Chapter II An Open Door
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
FRA LIPPO LIPPI
There is the Rub! Of how many of us can it be said that the World “means intensely and means good”? Do we unsatisfactorily stutter, and stumble, and barely exist through the three score years and ten that is our portion, or do we find in life a splendid activity that gladdens our heart and fills us full of the thorough-going ecstasy of living?
I have a friend who is a great athlete,—an oarsman, mountain climber, big game hunter. He exults in a life of action, of doing big things, and yet withal, he is a tremendous reader and one of exquisite taste and wide knowledge in books and authors. I asked him of the value of reading.
“Every time I read a great book,” he answered, “I feel as if I had punched a hole through the wall,” and so saying he crashed his large fist against a buttress of reinforced concrete. “I feel that my world has been made larger; where before I had only seen a blank space, now I see a new world, the world in which the author lived. I am that much more alive to my own.”
He applied his reading to his daily life, and the world became for him a richer, more exciting place in which to live. No one wants to plod through the world in a blind, sleepy fashion. We all want to live as keenly, as vitally as possible. The roots of the present are buried deep in the past—to appreciate and have understanding of the present you must appreciate and have understanding of the past—to realize how small and one-sided is your own point of view, you must appreciate the thousand and one viewpoints that have appeared through the ages to the eyes of other men and women.
In beginning to form the habit of reading, the first thing to be realized is that books are intimately connected with the world in which we live. Their true value does not come from the pleasure you experience during the actual hours in which you are turning the pages, but (and this point cannot too vividly be borne in mind) in the reaction of you upon the world and the world upon you after having read them. If a book does not influence your point of view towards God, your fellow men, and your daily tasks and ambitions, you may feel assured either that the book is one of little worth, or that you have not absorbed its true meaning. When you hear someone say that reading is an excellent way to pass the time, you may feel sure that he knows little about books. The poem, the novel, the history, the philosophy are not to pass the time, they are to make more vital the hours of life. A book that is a book becomes part and parcel of your being, and you must of necessity make it part of your life.
Authors are not for the library, they are for the street, the railroad train, the office, the open fields. Read them in the library, or even in bed, but live them in the city thoroughfares, or country roads or workaday places in which you make your life. No man can read the Journals of that mystic, nature lover, Henry David Thoreau, without having his next trip to the country one of greater pleasure. The colors and the sounds of the fields, the woodlands and the brooks will bring a new joy to his spirit. No man can read the novels of some great gobbler of life, such as eighteenth century Tobias Smollett, without finding the city life of our twentieth century more human, more satisfying, more exciting. No man can seriously read a religious poet such as Whitman or Wordsworth without becoming more deeply religious, more keenly conscious of the wonders of God and Man. And the Bible—surely no one can read the magic beauty and truth in the Prophecies of the Old Testament without feeling that he has met and talked with giants. These books bear directly on life—they make us think, love and experience in a way that we have never done before. The world becomes more thoroughly a magic place in which there are a thousand things to make life one glorious escapade, through which we may be thankful for the opportunity of living.
As some people believe reading to be a pleasant method of passing the time (without realizing that time is in truth passing them), so others believe that being “well read” is some sort of a social advantage. It is difficult to determine which is the more stupid and superficial point of view, that of regarding books as time-killers or as useful topics of conversation. The latter is probably the worst, as, in addition to its superficial aspect, there is its insincerity. The man or woman who reads a great book because it is “the thing to do” is not only a weak follower of fashion but a waster of valuable time. It is far better never to have read a book than to have read it stupidly and begrudgingly with the thought in mind that it will be a feather in your cap to be able to boast of having read it. Needless as it may seem to make a point of this, it is, nevertheless, the idea in the mind of many a man in college, and many a woman who joins a reading circle.
Some misguided supporters of the study of the ancient classics use as a plea that “every gentleman should read Greek.” The insincerity of this defence can only be compared to the sighs of the woman who attempts to convince her neighbors that the beauty of a sunset appeals to her as it does to no one else, or the ecstatic murmurings of the young man at the art exhibition, who is arousing within himself a false enthusiasm, for some artistic cult that in truth means nothing to him.
We see this type of man or woman all too often. They are usually gushing about their latest emotional experience, when in fact they are incapable of having any. It is an insincere attempt to be the highest of the high-brows. Let us have none of this! Let us realize that education and culture are splendid things to be highly prized, but only in that they make the individual who possesses them a richer, deeper, more sympathetic person.
A hobby, which has to-day become a fashion, is bird study. Far be it from me to disparage the movement seemingly alive in all our suburban districts, but let us make short shift with those who ogle knowingly through field glasses, when the motive behind the action is that in select company it is considered “the thing.”
It is a safe warning never to read a book because it is fashionable. Never read a book because you think it will form an engaging topic of conversation; always read because you want to derive a sincere inspiration, an enlarged point of view. Within a library is encased the soul of the past, the meaning of the present, the promise of the future. From it we derive the entire tradition of which we are inheritors, the deeper movements of which we are a part, the prophecies of the future in which we and ours will live. This treasure is more worthy of respect than to be treated as the devourer of an idle hour, or the means whereby to keep “in the swim.”
The cultured man is a man of broad understanding, of deep sympathies. A fisherman who knows his boat, his line and the bay in which he makes his livelihood may be a cultured man. He may have derived from his way of life and the tools of his trade the solemn truths that give him an understanding of the ways of men and the needs of the human heart; but another man who has gone through the University, “machinely made, machinely crammed,” may be totally without culture in that he has never drunk at those well-springs of living which teach the mind the great underlying sentiments that rule the world. One may well be educated and yet uncultured, “well-read” and yet without the vision that may be derived from books. It is not the word but the spirit of the word that must be taken to heart and lived.
Matthew Arnold defined culture as a knowledge of the best that has been done and said by man—but the one who opens that door must have more than that knowledge. It is not enough to cram away facts in the corners of your brain. These facts must have a direct bearing upon your life. To have knowledge of the best that has been written, you must not only read a great poem but you must allow the thought or fancy to sink into and become part of your personality; of the best that has been done you must not only have knowledge of the courage and wisdom of the early Americans who broke the yoke of Great Britain, but you must apply their courage and wisdom to your daily life; of the best that has been said you must not only read one of Abraham Lincoln’s great speeches, but absorb the quiet spirituality of the man who uttered them, and allow his personality to become part of yours.
Farcical moving-picture shows and talking-machine rag-time surely have their place, but can they enter the soul of man as can “the best that has been written, done and said”? The plays of Euripides and the words of Marcus Aurelius have for many centuries given deeper understandings and wider horizons to a multitude of readers, and it is probable that the intensity with which they have acted upon the individual is commensurate with the length of time that they have acted upon the mass. We do not believe that this can be said of the time-killing “movie” or the rag-time song of yesterday.
Let us enter the world of living through the world of books. It is from the printed page that we can best equip ourselves for a rich life of value to ourselves, our family and our neighbors. If you do not believe it, read some book that the world has acknowledged great. Having read it, live it in your eternal self, and you will have passed through the Open Door.
It is a rainy day at the seashore; I am writing in the reading room of a summer hotel. Without, the rain is sweeping across the bathing beach, the tennis courts are flooded, the golf course, without a doubt, is a swampy morass. It is a dreary sight for one who looks through the window pane. Our little world is upon a vacation, and all but the few who wish to tramp the beach in raincoats and gum boots must stay in-doors. And yet there is happiness, and I believe greater promise of the morrow. In one corner of the room there is a stripling of about thirteen, curled in a chair, absorbed in his book, which from the cover I know to be “Treasure Island.” He is with Old Pew, John Silver, and the cut-throat buccaneers. On the morrow the sand-dunes for that boy will be places of mystery where weird and exciting fairy deeds might have been accomplished. The commonplace bathing beach will have new mysteries, as the waters that splash at his feet are the same that surround some sunbaked, South Sea Treasure Isle.
At the desk opposite me, a student with furrowed brow reads a calf-skin volume. I have noted the title: “The Speeches of Henry Clay.” Perhaps this fellow is a young lawyer or an aspiring politician. He wishes to absorb the ideas of the silver-tongued “Harry of the West,” the popular idol of seventy years ago, and to consider their bearing upon the tariff questions of to-day. He must agree with Napoleon Bonaparte: “Read and reflect on history; it is the only true philosophy.” And there is a girl reading the poetry of Alfred Noyes, and a bespectacled, bearded old man with a volume of Pope. They have both turned to poetry to find the beauty and truth those poets have seen. How much will their spirits be affected, the one by the lyric note of our contemporary singer, the other by the didactic moralizing of the philosopher wit?
So it goes! The boy sees visions of pirates and adventure, the old man dreams dreams and seeks new truth; the young man desires armor for his life’s battle, the girl finds beauty, a refreshing and invigorating draught. It rains to-day but they will all be more richly endowed to welcome the sun and sea breezes of the morrow.