same experience--no two people are exactly alike--it follows that no
interpretation is ever entirely what the writer had in mind. The ratio
between what goes into a book and what comes out of it varies in two ways.
Granted the same reader, he will take only to the limit of his capacity
from any book set before him: he may get almost all from a book that
contains but little, a good share of a book that contains much, but very
little of a book that is far beyond the range of his experience. Granted
the same book, one reader will barely skim its surface, another will gain a
fair idea of the gist of it, a third will almost relive it with the author.

The main point is that this varying ratio depends upon the amount of
life-experience that goes into the writing of a book and the amount of
life-experience that goes into the reading of it. For as writing is the
expression of life, so reading is vicarious living--living by proxy,
reliving in imagination what the author has lived before he was able to
write it. Hence, we grow _up to_ books, grow _into_ them, grow _out of_
them. Our growing experience of life may be measured by the books that we
read; and conversely, as we cannot have all experience in our own lives,
books are necessarily one of the most fruitful sources of growth in
experience.

This is true, however, only of what may be called vitalized
reading--reading, not with the eyes alone, nor with the mind alone, but
with the stored experiences of life, with the emotions that it has brought,
with the attitudes toward men and things and ideas that it has given--in a
word, with imagination. To read with imagination, you must be, in the first
place, active; in the second place, sensitive, and, because you are
sensitive, receptive. Instead, however, of being merely passively receptive
of the stream of ideas and images and sensations flowing from the work you
are reading, you must be alert to take all that it has to give, and to
re-create this in terms of your own experience. Thus by making it a part of
your imaginative experience, you widen your actual experience, you enrich
your life, and you increase the flexibility and vital power of your mind.

In order, then, to tap the sources of your imagination, you must learn to
experience in two ways: first, through life itself, not so much by seeking
experiences different from those that naturally come your way, as by
becoming aware of the value of those that belong naturally to y