XXIV On Enjoying One's Own Writings I was alone, ensconced in a corner of the noisy, smoky café, perusing the pages of a valued volume. Keidansky walked in hastily, took up my book and looked at it. "How can you read anything that you have not written yourself?" he asked, with surprising solemnity. "Why, I don't mind it any longer; I am used to it now," I mumbled in astonishment. But conversations with Keidansky are one-sided. Before I had formed half a thought he was all ready with speech. "You are coming down, dear fellow," he said; "you are compromising and becoming reconciled to everything. You cannot supply your own demand, so you are going elsewhere for your literature--spending on others your days and your nights that you may devote to the excavations of the things that lie deep and dormant within thyself. I wager that before long you will even be reading the classics. You will abdicate from the sovereignty of your own genius, and measure life by the enjoyment that you derive from the things that other people do. "Aliens, foreigners, strangers as far away from you as different individuals are, millions of miles of impassable icebergs impeding any possible approach. They were not born as you were born, they have not lived as you have lived, they have not loved as you have loved, they have not hated as you have hated, they have not grappled with the agonies as you have, they have not died as you have over and over again, and yet--you read their books and pretend to enjoy them." I asked my friend to be seated, but he preferred to stand up, and with a characteristic wave of the hand, showed his annoyance at being interrupted. "If you have not felt what I have felt," he said, "it is useless for me to speak to you, and for you to enjoy what I write is hard and tedious labor. You cannot get behind the things others say, and all that remains for you to do is to read the meaning in so many words; and no meaning is ever absolutely uttered in so many words. There is almost always something unsaid behind the thing that is said. There is as much in as there is out. Thought is an endless chain of which we only see separate rings. We are fortunate to see that in the case of other persons. Most often you only hear and read their talk. But when you read your own thought, you read so vastly more than you have written, and you read the history of your thoughts, their far-away causes, their prehistoric origins, and their subterranean sources--and you enjoy it. You enjoy it, if you are intimately concerned in one near and dear personality, in the greatest study in all mankind--yourself. Also, if you are interested in the evolution of human thought, and can see it through the operations of your own mind.