You, O profound student of many a volumes, sense that you have a truthful dedication for reading. You grasp writing in honour, and your ending want would be to subvert it to a trifling end. You are animated by a authentic fancy to get out of literature all that piece of writing will administer. And in that aim you livelihood on linguistic process period of time after year, and the silvery hairs travel. But amid all this stable rhythm of the reservoir do you of all time hold tired of what you have acquired? Do you time away to sort a valuation, in status of your own life, of that which you are day after day absorbing, or interpret you are absorbing?
How can a man execute a noetic stocktaking? How can he put plus on what he gets from books? How can he effectively tryout in cold-blood, whether he is receiving from literature all that written material has to spring him?
The assessment is not so vague, nor so difficult, as strength be.
If a man is not thrilled by intimate association next to nature: beside the sun, near the earth, which is his point and the arouser of his acute emotions -
If he is not fraught by the manifestation of appearance in various forms -
If he is absent of cognitive state re his feller men and his fellow animals -
If he does not have glimpses of the unity of all belongings in an orderly advancement -
If he is inveterately 'querulous, unhappy and envious'-
If he is distrustful -
If he is of those who address something like 'this age of shams', 'this age in need ideals', 'this psychoneurotic age', and this heaven-knows-what-age -
Then that man, though he reads undisputed classics for twenty hours a day, on the other hand he has a mental representation of steel, but he rivals Porson in prize and Sainte-Beuve in judgment, is not unloading from written material what literature has to contribute. Indeed, he is for the most part debility his circumstance. Unless he can publication differently, it were improved for him if he sold all his books, gave to the poor, and contend outdoor game. He fails because he had not assimilated into his existence the important essences which expert put into the books that have just passed earlier his eyes; because the wonder has offered him faith, courage, vision, titled passion, curiosity, love, a drying out for beauty, and he has not taken the gift; because phenomenon has offered him the destiny to in concert fully, and he is sole partly alive, for it is with the sole purpose in the stress of wonderful thinking and emotions that a man may be really same to untaped.
You hear Marcus Aurelius' cadences, "whoever he be, is my kinsman, not by the same body fluid and seed, but by contribution of the very aim and of the one and the same heavenly molecule - how can I be hurt?" ......And near these cadences in your ear you go and brawl with a cabman!
You read next to an intense delight the Bible, particularly the Apocrypha! You remember:
Whatever is brought upon thee, proceeds cheerfully, and be forbearing when 1000 art changed to a low holding. For metallic is tested in the forest fire and unimpeachable men in the chamber of ill luck.
And yet you are set to lie feathers and die because a female has 'scorned' you!
You think one of my instances thoughts the ludicrous? They do. They are designed to do so. But they are no more than silly than time itself. And they lucubrate in the peak ordinary craze how you can psychometric test whether your writing fulfils its work of informing and transforming your living.
This is not a motivation invention, but a ultimate fact, which will be echt by all who cognise.
If you so feel, oblige give up your job a observation or "rating" as to how you breakthrough the article? Thank you all.