The Northern Advocate “NORTHLAND FIRST.” Registered for transmission through the post as a Newspaper. TUESDAY, MAY 18, 1943. Reading And Thinking

Northern Advocate, 18 May 1943, Page 2

The Northern Advocate “NORTHLAND FIRST.” Registered for transmission through the post as a Newspaper. TUESDAY, MAY 18, 1943. Reading And Thinking

RUSKIN, in a famous passage, said: “To watch the corn grow, and the pink blossom set; to drawl hard breath over the ploughshare; to read, to think, to love, to hope—these are the things to make men happy. They have always the power to do these, and they will never do less.” . This observation is recalled by comment upon a book written by M Ernest Dimnet, a French author, who discusses the art of thinking. Though he admits that the distance between reading and thinking is often great, this, he says, is because the reading is not of the right kind, or is not done in the right way. Reading to “kill time” M. Dimnet stigmatises as one of the vices of the age, another being the “lazy acceptance of whatever is read.” Every printed statement should be viewed as a problem to be challenged by the intelligence, and, as one commentator on M. Dimnet’s book observes, not treated as the schoolboy did the propositions of Euclid, which he told the examiner needed no proof, “Euclid being a truthful man.” Unhappily, the fecundity of the modern printing-press engenders a scrappiness and desultoriness in reading which are anything but conducive to independent and sustained thought. The world’s affairs are exacting: “Living and spending, we lay waste our powers,” with the result that half the time a man should devote to communion with himself is absorbed in unprofitable distractions, and the other half—if we are to pass as wellinformed—must be at the service of the various authors whose works form the subject of passing remark. One volume follows another so rapidly that before the facts or ideas contained in it are digested the mental appetite is cloyed with another meal. The result is that too much reading, if it has not made the devotee exactly mad, as much learning was said by Festus to have made St. Paul, may have reduced him to the mental exhaustion of many a University student who has carried all before him, only in later years to lapse into respectable obscurity. With books no thinker worthy of the name can dispense. They constitute his data. Knowledge must come before reflection; but M. Dimnet addresses a warning to those patrons of the libraries who are always looking for “something new.” Their time is passed in a wearing process of experimentation and a fleeting succession of ill-digested works of instruction or 111-realised romances. They have no real friends, old- or new, on the bookshelves; they are"not admitted into the choice society of books where the great authors awakening at the touch of the practised hand among the leaves, descend to hold “invisible converse” with their votaries. Will Shakespeare reveal himself at the first reading of Hamlet, or are the cadences of Shelley to produce their full effect at a first hearing?

Unless the volume we read has “enlarged oneself, unless we have assimilated what we have read, the reading is Worthless.” “Know yourself” is a well-known saying attributed to Solon of Athens. M. Dimnet gives it a literary application. “Find your own vein; discover the material for thought which you handle with most ease and the greatest enjoyment.” And another injunction is, “Do not live your lives on a dead level; seek the heights.” If anything is to be said by way of criticism of M. Dimnet’s suggestive and stimulating treatise, says oiie commentator, it is that he has not apparently grasped the truth that the “mere devourer of books” whom he condemns has not seldom developed into the “true reader” of his commendation. Who can say, it is asked, whence the stimulus to “true reading” may not at times come? Its source may be a newspaper paragraph or even a page from a trashy novel.