nothing else for threescore years, it is not in our human
breath to recite our fathers' names upon our lips. Each of us is the
child of an infinite mother, and from her breast, veiled in a thousand
years, we draw life, glory, sorrow, sleep, and death. The ones we call
fathers and mothers are but ambassadors to us--delegates from a million
graves--appointed for our birth. Every boy is a summed-up multitude. The
infinite crowd of his fathers beckons for him. As in some vast
amphitheatre he lives his life, before the innumerable audience of the
dead--each from its circle of centuries--calls to him, contends for him,
draws him to himself.

Inasmuch as every man who is born in the world is born with an infinite
outfit for living in it, it is the office of all books that are true and
beautiful books--true to the spirit of a man--that they shall play upon
the latent infinity in him; that they shall help him to select his
largest self; that they shall help him to give, as the years go on, the
right accent to the right fathers, in his life.

Books are more close to the latent infinity in a human being than
anything else can be, because the habit of the infinite is their habit.
As books are more independent of space and time than all other known
forces in the lives of men, they seem to make all the men who love them
independent also. If a man has not room for his life, he takes a book
and makes room for it. When the habit of books becomes the habit of a
man he unhands himself at will from space and time; he finds the
universe is his universe. He finds ancestors and neighbours alike
flocking to him--doing his bidding. God Himself says "Yes" to him and
delights in him. He has entered into conspiracy with the nature of
things. He does not feel that he is being made. He does not feel that he
is making himself. The universe is at work on him--under his own
supervision.

IV

The Charter of Possibility

In reading to select one's parents and one's self, there seem to be two
instincts involved. These instincts may vary more or less according to
the book and the mood of the reader, but the object of all live
reading--of every live experience with a book--is the satisfying of one
or both of them. A man whose reading means something to him is either
letting himself go in a book or letting himself come in it. He is either
reading himself out or reading himself in. It is as if every human life
were a kind of port on the edge of the un