How to Read/Chapter 9

by John Barrett Kerfoot

Layout 2

CHAPTER IX
THE COSMOS À LA CARTE
I

There is a simple yet dramatic experiment in elemental physics with which we are all more or less familiar.

In it a beam of sunlight is passed through a prism and is thereby separated—like a fan that our hands have opened—into the rainbow-hued shafts of its component color rays. These are then caught upon a screen and the audience allowed to examine them—allowed to see for itself that here and no otherwhere is the magic paint-box from which the world is colored. And finally—that there may be no doubters—the experiment is proved by reversing it. The divergent rays are passed through a lens that bends them back into focused reunion; and behold, the white beam of the sunlight is itself again.

It is, in reality, a very similar experiment that we are engaged on in this book.

We have passed our ability to read—that ability which, in these days of all but universal literacy, we have come to look upon as something almost as natural, almost as necessary, almost as much to be taken for granted at its face value, as sunlight itself—we have passed our ability to read through a prism of analysis and have separated it into the colorful factors of its component elements. We have next, so to say, thrown these elements on a screen and examined them separately. And we have discovered, to our initial surprise and to our subsequent enlightenment, that we are ourselves magic paint-boxes. We have discovered that our ability to read is made up of nothing less, and of nothing more, than of all the individual colorings, all the personal experiences, all the inborn impulses and unfolding forces of our individual lives.

And now it remains for us to prove the value of our experiment by reversing it; to reconstruct, that is to say, from the disunited elements of our ability to read and from the determined method of their proper employment, a single, illuminating entity—an attitude toward reading.

And the lens with which I have elected to do the necessary focusing—the phrase that I have chosen in which to sum up this attitude—is the title of this chapter.

You very likely feel that "the Cosmos à la carte" is a "hifalutin" phrase. It no doubt strikes some of you as—how shall I put it?—as a trifle "strong"; as "going some"; as, let us say, "a little bit of too much." Some of you are no doubt inclined to smile and politely pass it up as hyperbole. Some of you are no doubt inclined to frown and set it down as "hot air."

Let me be quite frank and say that I meant you to.

There is nothing like "stepping down a step that is n't there" for making us realize the levelness of a piece of ground.

There is nothing like being certain that we have caught some one in the very act of loose-minded overstatement, and then finding that he is, after all, well within the facts, for jolting us into a recognition of neglected truth.

And this phrase is n't "hifalutin." It is n't hyperbolic. It is n't "hot air." It is merely a slightly fanciful way of calling attention to the most basic, the most primal, the most universally operative attitude of all life.

If you doubt this, allow me to introduce you to one of our poorest relations and most distant cousins, the amœba.

II

The amœba, as you doubtless know, is one of the protozoa—one of the first, or lowest, forms of life. It is an invisible pellicule of protoplasm; a microscopic animalcule consisting of a single life-cell. It has no mouth, no stomach, no sense-organs, no limbs. It lives in the sea and it moves from place to place by occasionally protruding portions of its jelly-like substance and sculling with these temporary fins. And when, on its tiny journeys, it encounters bits of floating matter smaller than itself, it wraps its soft cell-stuff round them,—engulfs these microscopic atoms in its own microscopic mass,—and either absorbs them, if they prove absorbable, or rejects them if they don't. And this—except occasionally to divide itself in two and thus double the size of its own family—is all that it ever does.

Here, then, on the lowest rung of the ladder of life, here, still lingering at the source from which we have all derived, is a literal and living embodiment of my "hifalutin" phrase. For the amœba's sole attitude toward the cosmos is that the cosmos is edible. And it spends its life making experiments with the menu.

III

"But what," you may perhaps ask, "has this to do with reading?"

The proper and final answer to that question is "Everything." But first, let us move a few million years up the scale of development.

Did you ever notice that a human baby, when it arrives "trailing clouds of glory behind it," also brings along the amœba attitude toward the cosmos? That it, too, regards the universe solely as edible, and conveys every fragment of it that its little hands get hold of to its mouth?

Let us see how this happens and what it means.

Millions of years separate Man as we know him—Man with his complex physical organization and his developed mentality—from the one-celled creatures that were his earliest ancestors. But the individual human baby is not thus separated. The individual baby, newly born, is but a few short months removed from having been a microscopic, one-celled organism itself. Moreover, in those few months, it has physically rehearsed (like a scholar, who reviews in a day the lessons of a term) the whole physical history of the race's climb. It has been in turn a two-celled, a four-celled, an eight-celled organism. It has been the cup-shaped cell-mass that corresponds to a sponge. It has been a worm-like creature with a pulsing tube for a heart. It has been a fish-like being and breathed through gills. It has had the two-chambered heart of a fish, and the three-chambered heart of a frog, before it developed the four-chambered heart of a mammal. It has been a "quadruped" with four limbs alike. It has worn hair from head to heel. It has grown, and discarded, a long tail.

And even when it is born, it is not yet, except in intention and promise, a human being. It is still merely a creature on the road to becoming human—a creature that has already developed the body of a baby, but that still retains the mind of an amœba.

On the physical side, the long recapitulatory journey from protozoon to man is well advanced. But on the psychic side the journey is not yet begun. The entire development from "amœba attitude" to "man attitude" remains to be carried out. All the marvelous overtones of Man's emotional, intellectual, and spiritual appetites have still to be evolved from, and superimposed on, the basic hunger of the protozoon.

IV

Do you doubt the possibility of this transition?

Did you ever watch a baby a few days old nuzzle at its mother's breast, and then fall asleep in the very act of suckling—at the instant, that is to say, of achieved satisfaction? And did you ever watch the same baby, a few weeks later, although its hunger had been sated, fret for its mother's lullaby; and then fall asleep, suddenly, in the middle of a rhythm?

If you have, you have watched one of the many beginnings of that other recapitulatory journey—the journey from physical hunger to mental appetites.

For this latter falling to sleep also marks the instant of an achieved satisfaction. A satisfaction still physical, but no longer gastric. The satisfaction of what is, as yet, a mere faint bodily appetite; but which will, some day, develop into a spiritual hunger.

For what has happened is this: the baby (not being deaf, like the imagined "Helen Keller" of our discussion of "The World Outside Us and the World Within") has sensed a relationship, other than that of food and hunger, between the world outside it and its inner life. It has sensed the relationship between the physical rhythm of its mother's song, and the physical rhythms of its own body; the rhythms of its beating heart, its pulsing arteries, its expanding and contracting lungs, its breath alternately intaken and exhaled. And where, awhile ago, it was content and fell asleep when it had hungered and been fed, it now instinctively craves and clamors for a periodic renewal of this other, comfortable sensing; and sleeps when that is sated. It has discovered a new dish on the cosmic menu.

It has, let us put it, sensed something in the world outside it, that is not food, and that yet, somehow, belongs to it.

And have we not already, in the course of our previous inquiry, seen a child, a little further advanced on this journey,—"the inhabitant," we then described it, "of a world where there was already rhyme, but not yet reason,"—reading Mother Goose with a satisfaction that was not wholly physical, yet not wholly mental; and discovering in the process something that was its own—"finding itself" as we said?

Have we not, indeed, already, in our seeking for a Sense of Direction, followed one phase of this journey up through childhood and adolescence to the final culmination of maturity; and found, at every stage,—from the rhymes of Mother Goose to the gospels of the elect,—that the travelers were but discovering their own; formulating what belonged to them; "finding," as we said, "themselves"?

It is the universal impetus—this search for our own.

It is the essence of that upward urge that has immemorially driven our race; that has driven it from being "amœbas" into being men; that will yet drive it into being what no man can now foresee.

Not merely in metaphor, but in biologic fact, the acts and attitudes that we speak of as "drinking in beauty," as "having an omnivorous mind," as "hungering and thirsting after righteousness," are sublimated forms of the primal hunger. They are subtler searchings for our own on the menu of a Cosmos à la carte.

In short, this search is the Law of Life.

And it is also the focus-giving fact that we are seeking.

For, since reading, as we have seen, is a form of living, we can best state our right attitude toward it in terms of Life-law. And so, in order to get our definition of that attitude into a concrete form that we can examine and adjust ourselves to, we will put it that Reading should be a zestful, conscious, discriminating search for our own.

V

Do you remember that, in our early discussions, when we discovered that we have to find our own materials in which to retell for ourselves an author's story, and that we even have to find our own meanings for the words in which the story is written, we discovered that we do not always find the right word-meaning first? That we "react automatically" to words and then criticize the reactions?

And do you remember that it was there pointed out that this method—to feel first, and then examine our feelings; to react spontaneously to life, and then accept or reject the reactions—is the only method we have of finding personal meanings, whether for words or for the world?

And do you remember that it was further pointed out, there and thereafter, that the understanding of these facts and the employment of this method are the only sources of genuine cultural growth and attainment?

Please note, then, that this method is the method of the amœba, which first engulfs its atom, and then either absorbs or rejects it. It is the ancestral method. By it, and by it only, can we discriminate our own, anywhere in life. And by it, and by it only, can we make that, which should be our own, ours. Please note, also, that our friend George—he of the cold-storage mind—does not use this method. He engulfs as many atoms as he can hold; but neither absorbs, nor rejects, any. He is the kind of reader that Lord Bacon must have had in mind when he said that "reading maketh a full man." He mistakes the Cosmos for a table d'hôte.

VI

But we are adopting a very different attitude; and our discussion of "Intellectual Digestion" in the seventh chapter was really undertaken in order to lay the foundation for a proper understanding, at this point, (1) of the true nature of this reading-search for our own, and (2) of the way we can best translate this understanding into efficient practice. For not everything in any book "belongs to us." And, of what does, only so much is ever actually made ours through reading as we intellectually digest, in addition to mentally engulfing. Let us now look, then, with this in mind, at a few obvious facts of reading, the meaning of which we seldom seek for.

There are many books in every department (and there are few of us who have not had some experience with them) that we read, with fresh profit, at successive stages of our development; books in which, at each rereading, we find something now "belonging to us" that was not even potentially "ours" before.

Sometimes this is because we have, in the mean while, acquired the necessary raw materials of experience with which to read these books more fully.

Sometimes this is merely because, in the mean while, we have developed new skill in the right using of our old material.

Sometimes it is because, in the mean while, we have developed new needs that were dormant in our younger selves.

But, generally speaking, these new discoveries, in books that we have already read, of things that are potentially ours, and these new successes at making them so, are the outcome of all three of these causes combined in various proportions.

Again, there are many books in every department (and again there are few of us who have not had some experience with them) that we read once with conscious enjoyment or personal profit; but of which a later reading leaves us puzzled to understand "what we ever saw in them."

Sometimes this is because, at our first reading, they synthesized certain portions of experience for us (and these syntheses may be either the explanatory ones of elementary science or the imaginative ones of simple-mooded fiction) that we now know our way through blindfold, and so no longer realize the sense of rightful ownership we felt in our first finding of them thus simply grouped.

Sometimes this is because, while in our first reading we found these books adequate moulds into which to pour some inchoate hope or dream or tentative realization of relationship, fictional, philosophical, historical, or what-not, the fuller store of our later mould-needing material finds them inadequate to its purposes, and we forget their former adequacy.

Sometimes this is because, at our first reading, these books ministered to a typical but temporary need—childish, adolescent, or developmental—that we have since outgrown, have perhaps forgotten, and have even possibly come, while remembering, to despise.

But again, generally speaking, all of these reasons are present in varying proportions when we thus discover that a book, once seemingly full of what by right belonged to us, is now comparatively empty, wholly worthless, or even despicable.

And a proper balancing against each other of these two sets of facts from our common reading experience will go far toward making clear to us the true meaning, both of what progressively and changingly constitutes "our own," and of the step-by-step methods of our only efficient search for it.

VII

Even Science and Philosophy, we must remember, constantly invent explanations and hypotheses; find them useful while they cover, and seem to co-relate, all the facts till then observed in a particular field; swear by them more or less dogmatically while maintained; use them as stepping-stones to new investigations and as tests of new discoveries; end by discarding them when outgrown and discredited, and frequently look back upon them with contempt.

And this is but another way of expressing the use we have made of those books once found full of meaning, but later discovered to be empty.

And even Science and Philosophy, those great, organized, supposedly authoritative forms of humanity's search for its own in the chaos of experience, are constantly going back and discovering that their own growth has enabled them to find new meanings and new mysteries in chapters of the Great Book that they had already read and had thought to have read fully.

And this is but another way of expressing the fresh discoveries we make in old books whose real "conceptions" were bigger than our first formulations of them.

VIII

But what the Science, and the Philosophy, and the You and the I of any particular moment are all prone to lose sight of, is the fact that it is partly with the actually digested and assimilated essences of these old and perhaps exploded explanations, of these old and perhaps abandoned hypotheses, of these old and perhaps now despicable "readings," that they, and we, in our respective fields, are now pursuing our enlarging search.

Thus the chemist of to-day is thinking in part with the truths digested out of the crude syntheses of alchemy.

Thus the idealist of to-day is more beholden than he sometimes likes to acknowledge to those who first made idols and worshiped them. For the idol was the wooden synthesis of a crude idealism; and in the higher truth of all human worship there circulates to-day some transubstantiated essence of the idolater's gropings after truth.

Thus John Smith, formulating for himself (in reading W. H. Hudson's romance of Central America, "Green Mansions") a new synthesis of relations between the naïve brutalities of savage life, the scientific marvels of nature-study, and the basic yearnings of the human heart, may unwittingly be building into his creative structure something of what he first wonderingly found and made his own in reading that once gladly accepted, but now ridiculous-seeming "appearance of completeness," Mayne Reid's "Afloat in the Forest."

IX

Our minds, it seems, like our bodies, grow by what they feed on. But, like our bodies, our minds do not grow by means of the containing husks and form-giving fibers that in time they digestively reject, but by whatsoever of the nutritive contents of these they assimilate and make their own.

And now, with this idea also in mind, let us again look at some of the obvious facts of our common reading experience.

One may read a volume on science, or an essay upon some philosophical conception, and be so poorly equipped with technical knowledge that one does little more, in the reading, than formulate for one's self a vague idea—the hazy conception of a point of view bigger than one's own.

Later on, one may come to discard this idea as fallacious, or arrive at regarding this point of view as dwarfing.

And yet, meanwhile, they may have functioned for us—these experimental syntheses—as incentives to further searchings, as disclosers of new possibilities, as touchstones and criteria of "ownership."

On the other hand, one may read such a book and be utterly incapable of grasping the synthetic idea contained in it; yet may incidentally formulate for one's self, in reading it, a dozen subsidiary realizations of fact-relationship or idea-relationship that one uses thereafter as building-blocks in future formulations; that one gradually combines with other similar realizations, the personal meanings of which one slowly and digestively assimilates into one's attitude toward the world. And the same thing is true of fiction.

One may read a story and get little from reading it beyond the vividly emotionalized facing of a situation; or the eager, "I-told-you-so" notion of a proved moral; or a sense of violent antipathy to "that way of looking at things."

And one may—indeed, one must—use these hazy findings of what belongs to one as parts of one's future equipment.

But, on the other hand, one may read a novel and discover no wholeness to it at all; yet have a dozen things "happen in one" in the course of the reading that prove, later, to have been true "findings of one's own."

And of course the same thing is true of a history, an autobiography, a religious treatise, or any other printed invitation to compare notes on life, past, present, or to come.

X

All our reading, then, no matter how unskillful or how unsophisticated it may be, proves on examination to be eclectic.

And we see, moreover, that this eclecticism, even when unconscious and undirected, is exercised in two typical manners: (1) it seizes upon, and makes future use of, the synthetic aspects of the book read; or (2) it seizes upon, and makes future use of, component details used by the author in his attempted synthesis. Or it does both.

And the efficient application to practice of our defined attitude toward reading must therefore be sought through a gradual developing in ourselves of a more conscious, zestful, and discriminating eclecticism:—an eclecticism eager for the discovery, in everything we read, of "our own" in either of these forms; and an eclecticism progressively able and willing to accept either, at its full value, without prejudice to the other, while at the same time looking hopefully for the greater discovery of their complete combining. Such a combining, for instance, as comes to us when a great novel helps us to build the disregarded facts of our common lives, the partial philosophies of our daily using, the accepted "science" of our passing civilization, into successively revealing syntheses of understanding, and finally welds these rhythmically assembled parts into the interpretative "completeness" of an outlook, and at the same time leads our art-roused sense of "need" to an art-achieved fulfillment. Or such a combining, again, as one may find in the writings of the French entomologist, Henri Fabre. Fabre had the scientist's passion for truth, the unassuming culture of the scholar, the unifying imagination of the poet, the dramatist's sense of the tragic and mysterious, the outlook of the philosopher and the creativeness of the artist. His books are about bugs. But their insect actors cast shadows on the stars.

XI

But there is a reverse side to every medal. And besides developing a more open-minded and receptive and discriminating eclecticism in the realm of what really belongs to us, we need also to discourage—at least to the extent of recognizing its true character—another kind of eclecticism that we all practice more or less unintelligently in the realm of what, in the strictest sense, does not as yet belong to us.

And here again our seventh chapter inquiry into the matter of Intellectual Digestion will help us to an easier understanding.

The mere acceptance—the "swallowing whole"—of statements of alleged fact, no matter how trustworthy, or of pronounced opinions, no matter how "authoritative," may stock our memories with useful material—useful for certain experiments, or as points of departure for future inquiry, or as subjectmatter for future testing-out. But, so far from such mere acceptance making these things "ours," it frequently results in preventing our ever discovering in them that which should by rights belong to us.

If, for example, in the exercise of this bastard eclecticism, one uncritically accepts as personally and finally valid the orders of some critic, or specialist, or teacher (no matter how celebrated) as to what we must think of a picture, or what we must find in a book, or how we must regard some political theory, or what we must believe in religion, one closes by that supine act of acceptance the only door that opens into real "ownership" in that particular synthesis of recognizable relationship.

"But," many readers are likely to exclaim at this point, "are we not to accept, then, as valid, the declaration of Science that it is so and so many million miles to the sun; that so much oxygen and so much hydrogen, properly combined, form water; and all the thousands of other authoritative declarations about things that we need to know, but have no chance to find out for ourselves?" And the answer to this question is very simple, for the question has to do with a difficulty that is really only a confusion. The fact being that we accept the statements of others only in so far, and for so long, as their truth does not personally concern us.

Science tells us that it is ninety-four million miles to the sun; and we accept the statement humbly and gratefully and admiringly.

Later on, Science comes round and says that it is sorry, but it finds that it has made a mistake. It is only ninety-two and a half million miles to the sun. And we accept the new statement just as readily and as humbly as the first. But the real reason for this is that the only personal use we make of this "knowledge" is to use the supposed distance to the sun as a means of trying to conceive the distances of inter-stellar space; and for this purpose one of these distances is as useful as the other.

Again, Science tells us to-day that under certain circumstances two atoms of oxygen and one of hydrogen will rush joyously together and form a molecule of water; and that under other circumstances these same atoms will find each other's company unsupportable and will rush apart and resume their original status. And we accept the statement, humble and marveling. But if, to-morrow, Science came round and told us that it was sorry, but it found that it had overlooked something; namely, that it was only when a little radium was present,—say an eightieth of a grain in a gallon of water,—that these things ever happened, we should accept the new statement as complacently as the first; and should continue to discriminate just as eclectically as before between the bottled waters offered us by the Undine Spring Company and the Hygienic Distilling Corporation. For the truth is that the only personal use most of us ever make of the statements of Science about the composition of water is to use them as imaginative items in our building-up of a conception of the marvelously intricate nature of matter, of the almost human loves and hates and liaisons and fallings-out of "chemical affinity," and of the relations these bear to modern industry and modern thought. And for this purpose one of these statements is as serviceable as the other.

But suppose one was a manufacturing chemist, excited by the new declaration because it suggested the possibility of his extracting radium from Lake Michigan. Do you imagine for a moment that he would accept the new declaration without personal investigation? Or build a plant until he had digested out of that investigation's results the "personal meanings" of the discovery?

But enough of Science. Let us come down to the practical plane of household practice. You get, let us say, your bread from a baker. But in glancing over the pages of Mrs. Roastem's cookbook, you come upon the statement that four eggs are the proper number to use in making corn muffins. If Mrs. Roastem is your favorite authority, you accept the statement unconditionally, and even pass the information on to inquiring friends, rather proud that the corner of Authority's mantle should thus for a moment rest on your shoulder. And if, next year, a new edition of Mrs. Roastem's book advises three eggs instead of four, you accept the revision without question, and perhaps even boast to your advisees that Mrs. R. has found a way of making muffins with three eggs.

But suppose that you make up your mind to try your own hand at making corn muffins. Which authority finally determines for you what is "your own" in that recipe—Mrs. Roastem, or your palate and your digestion?

XII

There are, as a matter of fact, but three services, broadly speaking, that any teacher or expounder. or commentator or critic can render us.

One of these is the important and necessary, but none-the-less humble, service of supplying our memories with storable raw materials of alleged "facts," of supposed relationships, and of the existence of this, that, or the other decision about these, arrived at by this, that, or the other investigator.

The other two services are of a higher order; of opposed but mutually complementary character, and hence of equal value.

One of them is to help us (by inducing us constructively and critically to agree with them) to a more intelligent synthetic formulation of our own reactions to life.

The other is to help us (by inducing us constructively and critically to disagree with them) to more intelligent syntheses of these same personal reactions.

And there is no more fatal bar to the progressive and successful reduction to practice of our accepted attitude toward reading than habitually to allow the first of these author services to take for us the place of the other two.

XIII

One might fill a book with examples of the emotional and intellectual and spiritual lanes-leading-to-our-own that are blocked and turned into no-thoroughfares for us by this practice.

But one common and typical instance will suffice—an instance so common that we constantly see examples of it; and so typical that we should always regard them as final reductions-to-absurdity of the idea that we do not need to seek our own, or to digest it out of what we find, but can rest content in being told by another what it is.

We all know people who will read a book in the firm conviction that they are getting a great deal out of it, and who, in that conviction, voraciously "swallow whole" all its statements, opinions, theories, and explanations; but who, if they chance upon some declaration in it that they know of their own knowledge to be inaccurate, will "unswallow" everything they had taken in (which, having digested none of it, they are able to do) and will toss the book aside, declaring that "if it is wrong in that it may be wrong in everything" and that it is of no further use to them, since they no longer know "what to believe and what not to."

These are the people who, a few generations since, ceased to believe in God when they began to believe in Darwin.

And the root of their trouble—and of ours, since it is a trouble from which none of us is free—lies in the fact that they have not yet even begun to learn the thing that none of us has wholly learned; namely, that, while understanding and faith must both feed on external things, they must both be generated within us.

XIV

Understanding and faith: These are the two forms that all our successful seekings for our own take on. They are equally changeable and fallible. They are equally subject to the laws of growth by digestion and assimilation. They are equally incapable of reaching "ultimate truth." Yet they are the equal and final storehouses of the harvest of living.

All that is significant to the seer in his "attitude toward the Cosmos" and toward the unknowable Power that stands behind it or pervades it, is summed up in these two terms. And all that is significant to the miser, gloating on the dulling dollars in an old hair trunk, is similarly to be summed up.

And since, while generated within us, understanding and faith both feed on external things,—on the concreteness of our own contacts with life and on such comparings of notes as we are able to carry on with our fellows,—the homely problem of the "balanced ration" enters into all our dealings with their nourishment.

We have already seen that our own concrete contacts with life and our own germinal "ideas" derived therefrom are the basic raw materials of our reading. We have already seen that it is in part with such increments of understanding and faith as we digest out of our old reading that we carry on our new. And we must not forget that these new readings must, taken together with our new living, constitute in some sort a "balanced ration," if the understanding and faith we build from them are to be sound and serviceable.

We cannot practice to the full the right reading of modern fiction if we are utterly ignorant of modern thought. We cannot practice to the full the right reading of even the simplest conceptions of modern thought if we are utterly ignorant of modern science. We cannot bring to the reading of the simplest scientific textbook the "curiosity" that furnishes the motive power of our reading if we walk the modern world without something of that will to inquire into its phenomena that every child possesses.

Right reading is not a trick. It is a structure. It is built up from the digested satisfyings of a myriad curiosities—curiosities from which, on the one hand, its materials are derived, and from which, on the other, its methods are assembled, like the growing formulation of a novel's conception. And its aim is an efficient readiness and ability, based on practice and experiment, to make imaginative combinations of this material at the instigation of the author, in the zestful seeking for what these may disclose in, and for, ourselves.

Perhaps you are one of those who have kept hanging up, in your heart, a motto, worked in mental worsted on a bit of intellectual bristol board—a motto reading "Live, and let live." If so, and if you would learn right reading, take this motto down and hang up in its place one with the inscription, "Live, and compare notes." And then, when you are "reading your book," remember George of the cold-storage mind, and remember the amœba.

Is there a simile in the sentence before you? Engulf it. Test yourself quickly with it for anything that it may disclose to, or in, or for, you, either of beauty or of meaning or of humor. Absorb what you find; or toss the empty husk of words aside, and pass on. Is there a statement in a paragraph? A moral 296 implication in an incident? A criticism of life implicit in a tale? An "outlook" in an outcome? An esthetic stimulus in a style? An art-enhancement in a writer's creation? Engulf them. Taste them. Test them by, and for, yourself. Smack your mind's lips over them; or make a wry face, and pass on.

When, and only when, you are doing this, are you really reading—seeking your own with a zestful and discriminating eclecticism.

And when you are doing this, you are, like the amœba, taking your Cosmos à la carte.

 

THE END