Thoughts of Worthwhile Men
By F.D. Nichol
All of us occasionally have experienced the rare thrill of listening to an address in which the speaker presented some very vivid and stimulating thoughts with such clearness and force that there was immediately started in our brain a whole series of thoughts. We hastily took out of our pocket an old envelope, or any scrap of paper, to catch the suddenly generated ideas before they flitted away with the passing words of the speaker. I say, we all have this exhilarating experience once in a while, and we wish that sermons and addresses might more often stimulate our thoughts,
Here is where the value of books comes in. Most men who write have compressed into one or two works the whole range of their choicest and most invigorating thoughts. Any man who has personal contact with the routine procedure employed in the publication of a book, knows that only a small per cent of manuscripts submitted ever become books. The competition is keen, and the standards that have to be met are such that the mere fact that a man's thoughts have been put into book form is presumptive evidence in itself that those thoughts are probably worth reading. As a matter of dollars and cents, book publishers are not inclined to risk a thousand dollars or more in printing and promoting a book that is mediocre. Best of all, when a man's thoughts have finally been put into book form, it means they have been subjected to a literary treatment by editors and proof readers to give them the very greatest clarity possible.
As one who lives in the editorial world, I like to feel when I pick up a book that I have before me, compressed in a few pages, the cream of another man's years of meditation. And when I read the book, I don't have to grab hastily for an old envelope on which to scratch some newly generated ideas of mine, lest they vanish with passing inspiration, for the book is always with me, and if I wish I can write in the margin of it, as I often do. Then if I want to pick it up a year or two later, I can compare his thoughts with my marginal ones, and perhaps out of the combination have a new series of thoughts. All of us ought to cultivate the practice of making marginal notations. In this way we can, in a sense, converse with the author. We come into communion with his mind.
A man who depends altogether upon his own private meditations for the food he feeds the people, is in grave danger of afflicting them with malnutrition. It takes a fire to start a fire. And it takes thoughts to generate thoughts. If you want your mind to be ablaze with the brilliance of thought, bring it constantly in contact with the fire of other men's thoughts.
Perhaps some one replies, that "of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Doubtless so. But the man who doesn't study some of the best books is a great weariness to the flesh of everybody who has to listen to him.
