Conrad's New Preface
The Little House
Tadpoles
Magic in Salamis
Consider the Commuter
The Permanence of Poetry
Books of the Sea
Fallacious Meditations on Criticism
Letting Out the Furnace
By the Fireplace
A City Note-Book
Thoughts in the Subway
Dempsey _vs._ Carpentier
A Letter to a Sea Captain
PLUM PUDDING
[Illustration]
THE PERFECT READER
On Christmas Eve, while the Perfect Reader sits in his armchair
immersed in a book--so absorbed that he has let the fire go out--I
propose to slip gently down the chimney and leave this tribute in
his stocking. It is not a personal tribute. I speak, on behalf of
the whole fraternity of writers, this word of gratitude--and envy.
No one who has ever done any writing, or has any ambition toward
doing so, can ever be a Perfect Reader. Such a one is not
disinterested. He reads, inevitably, in a professional spirit. He
does not surrender himself with complete willingness of enjoyment.
He reads "to see how the other fellow does it"; to note the turn of
a phrase, the cadence of a paragraph; carrying on a constant
subconscious comparison with his own work. He broods constantly as
to whether he himself, in some happy conjuncture of quick mind and
environing silence and the sudden perfect impulse, might have
written something like that. He is (poor devil) confessedly selfish.
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