or worse, but I have come to the
point where, if I really care about a book, the last thing I want to do
with it is to sit down in a chair and read it by myself. If I were ever
to get so low in my mind as to try to give advice to a real live author
(any author but a dead one), it would be, "Let there be room for all of
us, O Author, in your book. If I am to read a live, happy, human book,
give me a bench."

I have noticed that getting at truth on most subjects is a dramatic
process rather than an argumentative one. One gets at truth either in a
book or in a conversation not so much by logic as by having different
people speak. If what is wanted is a really comprehensive view of a
subject, two or three rather different men placed in a row and talking
about it, saying what they think about it in a perfectly plain way,
without argument, will do more for it than two or three hundred
syllogisms. A man seems to be the natural or wild form of the syllogism,
which this world has tacitly agreed to adopt. Even when he is a very
poor one he works better with most people than the other kind. If a man
takes a few other men (very different ones), uses them as glasses to see
a truth through, it will make him as wise in a few minutes, with that
truth, as a whole human race.

Knowledge which comes to a man with any particular sweep or scope is, in
the very nature of things, dramatic.

* * * * *

[I fear, Gentle Reader, I am nearing a conviction. I feel a certain
constraint coming over me. I always do, when I am nearing a conviction.
I never can be sure how my soul will take it upon itself to act when I
am making the attempt I am making now, to state what is to me an
intensely personal belief, in a general, convincing, or impersonal way.
The embarrassing part of a conviction is that it is so. And when a man
attempts to state a thing as it is, to speak for God or
everybody,--well, it would not be respectable not to be embarrassed a
little--speaking for God. I know perfectly well, sitting here at my
desk, this minute, with this conviction up in my pen, that it is merely
a little thing of my own, that I ought to go on from this point cool and
straight with it. But it is a conviction, and if you find me, Gentle
Reader, in the very next page, swivelling off and speaking for God, I
can only beg that both He and you will forgive me. I solemnly assure you
herewith, that, however it may look, I am merely speakin