d is not even the book. It is still farther from the
creative point of view. It is the book about the book.

It is written generally in the laborious unreadable, well-read
style--the book about the book. You are as one (when you are in the book
about the book) thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of Other
Books--not that they are referred to baldly, or vulgarly, or in the
text. It is worse than this (for this could be skipped). But you are
surrounded helplessly. Invisible lexicons are on every page. Grammars
and rhetorics, piled up in paragraphs and between the lines thrust at
you everywhere. Hardly a chapter that does not convey its sense of
struggling faithfulness, of infinite forlorn and empty plodding--and all
for something a man might have known anyway. "I have toted a thousand
books," each chapter seems to say. "This one paragraph [page 1993--you
feel it in the paragraph] has had to have forty-seven books carried to
it." Not once, except in loopholes in his reading which come now and
then, does the face of the man's soul peep forth. One does not expect to
meet any one in the book about the book--not one's self, not even the
man who writes it, nor the man who writes the book that the book is
about. One is confronted with a mob.

Two things are apt to be true of students who study the great masters in
courses employing the book about the book. Even if the books about the
book are what they ought to be, the pupils of such courses find that (1)
studying the master, instead of the things he mastered, they lose all
power over the things he mastered; (2) they lose, consequently, not only
the power of creating masterpieces out of these things themselves, but
the power of enjoying those that have been created by others, of having
the daily experiences that make such joy possible. They are out of range
of experience. They are barricaded against life. Inasmuch as the
creators of literature, without a single exception, have been more
interested in life than in books, and have written books to help other
people to be more interested in life than in books, this is the gravest
possible defect. To be more interested in life than in books is the
first essential for creating a book or for understanding one.

The typical course of study now offered in literature carries on its
process of paralysis in various ways:

First. It undermines the imagination by giving it paper things instead
of real ones to work on.

Second. B