Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in READING AND WRITING Since the beginning of civilization, the three R's | have formed the substance of education, for reading and writing are the tools of cumulative knowledge and communication; and arithmetic, the medium of I economic life. By numerical calculation, we hold our own in the face of nature, estimate the chances of life and season, and conduct the business of manufacture and commerce in a social world. Writing jand reading, on the other hand, are not only a means 'but a mode of life itself: For how much of living comes to us through books which we should miss in first-hand contact with the world. By the turn of a page we are whisked to the ends of the earth and walk at ease with their inhabitants ; encounter types with which our social round will never bring us face to face; live a hundred lives, pass through a hundred experiences which would never fall to our own humdrum lot. In books, there lives for us "the sacred past that cannot pass away"; we weep with Hecuba upon the walls of Troy; dare with Caasar at the Rubicon; die with the Spartans at Thermopylre. In books, all lives and times are ours, not flittingly but to live through again and yet again, draining the fcA bitter and the sweet, the zest, the pang, and the significance. Geographically, historically, socially, emotionally, intellectually, literature offers us a vast expansion of experience beyond the limited existence we should elsewise live in time and space. An insight into and understanding of life as a whole, an impersonal and objective view of experience, a I new power over ideas through their adequate ex- pression, a recreative escape from the limitations of life, satisfaction of our hunger for permanence in things, and a brighter vision of the ideal, " The light that never was on... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.