When I was a child of tender years--about five tender years, I think--I
felt I couldn't wait any longer: I wanted to read. My parents had gone
along supposing that there was no hurry; and they were quite right;
there wasn't. But I was impatient. I couldn't wait for people to read to
me--they so often were busy, or they insisted on reading the wrong
thing, or stopping too soon. I had an immense curiosity to explore the
book-universe, and the only way to do it satisfactorily was to do it
myself.
Consequently I got hold of a reader, which said, "See the Dog Run!" It
added, "The Dog Can Run and Leap," and stated other curious facts. "The
Apple is Red," was one of them, I remember, and "The Round Ball Can
Roll."
There was certainly nothing thrilling about the exclamation, "See the
Dog Run!" Dogs run all the time. The performance was too common to speak
of. Nevertheless, it did thrill me to spell it out for myself in a book.
"The Round Ball Can Roll," said my book. Well, I knew that already. But
it was wonderful to have a book say it. It was having books talk to me.
Years went on, and I read more and more. Sometimes, deep in Scott,
before dinner, I did not hear the bell, and had to be hunted up by some
one and roused from my trance. I hardly knew where I was, when they
called me. I got up from my chair not knowing whether it was for dinner
or breakfast or for school in the morning. Sometimes, late at night,
even after a long day of play--those violent and never-pausing exertions
that we call play, in boyhood--I would still try to read, hiding the
light, until my eyes closed in spite of me. So far as I knew, there were
not many books in the world; but nevertheless I was in a hurry to read
all there were.
In this way, I ignorantly fastened a habit upon me. I got like an
alcoholic, I could let no day go by without reading. As I grew older, I
couldn't pass a book-shop without going in. And in libraries, where
reading was free, I always read to excess. The people around me
glorified the habit (just as old songs praise drinking). I never had the
slightest suspicion that it might be a vice. I was as complacent over my
book totals as six bottle men over theirs.
[Illustration: Ak and the striped Wumpit--]
Can there ever have been a race of beings on some other star, so
fascinated as we are by reading? It is a remarkable appetite. It seems
to me that it must be peculiar to simians. Would you find the old folks
of any other species, with tired old brains, feeling vexed if they
didn't get a whole newspaper fresh every morning? Back in primitive
times, when men had nothing to read but knots in a string, or painful
little pictures on birch bark--was it the same even then? Probably Mrs.
Flint-Arrow, 'way back in the Stone Age pored over letters from her son,
as intensely as any one. "Only two knots in it this time," you can
almost hear her say to her husband. "Really I think Ak might be a little
more frank with his mother. Does it mean he has killed that striped
Wumpit in Double Rock Valley, or that the Gouly family where you told
him to visit has twins?"
[Illustration: maiden in distress]
There are one or two primitive ideas we still have about reading. I
remember in a boarding-house in Tucson, I once met a young clergyman,
who exemplified the belief many have in the power of books. "Here are
you," he would say to me, "and here is your brain. What are you going
to put into it? That is the question." I could make myself almost as
good as a bishop, he intimated, by choosing the noblest and best books,
instead of mere novels. One had only to choose the right sort of reading
to be the right sort of man.
[Illustration: Scenes of Horror]
He seemed to think I had only to read Socrates to make myself wise, or
G. Bernard Shaw to be witty.
Cannibals eat the hearts of dead enemy chieftains, to acquire their
courage; and this clergyman entered a library with the same simple
notion.
But though books are weak implements for implanting good qualities in
us, they do color our minds, fill them with pictures and sometimes
ideas. There are scenes of horror in my mind to-day that were put there
by Poe, or Ambrose Bierce or somebody, years ago, which I cannot put
out. No maiden in distress would bother me nowadays, I have read of too
many, but some of those first ones I read of still make me feel cold.
Yes, a book can leave indelible pictures .... And it can introduce wild
ideas. Take a nice old lady for instance, at ease on her porch, and set
the ballads of Villon to grinning at her over the hedge, or a
deep-growling Veblen to creeping on her, right down the rail,--it's no
wonder they frighten her. She doesn't want books to show her the
underworld and blacken her life.
[Illustration: Dastardly attack by Veblen's latest.]
It's not surprising that some books are censored and forbidden to
circulate. The surprising thing is that in this illiberal world they
travel so freely. But they usually aren't taken seriously; I suppose
that's the answer. It's odd. Many countries that won't admit even the
quietest living man without passports will let in the most active,
dangerous thoughts in book form.
The habit of reading increases. How far can it go? The innate capacity
of our species for it is plainly enormous. Are we building a race of men
who will read several books every day, not counting a dozen newspapers
at breakfast, and magazines in between? It sounds like a lot, but our
own record would have astonished our ancestors. Our descendants are
likely to read more and faster than we.
[Illustration: The Underworld]
People used to read chiefly for knowledge or to pursue lines of thought.
There wasn't so much fiction as now. These proportions have changed. We
read some books to feed our curiosity but more to feed our emotions. In
other words, we moderns are substituting reading for living.
When our ancestors felt restless they burst out of their poor bookless
homes, and roamed around looking for adventure. We read some one else's.
The only adventures they could find were often unsatisfactory, and the
people they met in the course of them were hard to put up with. We can
choose just the people and adventures we like in our books. But our
ancestors got real emotions, where we live on canned.
[Illustration: Volume of morbid Geography attempting to enter Lone
Gulch]
Of course canned emotions are thrilling at times, in their way, and
wonderful genius has gone into putting them up. But a man going home
from a library where he has read of some battle, has not the sensations
of a soldier returning from war.
[Illustration: This book tells you all about how fighting feels]
Still--for us--reading is natural. If we were more robust, as a race, or
if earth-ways were kinder, we should not turn so often to books when we
wanted more life. But a fragile yet aspiring species on a stormy old
star--why, a substitute for living is the very thing such beings need.