yawn of
all being. One feels one's soul lying out, all relaxed, on it, and
resting on real things. It stretches itself on the bare bones of the
earth and knows. On a hundred silent hills it lies and suns itself.

And as I lay in the morning, soul and body reaching out to the real
things and resting on them, I thought I heard One Part of me, down
underneath, half in the light and half in the dark, laughing softly at
the Other. "What is this book of yours?" it said coldly, "with its
proffered scheme of education, its millenniums and things? What do you
think this theory, this heaven-spanning theory of reading of yours,
really is, which you have held up objectively, almost authoritatively,
to be looked at as truth? Do you think it is anything after all but a
kind of pallid, unreal, water-colour exhibition, a row of blurs of
faintly coloured portraits of yourself, spread on space? Do you not see
how unfair it is--this spinning out of one's own little dark, tired
inside, a theory for a wide heaven and earth, this straddling with one
temperament a star?"

Then I made myself sit down and compose what I feared would be a
strictly honest title-page for this book. Instead of:

THE LOST ART OF READING

A STUDY
OF
EDUCATION
BY
ETC.

I wrote it:

HOW TO BE MORE LIKE ME

A SHY
AT
EDUCATION
BY
ETC.

And when I had looked boldly (almost scientifically) at this title-page,
let it mock me a little, had laughed and sighed over it, as I ought,
there came a great hush from I know not where. I remembered it was the
title, after all, for better or worse, in some sort or another, of every
book I had craved and delighted in, in the whole world. Then suddenly I
found myself before this book, praying to it, and before every
struggling desiring-book of every man, of other men, where it has prayed
before, and I dared to look my title in the face. I have not denied--I
do not need to deny--that what I have uncovered here is merely my own
soul's glimmer--my interpretation--at this mighty, passing show of a
world, and it comes to you, Oh Gentle Reader, not as I am,