Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (100 books to read txt) 📕

been shocked to receive, by the returning post, a letter rejoicing with you in your gaiety, when in fact, at the moment, you are plunged in gloom; or astonished, when you come whistling down to breakfast, to find beside your plate sixteen pages of sympathy and consolation? And have you ever had the misfortune to be loved by somebody you do not love? Then you know very well how expressions of affection which must have been written with tears in the eyes and from the depth of the heart seem to you not merely silly and irritating, but in the worst possible bad taste. Positively vulgar, like those deplorable letters that are read in the divorce courts. And yet these are precisely the expressions that you habitually use when writing to the person you yourself are in love with. In the same way, the reader of a book who happens to be out of tune with the author’s prevailing mood will be bored to death by the things that were written with the greatest enthusiasm. Or else, like the faraway correspondent, he may seize on something which for you was not essential, to make of it the core and kernel of the whole book. And then, you admitted it yourself, you make it very hard for your readers. You write sentimental tragedies in terms of satire and they see only the satire. Isn’t it to be expected?”

“There’s something in that, of course,” said Miss Thriplow. But not everything, she added to herself.

“And then you must remember,” Mr. Cardan went on, “that most readers don’t really read. When you reflect that the pages which cost a week of unremitting and agonizing labour to write are casually read through⁠—or, more likely, skipped through⁠—in a few minutes, you cannot be surprised if little misunderstandings between author and reader should happen from time to time. We all read too much nowadays to be able to read properly. We read with the eyes alone, not with the imagination; we don’t take the trouble to reconvert the printed word into a living image. And we do this, I may say, in sheer self-defence. For though we read an enormous number of words, nine hundred and ninety out of every thousand of them are not worth reading properly, are not even susceptible of being read except superficially, with the eye alone. Our perfunctory reading of nonsense habituates us to be careless and remiss with all our reading, even of good books. You may take endless pains with your writing, my dear Miss Mary; but out of every hundred of your readers, how many, do you suppose, ever take the pains to read what you write⁠—and when I say read,” Mr. Cardan added, “I mean really read⁠—how many, I repeat?”

“Who knows?” said Miss Thriplow. But even if they did read properly, she was thinking, would they really unearth that Heart? That was the vital question.

“It’s this mania for keeping up to date,” said Mr. Cardan, “that has killed the art of reading. Most of the people I know read three or four daily newspapers, look at half a dozen weeklies between Saturday and Monday, and a dozen reviews at the end of every month. And the rest of the time, as the Bible with justifiable vigour would put it, the rest of the time they are whoring after new fiction, new plays and verses and biographies. They’ve no time to do anything but skim along uncomprehendingly. If you must complicate the matter by writing tragedy in terms of farce you can only expect confusion. Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver’s Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children’s book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That’s what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story. The publications of the Purity League figure invariably under the heading ‘Curious’ in the booksellers’ catalogues. The theological and, to Milton himself, the fundamental and essential part of Paradise Lost is now so ludicrous that we ignore it altogether. When somebody speaks of Milton, what do we call to mind? A great religious poet? No. Milton means for us a collection of isolated passages, full of bright light, colour and thunderous harmony, hanging like musical stars in the lap of nothing. Sometimes the adult masterpieces of one generation become the reading of schoolboys in the next. Does anyone over sixteen now read the poems of Sir Walter Scott? or his novels, for that matter? How many books of piety and morality survive only for their fine writing! and how our interest in the merely aesthetic qualities of these books would have scandalized their authors! No, at the end of the account it is the readers who make the book what it ultimately is. The writer proposes, the readers dispose. It’s inevitable, Miss Mary. You must reconcile yourself to fate.”

“I suppose I must,” said Miss Thriplow.

Calamy broke silence for the first time since they had entered the room. “But I don’t know why you complain of being misunderstood,” he said, smiling. “I should have thought that it was much more disagreeable to be understood. One can get annoyed with imbeciles for failing to understand what seems obvious to oneself; one’s vanity may be hurt by their interpretation of you⁠—they make you out to be as vulgar as themselves. Or you may feel that you have failed as an artist, in so far as you haven’t managed to make yourself transparently plain. But what are all these compared to the horrors of being understood⁠—completely understood? You’ve given yourself away, you’re known, you’re at the mercy of the creatures into whose keeping you have committed your soul⁠—why, the thought’s terrifying. If I were you,” he went on, “I’d congratulate myself. You have a public which likes your books, but for the wrong reasons. And meanwhile you’re