exactly here—at the point indicated by the semicolon in this wag's sentence—that we are accustomed (as though at some boundary posting-station where burdens are shifted to other horses and entrusted to new guides) to hand over our responsibilities, quite casually and confidently, to the Unknown Mystery. Three times a day, as self-willed and selective human choosers, we "start something." And three times a day, unless something goes wrong with the mysterious machinery, we experience, with supreme content but with no other concern, the resultant miracle of transubstantiation.
And it is just the same with our minds.
No matter how proud of—I had almost said how "stuck on"—our thinking, and our reasoning powers, and our deductive faculties we may be, it requires very little self-knowledge to realize that these more or less conscious and mechanical forms of mental exercise are but the chewing of our mental food. The ultimate miracle of transubstantiation—the involuntary processes of disintegration and transforming, of selection and rejection, of absorption and assimilation, by which the essentials of ideas and the outcomes of understandings are finally incorporated in our personalities—all this takes place on the further side of another (or is it the same?) semicolon. No less in our reading than in our eating, there is a point at which, quite casually and confidently, we entrust all further responsibility to the Unknown Mystery within us. In short, if you happen to prefer the statement, there is a chemistry of the brain as well as of the body, whose fundamental mystery eludes us, but whose workings we may none the less study, and in the attainments of whose ends it is thus possible for us to coöperate.
And it is the purpose of this chapter (1) to examine, in the light of our everyday experience, the more obvious workings of this mental chemistry; (2) to point out a misconception that we constantly labor under in our reading for want of this simple facing of fact; and (3) to indicate the practical relevancy of these matters to the further developing of the reading-methods we are discussing.
II
Before, however, we go into the laboratory and prepare the simple experiment needed to demonstrate the actual character of the reactions we are wanting to understand, it will be just as well to note a few general facts with regard to our habitual actions and attitude in the matter under discussion. For we are constantly taking the real state of things into account, while failing specifically to recognize their character.
Thus we frequently say to each other, "Yes, I'm inclined to agree with you. But suppose we sleep on it." We even have a proverb that says, "The night brings counsel." And nothing is more common than for a person who has masticated an idea for an hour and then, so to say, swallowed it and forgotten it, to be reminded of it the next day, or the next week, and, finding its appearance subtly altered and his attitude correspondingly changed toward it, to say, "No, I've been thinking that over, and I've changed my mind."
Of course the psychologists hasten to supply us with highly interesting and, incidentally, conflicting theories about involuntary cerebration and the continuous activity of the subliminal consciousness. But for our present purpose it does n't make a bit of difference what you call it. The fact remains that, intellectually speaking, we are ruminating animals. The man just quoted had not, in any ordinary sense, been "thinking it over." He had, quite involuntarily and without any control either of the process or the result, been digesting the idea. His subsequent, conscious consideration of the result was to all intents and purposes a "chewing of his cud."
III
Our first concern, then, is to see whether we cannot manage to surprise our minds in the actual act, while reading, of carrying out some of the coarser and less intricate transformations of its chemic action—just as, with a couple of glass tubes and a bunsen burner, a chemist will enable us to see Nature at her more obvious tricks of prestidigitation.
And by way of preparing the laboratory for our experiment, I am going to ask you to remember, all over again, that the printed matter before your eyes—whether it be on a signboard, or on the front sheet of the morning paper, or on a page of an exciting novel, or in the paragraph that you are now reading—is never a thing in itself, but is always merely printed instructions, like sheet music.
Somehow or other we do not seem to get mixed up about the nature of sheet music.
Even musicians, who "read music" as fluently as you and I read print, do not seem, often, to get mixed up about it.
Practically every one recognizes sheet music for what it actually is; namely, printed instructions as to what to do with a tin whistle, or a flute, or a violin and a piano, or a quartette of stringed instruments, or a full orchestra with its choirs of strings and brasses and woodwinds and instruments of percussion, in order to make music.
But, somehow, it is different with reading matter. About the nature and the purpose of that we are constantly getting mixed.
Suppose, then, that we begin by putting down the facts.
(1) Reading matter, like sheet music, is just printed instructions.
(2) It may be merely instructions as to what to do with a set of muscles and with a pair of eyes and a pair of ears; as in the railway-crossing sign, stop! look! listen!
Or (3) it may be trite instructions (like a tin-whistle tune) for stringing a few thread- bare memories together so as to form a mental image of a "statement of fact"; as (I quote from this morning's paper) "The bride was gowned in white satin and wore a tulle veil caught back with orange blossoms."
Or (4) it may (as in H. G. Wells's novel, "The Research Magnificent") be instructions as to what to do with the full orchestra of one's personal attainment, with all its balanced choirs of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual experience and responsiveness, in order to make, inside one's self, a symphonic, soul-stirring vision of the finenesses of human failure.
But we are constantly forgetting this.
We are constantly settling down into the lazy assumption that the text of a story is the story itself; that the words of a poem are the poetry itself; and forgetting that they are only instructions as to what to do with our memories and our imaginations, our reason and our understanding, in order to create inside ourselves the story or the poem.
And the fact of which, at the present moment, we need to remind ourselves is that, given a page or a volume of these instructions, the rest is "up to us"; just exactly as in the case of a musician with an instrument in his hand, or of a conductor with an orchestra under his baton, when one or other of them opens a volume of sheet music.
IV
We all recognize that the sheet-music method of conveying instructions is a makeshift.
Even the layman knows it for a system of signs, effective on the whole, but nevertheless clumsy. Even the outsider understands that this system of signs is amazingly definite as to main issues, but is often hazy and sometimes wholly inarticulate as to subtleties—that it leaves (not from choice, but from necessity) many niceties of interpretation to the intelligence and the personal decision of the performer.
But we fail as a rule to see that the same thing, only more so, is true of our word-system of conveying instructions. Composers and performers alike, we are in the habit of assuming that our word-system, and especially our printed-word-system, not only equals the other in the definiteness of its main instructions, but is capable of being made almost free from minor haziness.
Yet the facts are quite the other way about.
The instructions of reading matter have, when carefully examined, scarcely any absolute definiteness to them at all.
They leave (and again not from choice but from necessity) not merely the niceties of interpretation, but the first-hand material of the composition itself, to the more or less involuntary selection of the performer.
Of course as an idea—as an intellectual realization—this fact has now become familiar to us. We have repeatedly proved it to our own satisfaction and to our consequent acceptation in the earlier stages of our inquiry. But our present experiment requires something more than this theoretical conviction. And I am therefore going to contrive that you shall, in imagination at least, see the thing in operation with your own eyes.
V
The box adjoining that of the party I was with at a recent Kneisel concert was occupied by two well-known musicians. And I noticed with some curiosity that during the performance of a Haydn quartette these two were sitting well forward in their seats, with a copy of the score held open on their knees, and were watching with the most intent interest the way in which the experts on the stage were following the instructions of the composer. Of course if the piece being played had been a new one, if, say, it had been one of Schoenberg's intricate and radical challenges of harmonic convention, this study of the score on the part of these specialists would not have attracted my attention. But the selection being rendered was one of the loveliest of Haydn's well-known works, and the men I was watching must have been familiar with it for years. And they were not only listening with all their ears to the music, but were following the printed instructions closely and exchanging from time to time quick glances of silent comment and appreciation.
Now it is quite evident that they were not watching to see whether the performers struck the right notes. The definiteness of the instructions on the one hand, and the well-known skill of the performers on the other, made that a foregone conclusion. It was, as we can see, the subtleties of this famous quartette's individual interpretation that they were studying.
But suppose that two of you were similarly to sit, with the pages of Kipling's "The Brushwood Boy" open between you; and suppose that it were possible—by some miracle of mind-reading—for you similarly to watch (and to exchange glances about) the way in which I followed the author's instructions as I read that story to myself.
Do you not see that here would be far deeper differences than any of attack and of accent, of execution and inflection, of tempo and of temperament? Do you not see that, so far from my "striking the right notes" being a matter to be taken for granted, the very materials I worked with would be either foreign to you or non-existent? That the memories I assembled into scenes, and the features I built faces out of, would be unknown to you; and that the combinations I made of them would seem incongruous and inappropriate, since you would lack the associations that I unconsciously chose them for?
Do you not see that my landscape of Kipling's "Dream Country" would be alien to you, and that my cast of his chief characters—the potential myselves with which I peopled that mystic land—would be unrecognizable? Nay, more: do you not see that to no single important word in the entire text would I give your personal meaning; and that the words that were important to me—the words whose grouped meanings every now and then combined to "make things happen in me"—would often be words that you scarcely noticed?
VI
Of course you see all this. But then all this is merely an imaginative dramatization of what we have already discovered and discussed. And I have contrived this dramatized presentation of the actual workings of a reader's mind, not primarily for its own sake, but as a demonstrator in chemistry will dispose the paraphernalia and contrive the operative conditions of an experiment in order that, when the preliminary steps have been taken, the ingredients mixed, the lamp lighted, and the reaction intended to be observed is about to take place, he may invite the onlookers to approach the table and keep a closer watch. And it is this final and closer look that I now ask you to take at my supposed reading of "The Brushwood Boy."
Do you not see that when my readings of certain groups of words "made things happen in me," these happenings would at times consist of the minglings (like those of raindrops on a window pane) of bits of old feeling into spurts of new emotion? And do you not see that at other times these "happenings" would be subtler still; would consist of almost chemical combinings of separate atoms of familiar understanding into the beginnings of new perceptions? And do you not, finally, see that these occurrences would be utterly personal to me, and that, since they would quite literally result in new growths of my personality, they would also be of supreme importance to me?
VII
But our object in examining a bit into the workings of these subtleties is by no means a desire to supervise or control their operation. The mere attempt to do this would instantly defeat its own end by stopping the machinery. Our object is to enable us, by understanding the sources of our reactions to reading, to acquire little by little a better criterion of values as to their output and to help us in gradually building up that attitude toward all reading that is to be the final object of our search.
In the last chapter we examined the more or less concrete, conscious, and voluntary seekings-out of relationships from which the rewards of reading (be these restful diversion, pleasurable stimulation, or utilitarian "knowledge") are most immediately derived. And here we have managed for a moment to glimpse something of the manifold, minute, unconscious, and involuntary play of similar relationship-establishing that goes on, in the very act of reading, beneath the level of our ordinary attention and notice. And having once recognized the existence and glimpsed the nature of this unconscious mental activity, we can understand how, on the one hand, these quick-forming nuclei of emotion and perception rise, now and then, into conscious recognition (like the tips of coral reefs above the sea surface); and how, on the other hand, it must be through some slow, chemic-like continuance of the same activities that our "second thoughts," our "having-slept-on-it" judgments, and all the constructive results of our unconscious "digestion" of ideas and proposals are derived.
But our still more immediate object in examining into our subconscious reactions to reading is the recognizing and getting rid of a misconception that we are all prone to entertain; namely, the notion that it is the amount that we read, and more especially yet the sum of what we remember out of what we read, that really matters.
It is n't.
What really counts is the sum of what happens in us through reading—the ultimate outcome of those "concrete" combinings and "chemical" transformations by which new tissues are added to our intelligence and new cells to our understanding. What counts is not the quantity of our intellectual food, but the products of our intellectual digestion.
VIII
I know a man—he is a contemporary and was once a classmate of my own—who has pushed this misconception to greater lengths than any one I know. Indeed, his mind is less like a digestive apparatus and more like a cold-storage warehouse than anything human I have ever encountered. For some decades now his mental floor-space has been practically filled, so that he no longer adds anything bulky to his stores. But little that has gone into his warehouse has been lost; and nothing that has stayed in it has ever spoiled.
I have watched him for years—watched him with curiosity and amazement—watched him take out from those icily preservative depths and lay down, as it were on the counter of his conversation, supposedly perishable intellectual provender:—the plots of long-forgotten novels, the middle names of now deceased acquaintances, the outlines of old after-dinner arguments, the carcasses of extinct theories, bunches of biographical dates, crates of infertile facts, historical happenings, chemical formulæ, literary quotations,—an endless variety, in short, of mental food that should have been consumed and digested years ago when it was fresh and in season, but which he has preserved, staling but intact, for a generation.
Yet while some of these articles come out a trifle shriveled,—a little sicklied o'er with the cold-storage hue,—no one of them ever shows the slightest sign of having been attacked by the digestive juices of my friend's mentality. And never—certainly never in the last twenty years or so—have I seen any reason to suspect that, by the normal processes of intellectual digestion and assimilation, he has added a single cell to his responsiveness to life or revivified by a single red corpuscle the circulation of his outlook on the world.
And yet, in certain lines, and in the ordinary acceptation of the term, he is "a great reader."
He is also, for our present purpose, a most useful specimen of a horrible example. For nothing ever happens in him when he reads. Nothing, that is, except the occasional storing away, in some still vacant cranny in his refrigerated memory, of one more frozen fact or dead idea.
IX
You will not—or I trust that you will not—imagine for a moment that I am impugning the value of a good memory. I am merely calling attention to the fact that the storing of one's memory through reading is (or should be) a means to an end and not an end in itself. It is like the outfitting and provisioning of the ship of our adventure. Everything that goes into it that we can use later on is of value. Anything that, in the final test, we neither put to practical living use, or take out, like tinned food, and intellectually digest and live by, is a waste of storage-room and a dead burden of superfluous cargo.
The man we are talking about has a most remarkable memory. He has (to change the simile) coddled it and pampered it and "sacrificed himself" in order to "give it every advantage," exactly like a doting mother with an only child. And the result is very similar. This "only child" of his always wants, when there is company, to monopolize the talk. It is as bad as a pet parrot. It fills in every pause with statements of irrelevant fact or offerings of superfluous information. Yet even so, we must not do my friend an injustice. His memory has a value both to himself and to those who know him. To himself I imagine it is like a miser's strong box. When he is not engaged in adding to its contents, he takes out its unproductive treasures and hugs himself in the joy of counting them. And to his acquaintances his memory is like a special supplement to the encyclopædia. One can often turn to it for information that one does not bother to carry round.
X
There is, by the way, a question that it has been his habit to ask me, once a year or so, for a long time. He asks it unexpectedly—apparently when he thinks me off my guard or in an "easy" mood, and thus liable to be surprised into divulging a professional secret.
"John," he asks me, "how do you ever manage to remember all you read?"
Now it is, of course, useless to attempt a direct answer to such a question from such a man. You might explain to him for an hour; but instead of trying to understand what you meant, he would be trying to remember what you said. So I take refuge in the Socratic method. I ask him a question myself.
"George," I say, "you eat three meals a day all the year round. How do you manage to hold all you eat?"
But he fails to get it.
I can see by the expression of his eyes—those windows to his warehouse —that he simply thinks that I have once more proved too alert to be caught napping and have once more guarded the secret that he so wants me to share with him. For he has noticed that I have "ideas" in stock that he has, somehow, failed to pick up. And he naturally assumes that, since I have them, I must somewhere have read them and remembered them. How else, on the cold-storage basis of accumulating mental capital, can they have gotten into my refrigerator? What he is really asking for is my ammonia formula for preserving an even mental temperature of 36° Fahrenheit. And some day, on his tombstone, we shall find engraved, "Lord, keep my memory cold."
XI
Let us each, at this point, do what George apparently never does, and ask ourselves a question. And let us each, before we go on with our discussion, try just for a second or two to find an honest answer. Here is the question:—
"What did I have for dinner on the tenth of last April?"
Doubtless we have all forgotten.
Yet the mere effort to remember has set blood to flooding the arterial filaments in our brains. And it is quite likely that in this very blood (which has just failed to stir into action the memory cells charged with the details of that menu) there has flowed some transmuted essence of that unremembered meal.
And it is no otherwise with reading.
Two months from now you may remember, or you may have forgotten, the verbal expositions of this chapter. But, assimilated and built into the living tissues of your intelligence, transubstantiated and incorporated in the very thoughts you will be thinking with, there will be (if any thing at all "happens in you" as you read it, and if anything digestively happens in you afterward) the essence of what you have extracted from this intellectual meal.
XII
And now we come to the practical point,—the point that may, as yet, seem very blind and unlikely to be practical,—namely, the relevancy of all this to our actual reading.
For our memories, as we know, are apparently arbitrary, self-willed, and inconsistent. They are given to retaining, unasked, a host of things that we think we have no interest in or use for; while mislaying, or losing, things that we have begged them in vain to keep for us. Indeed, the best of them sometimes act like pockets with holes in them—letting five-dollar pocket-knives drop out, but retaining the crumpled seat-coupons of a vaudeville show. Yet in spite of this I would seem to be urging you to give over the training of your memories and to be counseling, instead, the centering of your attention upon minute matters of mental activity which, in the long run, take care of themselves.
But this is very far, indeed, from being the case.
Let us examine for a moment the real workings of our memories.
XIII
Modern science is inclined to believe that those brain cells with which the function of memory is connected retain a record of every incident of our lives; that, physiologically speaking, we never forget anything, no matter how often, mentally speaking, we fail to remember: in short that "remembering" is merely the successful sending-through, to the latent cells where the records are stored, of the stimulating impulses needed to arouse them. Thus our memories are like some micro-cosmic telephone system in which, the oftener we make a call, the more used do the operators become in "getting the connection" for us. And the specialists assure us, moreover, that these paths of connection—the routings through local exchanges by which our calls are sent—are association paths; which (translated into the terms of our present inquiry) means paths of somehow recognized relationships.
Of course these "recognized relationships" may be either warranted in fact or altogether arbitrary. And the quack mind-doctors, who undertake to train our memories by correspondence, are very fond of prescribing these arbitrarily established relationships as aids to memorizing. Thus, they will advise you, if you happen to be a follower of Izaak Walton and to have a second cousin living in a town on the Hudson that you can never recall the name of, to fix the town in your memory by the fact that your second cousin's wife's sister has a "fishy" eye and that Fishkill ought to be a good place to catch trout. However, we have progressed far enough in our study of the value to us in our reading of the other kind of recognized relationships, to dismiss these pompous winnowers of mental chaff with a good-natured laugh.
Nor, for our immediate purpose, is it necessary for us to go any deeper into the fascinating but complex subject of memory. We need, now, only to remind ourselves of a fact of which our experience furnishes us constant proof.
XIV
We know, for instance, that if we happen to meet an acquaintance on the street and to stop for a moment's inconsequential chat with him, the chances are that in a week we shall have forgotten all that was said; and that in six months the incident itself may easily have slipped our minds. But suppose that the next morning another acquaintance stops us and says, "Tough about Judson's shooting himself!"—Judson being the man we'd talked to the day before. That puts a new face on the matter; and we will then remember for good and all that Judson, a few hours before he pulled the trigger, said to us with a queer sort of casualness that this was "a bum world anyway" and that "we would probably be quite as well out of it as in it."
Yes, this is another "extreme case." But I have chosen it that way on purpose; just as one makes a photographic enlargement of a bit of handwriting in order to examine it. Its extremeness enables us to see instantly that we should remember the character of our talk with Judson because our attention was redirected to it promptly and because we then discovered a recognized relationship in it.
And, having seen this, we can also see that if the complete records were open to us, we should no doubt find that these two factors had, in some fortuitous and forgotten way, been actively responsible for even those rememberings, so often apparently haphazard and senseless, that persist in us from the days of childhood.
XV
And so, by another and more roundabout route, but in possession now of still other understandings and of newly acquired senses of relationship, we come back to the further consideration of those practical reasons, dealt with in the last chapter, for valuing and indulging (by slight exercises of deliberate will power when necessary) the lesser impulses of curiosity and the minor upwellings of interest that come to us during reading and after reading.
Let us sum up our discoveries:—
(1) We know now what these lesser curiosities and these passing impulses of interest that intrude for a moment on our engrossment in "the story" really are. They are the constructive and digestive activities of our unconscious minds rising into consciousness. They are the top layer of what is happening in us as we read.
(2) We know, too, that if we habitually and impatiently brush these incidents aside and hurry on, the chances of our "forgetting" them gradually increase toward certainty. Whereas even a moment's turning of attention to them, and a passing noting of their relationship to our present enjoyment, or to our past prejudices, or to our other reactions to what we are reading, tends to give them a number in our mental 'phone book.
(3) We know now, moreover, that "what happens in us" through reading does n't all happen while we read. It only begins to happen then. Our intellectual digestion goes on working on a book for days and weeks; and periodically, during this process, we experience other impulses of curiosity toward it and other upwellings of interest with regard to it—urgings, no less, from that "ruminating animal," our intelligence, to help along in the process of assimilation by chewing the cud of its progressive reflections for it.
(4) And we know now, too, that as far as "remembering what we read" goes, since memory is a matter of retracing paths of established relationship, our memories will, in the long run, take care of themselves if we take care of establishing the relationships.
(5) And so we arrive at our practical realization of the relevancy of these minute matters to our reading.
For even when reading is for us only a careless pleasing of our mental palates, the fugitive pleasure we derive from it is due to the unrecognized and quickly forgotten play of the coarser of these reactions.
And it is only by the selective indulgence of our natural impulses toward noting the finer of these spontaneous reactions, and through gradually, by noting them, establish ing familiar paths of relationship among them, that all the progressive pleasures, the increasing stimulation, the accumulating capital, and the final enhancements and enfranchisements of right reading are to be sought and, in our respectively possible degrees, attained.
XVI
In addition, therefore, to the advisory rules laid down in the last chapter for those wishing, for whatsoever purpose, to increase their reading efficiency, we now need to emphasize the need of applying these same rules during the subsequent period of intellectual digestion.
Do not make the "thinking over" of a book a matter of "duty." Do not keep "taking your mental temperature" about it or "poking yourself to see if you are alive" with regard to it.
But, on the other hand, learn to value your curiosity about books after reading them. Learn to evaluate your minor curiosities in regard to them after you have read them. Never fail to follow out, to the extent of your aroused interest, any subsequent promptings of inquiry into their meaning for you, or into your feelings toward them. And, other things being equal, force yourself to give the right of way to curiosities as to your antagonisms and your dislikes, rather than to curiosities as to your acquiescences and your likings.
And now, by way of taking up some of the larger questions of relationship-seeking involved in reading whole books,—questions that have purposely been deferred till we had laid a foundation for their consideration,—let us take up the matter of how to read a novel.