remarks, more for my own
pleasure than for benefit to society.

Were the listings halved, made more selective, the book might serve
its purpose better. Anybody who wants to can slice it in any manner
he pleases. I am as much against forced literary swallowings as I am
against prohibitions on free tasting, chewing, and digestion. I rate
censors, particularly those of church and state, as low as I rate
character assassins; they often run together.

I'd like to make a book on _Emancipators of the Human Mind_--Emerson,
Jefferson, Thoreau, Tom Paine, Newton, Arnold, Voltaire, Goethe.... When
I reflect how few writings connected with the wide open spaces of
the West and Southwest are wide enough to enter into such a volume, I
realize acutely how desirable is perspective in patriotism.

Hundreds of the books listed in this _Guide_ have given me pleasure as
well as particles for the mosaic work of my own books; but, with minor
exceptions, they increasingly seem to me to explore only the exteriors
of life. There is in them much good humor but scant wit. The hunger for
something afar is absent or battened down. Drought blasts the turf, but
its unhealing blast to human hope is glossed over. The body's thirst for
water is a recurring theme, but human thirst for love and just thinking
is beyond consideration. Horses run with their riders to death or
victory, but fleeting beauty haunts no soul to the "doorway of the
dead." The land is often pictured as lonely, but the lone way of a human
being's essential self is not for this extravert world. The banners of
individualism are carried high, but the higher individualism that grows
out of long looking for meanings in the human drama is negligible.
Somebody is always riding around or into a "feudal domain." Nobody at
all penetrates it or penetrates democracy with the wisdom that came to
Lincoln in his loneliness: "As I would not be a SLAVE, so I would not
be a MASTER. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from
this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." The mountains,
the caves, the forests, the deserts have had no prophets to interpret
either their silences or their voices. In short, these books are mostly
only the stuff of literature, not literature itself, not the very stuff
of life, not the distillations of mankind's "agony and bloody sweat."

An ignorant person attaches more importance to the chatter of small
voices around him than to the noble langua