Chapter 80
How few people ever learn to concentrate their attention. Most of us waste a vast amount of precious time dawdling and idling. We sit or stand over our work without thinking. Our minds are blank much of the time.
Pa.s.sive reading is even more harmful in its effects than desultory reading. It no more strengthens the brain than sitting down in a gymnasium develops the body. The mind remains inactive, in a sort of indolent revery, wandering here and there, without focusing anywhere.
Such reading takes the spring and snap out of the mental faculties, weakens the intellect, and makes the brain torpid and incapable of grappling with great principles and difficult problems.
What you get out of a book is not necessarily what the author puts into it, but what you bring to it. If the heart does not lead the head; if the thirst for knowledge, the hunger for a broader and deeper culture, are not the motives for reading, you will not get the most out of a book.
But, if your thirsty soul drinks in the writer's thought as the parched soil absorbs rain, then your latent possibilities and the potency of your being, like delayed germs and seeds in the soil, will spring forth into new life.
When you read, read as Macaulay did, as Carlyle did, as Lincoln did--as did every great man who has profited by his reading--with your whole soul absorbed in what you read, with such intense concentration that you will be oblivious of everything else outside of your book.
"Reading furnishes us only with the materials of knowledge," said John Locke; "it is thinking that makes what we read ours."
In order to get the most out of books, the reader must be a thinker. The mere acquisition of facts is not the acquisition of power. To fill the mind with knowledge that can not be made available is like filling our houses with furniture and bric-a-brac until we have no room to move about.
Food does not become physical force, brain, or muscle until it has been thoroughly digested and a.s.similated, and has become an integral part of the blood, brain, and other tissues. Knowledge does not become power until digested and a.s.similated by the brain, until it has become a part of the mind itself.
If you wish to become intellectually strong, after reading with the closest attention, form this habit: frequently close your book and sit and think, or stand and walk and think--but think, contemplate, reflect.
Turn what you have read over and over in your mind.
It is not yours until you have a.s.similated it by your thought. When you first read it, it belongs to the author. It is yours only when it becomes an integral part of you.
Many people have an idea that if they keep reading everlastingly, if they always have a book in their hands at every leisure moment, they will, of necessity, become full-rounded and well-educated.
But they might just as well expect to become athletes by eating at every opportunity. It is even more necessary to think than to read. Thinking, contemplating what we have read, is what digestion and a.s.similation are to the food.
Some of the biggest fools I know are always cramming themselves with knowledge. But they never think. When they get a few minutes' leisure they grab a book and go to reading. In other words, they are always eating intellectually, but never digesting their knowledge or a.s.similating it.
I know a young man who has formed such a habit of reading that he is almost never without a book, a magazine, or a paper. He is always reading at home, on the cars, at the railway stations, and he has acquired a vast amount of knowledge. He has a perfect pa.s.sion for knowledge, and yet his mind seems to have been weakened by this perpetual brain stuffing.
By every reader let Milton's words be borne in mind:
"Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior,...
Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gathering pebbles on the sh.o.r.e."
When Webster was a boy, books were scarce, and so precious that he never dreamed that they were to be read only once, but thought they ought to be committed to memory, or read and re-read until they became a part of his very life.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning says, "We err by reading too much, and out of proportion to what we think. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much; should have had stronger and better exercised faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation."
Those who live more quietly do not have so many distracting influences, and consequently think more deeply and reflect more than others. They do not read so much but they are better readers.
You should bring your mind to the reading of a book, or to the study of any subject, as you take an ax to the grindstone; not for what you get from the stone, but for the sharpening of the ax.
The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness, their character-building power.
"It is not in the library, but in yourself," says Fr. Gregory, "in your self-respect and your consciousness of duty n.o.bly done--that you are to find the
"It is a grand thing to read a good book--it is a grander thing to live a good life--and in the living of such life is generated the power that defies age and its decadence."
It is not the ability, the education, the knowledge that one has that makes the difference between men. The mere possession of knowledge is not always the possession of power; knowledge which has not become a part of yourself, knowledge which can not swing into line in an emergency is of little use, and will not save you at the critical moment.
To be effective, a man's education must become a part of himself as he goes along. All of it must be worked up into power. A little practical education that has become a part of one's being and is always available, will accomplish more in the world than knowledge far more extensive that can not be utilized.
No one better ill.u.s.trates what books will do for a man, and what a thinker will do with his books, than Gladstone, who was always far greater than his career. He rose above Parliament, reached out beyond politics, and was always growing. He had a pa.s.sion for intellectual expansion. His peculiar gifts undoubtedly fitted him for the church, or he would have made a good professor at Oxford or Cambridge. But, circ.u.mstances led him into the political arena, and he adapted himself readily to his environment. He was an all round well read man, who thought his way through libraries and through life.
One great benefit of a taste for reading, and access to the book world, is the service it renders as a diversion and a solace.
What a great thing to be able to get away from ourselves, to fly away from the hara.s.sing, humiliating, discouraging, depressing things about us, to go at will to a world of beauty, joy, and gladness!
If a person is discouraged or depressed by any great bereavement or suffering, the quickest and the most effective way of restoring the mind to its perfect balance, to its normal condition, is to immerse it in a sane atmosphere, an uplifting, encouraging, inspiring atmosphere, and the most good in the world is found in the best books. I have known people who were suffering under the most painful mental anguish, from losses and shocks which almost unbalanced their minds, to be completely revolutionized in their mental state by the suggestive power which came from becoming absorbed in a great book.
Everywhere we see rich old men sitting around the clubs, smoking, looking out of the windows, lounging around hotels, traveling about, uneasy, dissatisfied, not knowing what to do with themselves, because they had never prepared for this part of their lives. They put all their energy, ambition, everything into their vocation.
I know an old gentleman who has been an exceedingly active business man.
He has kept his finger upon the pulse of events. He has known what has been going on in the world during his whole active career. And he is now as happy and as contented as a child in his retirement, because he has always been a great reader, a great lover of his kind.
People who keep their minds bent in one direction too long at a time soon lose their elasticity, their mental vigor, freshness, spontaneity.
If I were to quote Mr. Dooley, it would be:--"Reading is not thinking; reading is the next thing this side of going to bed for resting the mind."
To my own mind, however, I would rather cite that versatile Englishman, Lord Rosebery. In a speech at the opening of a Carnegie library at West Calder, Midlothian, he made a characteristic utterance upon the value of books, saying in substance:
"There is, however, one case in which books are certainly an end in themselves, and that is to refresh and to recruit after fatigue. When the object is to refresh and to exalt, to lose the cares of this world in the world of imagination, then the book is more than a means. It is an end in itself. It refreshes, exalts, and inspires the man. From any work, manual or intellectual, the man with a happy taste for books comes in tired and soured and falls into the arms of some great author, who raises him from the ground and takes him into a new heaven and a new earth, where he forgets his bruises and rests his limbs, and he returns to the world a fresh and happy man."
"Who," asks Professor Atkinson, "can overestimate the value of good books, those strips of thought, as Bacon so finely calls them, voyaging through seas of time, and carrying their precious freight so safely from generation to generation? Here are finest minds giving us the best wisdom of present and past ages; here are the intellects gifted far beyond ours, ready to give us the results of lifetimes of patient thought, imaginations open to the beauty of the universe."
The lover of good books can never be very lonely; and, no matter where he is, he can always find pleasant and profitable occupation and the best of society when he quits work.
Who can ever be grateful enough for the art of printing; grateful enough to the famous authors who have put their best thoughts where we can enjoy them at will? There are some advantages of intercourse with great minds through their books over meeting them in person. The best of them live in their books, while their disagreeable peculiarities, their idiosyncrasies, their objectionable traits are eliminated. In their books we find the authors at their best. Their thoughts are selected, winnowed in their books. Book friends are always at our service, never annoy us, rasp or nettle us. No matter how nervous, tired, or discouraged one may be, they are always soothing, stimulating, uplifting.
We may call up the greatest writer in the middle of the night when we can not sleep, and he is just as glad to see us as at any other time. We are not excluded from any nook or corner in the great literary world; we can visit the most celebrated people that ever lived without an appointment, without influence, without the necessity of dressing or of observing any rules of etiquette. We can drop in upon a Milton, a Shakespeare, an Emerson, a Longfellow, a Whittier without a moment's notice and receive the warmest welcome.
"You get into society, in the widest sense," says Geikie, "in a great library, with the huge advantage of needing no introductions, and not dreading repulses. From that great crowd you can choose what companions you please, for in the silent levees of the immortals there is no pride, but the highest is at the service of the lowest, with a grand humility.
You may speak freely with any, without a thought of your inferiority; for books are perfectly well bred, and hurt no one's feelings by any discriminations."
"It is not the number of books," says Professor William Mathews, "which a young man reads that makes him intelligent and well informed, but the number of well-chosen ones that he has mastered, so that every valuable thought in them is a familiar friend."
It is only when books have been read and reread with ever deepening delight, that they are clasped to the heart, and become what Macaulay found them to be, the old friends who are never found with new faces, who are the same to us in our wealth and in our poverty, in our glory and in our obscurity. No one gets into the inmost heart of a beautiful poem, a great history, a book of delicate humor, or a volume of exquisite essays, by reading it once or twice. He must have its precious thoughts and ill.u.s.trations stored in the treasure-house of memory, and brood over them in the hours of leisure.
"A book may be a perpetual companion. Friends come and go, but the book may beguile all experiences and enchant all hours."
"The first time," says Goldsmith, "that I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one."
"No matter how poor I am," says William Ellery Channing, "no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof--if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart,--I shall not pine for want of intellectual companions.h.i.+p, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live."
"Books," says Milton, "do preserve as in a violl, the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a Life beyond Life."
"A book is good company," said Henry Ward Beecher. "It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. It is not offended at your absent-mindedness, nor jealous if you turn to other pleasures, of leaf, or dress, or mineral, or even of books. It silently serves the soul without recompense, not even for the hire of love. And yet more n.o.ble, it seems to pa.s.s from itself, and to enter the memory, and to hover in a silvery transformation there, until the outward book is but a body and its soul and spirit are flown to you, and possess your memory like a spirit."