rt to a group of foreigners in
Tokyo. The interpreter would listen for several minutes and then in the
pause of the speaker put the fragment into English for us, without a
colour of his own, without disturbing even a gesture or an intonation of
the source of eloquence and ideation. Something of the same returned to
me from the boy's work. I tried him again on the plan a few days
later--just to be sure. The result was the same.

I have not done that since, because I do not wish to encourage physical
memory, an impermanent and characterless faculty, developed to excess in
every current theory of education. You cannot lift or assist another, if
your hands are full of objects of your own. One puts aside his
belongings, when called upon to do something with his hands for
another. Free-handed, he may succeed. It is the same with the mind.
One's faculties are not open to revelations from the true origin of all
values, if one's brain is clutching, with all its force, objects that
the volition calls upon to be remembered. The memory is temporal; if
this were not so, we would know the deeps of that great bourne from
which we come. No man is significant in any kind of expression when he
is using merely his temporal faculties. Time ruptures the products of
these faculties as it does the very body and instrument that produces
them.

However, I realised that I had an almost supernatural attention from the
lad who did not deign to grant me even a nod of acquiescence. I began to
tell him a few things about the technical end of writing for others to
read. I encountered resistance here. Until I pressed upon them a little,
the same mistakes were repeated. This should have shown me before it did
that the boy's nature was averse to actual fact-striving--that he could
grasp a concept off the ground far easier than to watch his steps on the
ground--that he could follow the flight of a bird, so to speak, with far
more pleasure than he could pick up pins from the earth, even if
permitted to keep the pins. I was so delighted to awaken the giant,
however, that I was inclined to let pass, for the present, the matters
of fact and technicality.

Finding that he listened so well--that it was merely one of the
inexplicable surfaces of the new generation that dismayed me--I, of
course, learned to give to him more and more freely. I allowed myself to
overlap somewhat each day, gave little or no thought as to what I should
say to him until the hour ca