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To read or not to read
To Read or Not to Read
- from: Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
After writing a work (The Books in my Life) which the critics find too long and too disorderly, I find it somewhat difficult to say in a few words what I was unable so say in a single volume. Perhaps the best would be to restate a few salient observations which apparently failed to hit the mark.
First of all, I tried to make it clear that, as a result of indiscriminate reading over a period of Sixty years, my desire now is to read less and less. (A difficult thing to accomplish!) If I had been wise enough to follow the example set me by the friend of my youth, Robert Hamilton Challacombe, I would today probably have better eyesight, better physique, and a keener intellect. I believe it was in the Tropic of Capricorn that I explained how this friend instructed me, all unwittingly, in the art of reading. Up until the age of thirty he himself had not read more than three or four books. (Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson.) I have never again met anyone who could get so much from a book, or one who had so little need to refer to books. To squeeze every drop of juice out a book is an art, almost as great an art as writing itself. When one learns it, one book does the work of a hundred.
What we all hope, in reaching for a book, is to meet a man or woman after our own heart, to experience tragedies and delights which we ourselves lack the courage to invite, to dream dreams which will render life more hallucinating, perhaps also to discover a philosophy of life which will make us more adequate in meeting the trials and ordeals which beset us.
But perhaps the greatest thing to be gained from the reading of books is the desire to truly communicate with one`s fellow man. To read a book properly is to wake up and live, to acquire a renewed interest in one`s neighbours, more especially those who are alien to us in every way.
