How Should One Read a Book?
It is simple to say that since books have classes-
fiction, biography, poetry-
we should separate them and take from each
what it is right that each should give us.
Yet few people from books what book can give us.
Most commonly we come to books
with blurred and divided minds,
asking of fiction that it shall be true,
of poetry that it shall be false,
of biography that it shall be flattering,
of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices.
If we could banish all such preconceptions
when we read that would be an admirable beginning.
Do not dictate to your author: try to become him.
Be his fellow worker and accomplice.
If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first,
you are preventing yourself
from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.
But if you open your mind as widely as possible,
then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness,
from the twist and turn of the first sentences,
will bring you into the presence
of a human being unlike any other.
Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this,
and soon you will find that your author is giving you,
or attempting to give you, something far more definite.
The thirty-two chapters of a novel-
if we consider how to read a novel first-
are an attempt to make something
as formed and controlled as a building:
but words are more impalpable than bricks;
reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.
Perhaps the quickest way to understand
the elements of what a novelist is doing
is not to read, but to write;
to make your own experiment
with the dangers and difficulties of words.
Recall, then, some event
that has left a distinct impression on you-
how at the corner of the street,
perhaps, you passed two people talking.
A tree shook; an electric light danced;
the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic;
a whole vision, an entire conception
seemed contained in that moment.