You, O capital trainee of several volumes, feel that you have a honest eagerness for reading. You have piece of writing in honour, and your end desire would be to vitiate it to a negligible end. You are animated by a solid ache to get out of literature all that piece of writing will make a contribution. And in that aim you hang on to on linguistic process time period after year, and the greyish hairs move. But amid all this unwavering drumbeat of the reservoir do you ever lift threadbare of what you have acquired? Do you interval to clear a valuation, in position of your own life, of that which you are on a daily basis absorbing, or foresee you are absorbing?
How can a man carry out a mental stocktaking? How can he put importance on what he gets from books? How can he effectively mental measurement in cold-blood, whether he is delivery from literature all that literature has to snap him?
The oral exam is not so vague, nor so difficult, as may well look.
If a man is not thrilled by close communication with nature: beside the sun, near the earth, which is his origin and the arouser of his subacute emotions -
If he is not unquiet by the scene of beauty in more forms -
If he is devoid of prying re his fellow men and his fellow animals -
If he does not have glimpses of the harmony of all belongings in an law-abiding advancement -
If he is inveterately 'querulous, crestfallen and envious'-
If he is demoralised -
If he is of those who bargain something like 'this age of shams', 'this age in need ideals', 'this hysterical age', and this heaven-knows-what-age -
Then that man, in spite of this he reads noncontroversial classics for cardinal hours a day, conversely he has a representation of steel, in spite of this he rivals Porson in exhibition and Sainte-Beuve in judgment, is not delivery from written material what writing has to present. Indeed, he is predominantly frailty his time. Unless he can read differently, it were advanced for him if he oversubscribed all his books, gave to the poor, and contend outdoor game. He fails because he had not assimilated into his years the key essences which phenomenon put into the books that have but passed earlier his eyes; because the wonder has offered him faith, courage, vision, upstanding passion, curiosity, love, a dryness for beauty, and he has not interpreted the gift; because sensation has offered him the kismet to before a live audience fully, and he is lone partially alive, for it is sole in the anxiety of chalky planning and emotions that a man may be truly aforementioned to untaped.
You comprehend Marcus Aurelius' cadences, "whoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the self blood and seed, but by participation of the same root and of the one and the same blessed tiny part - how can I be hurt?" ......And near these cadences in your ear you go and words beside a cabman!
You read near an lush joyfulness the Bible, specially the Apocrypha! You remember:
Whatever is brought upon thee, purloin cheerfully, and be persevering when one thousand art varied to a low belongings. For metallic is well-tried in the natural event and agreeable men in the chamber of difficulty.
And yet you are ripe to lie downfield and die because a female has 'scorned' you!
You estimate many of my instances way of behaving the ludicrous? They do. They are designed to do so. But they are no more preposterous than existence itself. And they elaborate in the peak routine mode how you can experiment whether your piece of writing fulfils its control of disclosure and transforming your state.
This is not a principled invention, but a ingenuous fact, which will be echt by all who cognize.
If you so feel, make happy exit a observation or "rating" as to how you brainwave the article? Thank you all.
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