time, who
can be said to be really living on it. They are engaged in getting a
living and in hoping that they are going to live sometime. They are also
going to read sometime.

When one thinks of the wasted sunrises and sunsets--the great free show
of heaven--the door open every night--of the little groups of people
straggling into it--of the swarms of people hurrying back and forth
before it, jostling their getting-a-living lives up and down before it,
not knowing it is there,--one wonders why it is there. Why does it not
fall upon us, or its lights go suddenly out upon us? We stand in the
days and the nights like stalls--suns flying over our heads, stars
singing through space beneath our feet. But we do not see. Every man's
head in a pocket,--boring for his living in a pocket--or being bored for
his living in a pocket,--why should he see? True we are not without a
philosophy for this--to look over the edge of our stalls with. "Getting
a living is living," we say. We whisper it to ourselves--in our pockets.
Then we try to get it. When we get it, we try to believe it--and when we
get it we do not believe anything. Let every man under the walled-in
heaven, the iron heaven, speak for his own soul. No one else shall speak
for him. We only know what we know--each of us in our own pockets. The
great books tell us it has not always been an iron heaven or a walled-in
heaven. But into the faces of the flocks of the children that come to
us, year after year, we look, wondering. They shall not do anything but
burrowing--most of them. Our very ideals are burrowings. So are our
books. Religion burrows. It barely so much as looks at heaven. Why
should a civilised man--a man who has a pocket in civilisation--a man
who can burrow--look at heaven? It is the glimmering boundary line where
burrowing leaves off. Time enough. In the meantime the shovel. Let the
stars wheel. Do men look at stars with shovels?

* * * * *

The faults of our prevailing habits of reading are the faults of our
lives. Any criticism of our habit of reading books to-day, which
actually or even apparently confines itself to the point, is
unsatisfactory. A criticism of the reading habit of a nation is a
criticism of its civilisation. To sketch a scheme of defence for the
modern human brain, from the kindergarten stage to Commencement day, is
merely a way of bringing the subject of education up, and dropping it
where it begins.

Eve