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.
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