.

What is knowing?

One day a manufacturer took me thru his factory where he makes fiddles.
Not violins--fiddles.

A violin is only a fiddle with a college education.

I have had the feeling ever since that you and I come into this world
like the fiddle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That
is about all there is either to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We
have no strings. We have no bow--yet!

When the human fiddles are about six years old they go into the primary
schools and up thru the grammar grades, and get the first string--the
little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles think
they are an orchestra right away. They want to quit school and go
fiddling thru life on this one string!

We must show these little fiddles they must go back into school and go
up thru all the departments and institutions necessary to give them the
full complement of strings for their life symphonies.

After all this there comes the commencement, and the violin comes forth
with the E, A, D and G strings all in place. Educated now? Why is a
violin? To wear strings? Gussie got that far and gave a lot of discord.
The violin is to give music.

So there is much yet to do after getting the strings. All the book and
college can do is to give the strings--the tools. After that the violin
must go into the great tuning school of life. Here the pegs are turned
and the strings are put in tune. The music is the knowing. Learning is
tuning.

You do not know what you have memorized, you know what you have
vitalized, what you have written in the book of experience.

Gussie says, "I have read it in a book." Bill Whackem says, "I know!"

Reading and Knowing

All of us are Christopher Columbuses, discovering the same new-old
continents of Truth. That is the true happiness of life--discovering
Truth. We read things in a book and have a hazy idea of them. We hear
the preacher utter truths and we say with little feeling, "Yes, that is
so." We hear the great truths of life over and over and we are not
excited. Truth never excites--it is falsehood that excites--until we
discover it in our lives. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there
is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the
oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a flashing jewel to delight
and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery is the joy of
living.

There is such a difference between reading a thing an