for a whole world?

And my soul said "He shall not save nor keep back himself."

Who is the Fool--that I should be always taking all this trouble for
him,--tiptoeing up and down the world with my little cover over my
secret for him? To defy a Fool, I have said, speak your whole truth.
Then God locks him out. To hide a secret, have enough of it. Hide it
outdoors. Why should a man take anything less than a world to hide in?
If a soul is really a soul, why should it not fall back for its reserve
on its own infinity? God does. Even daisies do it. It is too big a world
to be always bothering about one's secret in it. "Who has time for it?"
I have said. "Give it out. Move right on living. Get another." The only
way for a man in this twentieth century to hide his soul is by letting
it reach out of sight. Not by locks, nor by stiflings, nor by mean
little economizings of the heart does a man earn a world for a comrade.
Let the laughers laugh. On the great still street in space where souls
are,--who cares?

II

Diagnosis

Compelled as I am, as most of us are, to witness the unhappy spectacle,
in every city of the land, of a great mass of unfortunate and mutilated
persons whirled round and round in rows, in huge reading-machines, being
crunched and educated, it is very hard not to rush thoughtlessly in to
the rescue sometimes, even if one has nothing better than such a
pitiful, helpless thing as good advice.

I am afraid it does not look very wise to do it. Civilisation is such a
vast, hypnotising, polarising spectacle, has the stage so fully to
itself, everybody's eyes glued on it, it is hard to get up and say what
one thinks in it. One cannot find anything equally objective to say it
with. One feels as if calling attention to one's self, to the little,
private, shabby theatre of one's own mind. It is as if in a great
theatre (on a back seat in it) one were to get up and stand in his chair
and get the audience to turn round, and say, "Ladies and gentlemen. That
is not the stage, with the foot-lights over there. This is the stage,
here where I am. Now watch me twirl my thumbs."

But the great spectacle of the universal reading-machine is too much for
me. Before I know it I try to get the audience to turn around.

The spectacle of even a single lad, in his more impressionable and
possible years, reading a book whether he has anything to do with it or
not, in spite of the author and in spite of himself, when one conside