ings. If a man is
born with the wrong neighbours it brings the right ones flocking to him.
It is the universe to order. It makes the world like a globe in a
child's hands. He turns up the part where he chooses to live--now one
way and now another, that he may delight in it and live in it. If he is
a poet it is the meaning of life to him that he can keep on turning it
until he has delighted and tasted and lived in all of it.

The second importance of true books is that they are not satisfied with
the first. They are not satisfied to be used to influence a man from the
outside--as a kind of house-furnishing for his soul. A true book is
never a mere contrivance for arranging the right bit of sky for a man to
live his life under, or the right neighbours for him to live his life
with. It goes deeper than this. A mere playing upon a man's environment
does not seem to satisfy a true book. It plays upon the latent infinity
in the man himself. The majority of men are not merely conceived in sin
and born in lies, but they are the lies; and lies as well as truths flow
in their veins. Lies hold their souls back thousands of years. When one
considers the actual facts about most men, the law of environment seems
a clumsy and superficial law enough. If all that a book can do is to
appeal to the law of environment for a man, it does not do very much.
The very trees and stones do better for him, and the little birds in
their nests. No possible amount of environment crowded on their frail
souls would ever make it possible for most men to catch up--to overtake
enough truth before they die to make their seventy years worth while.
The majority of men (one hardly dares to deny) can be seen, sooner or
later, drifting down to death either bitterly or indifferently. The
shadows of their lives haunt us a little, then they vanish away from us
and from the sound of our voices. Oh, God, from behind Thy high
heaven--from out of Thy infinite wealth of years, hast Thou but the one
same pittance of threescore and ten for every man? Some of us are born
with the handicap of a thousand years woven in the nerves of our bodies,
the swiftness of our minds, and the delights of our limbs. Others of us
are born with the thousand years binding us down to blindness and
hobbling, holding us back to disease, but all with the same Imperious
Timepiece held above us, to run the same race, to overtake the same
truth--before the iron curtain and the dark. Some of us--a f