Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author's or even goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.
Every book stands by itself, like a one-family house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, together they all add up to something; they are connected with each other and with other cities. The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different solutions according to different writings at different times.
Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you "ought" to read, you probably won't have fun. But if you put down a book you don't like and try another till you find one that means something to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good time--and if you become as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won't have suffered during the process.
The main impression growing out of twelve years on the faculty of a medical school is that the No.1 health problem in the U.S. today, even more than AIDS or cancer, is that Americans don’t know how to think about health and illness. Our reactions are formed on the terror level.
We fear the worst, expect the worst, thus invite the worst. The result is that we are becoming a nation of weaklings and hypochondriacs, a self-medicating society incapable of
distinguishing between casual, everyday symptoms and those that require professional attention.
Early in life, too, we become seized with the bizarre idea that we are constantly assaulted by invisible monsters called germs, and that we have to be on constant alert to protect ourselves against their fury. Equal emphasis, however, is not given to the presiding fact that our bodies are superbly equipped to deal with the little demons and the best way of forestalling an attack is to maintain a sensible life-style.
The expensive shops in a famous arcade near Piccadilly were just opening. At this time of the morning, the arcade was almost empty. Mr Taylor, the owner of a jewellery shop was admiring a new window display. Two of his assistants had been working busily since 8 o'clock and had only just finished. Diamond necklaces and rings had been beautifully arranged on a background of black velvet. After gazing at the display for several minutes, Mr Taylor went back into his shop.
The silence was suddenly broken when a large car, with its headlights on and its horn blaring, roared down the arcade. It came to a stop outside the jeweler's. One man stayed at the wheel while two others with black stockings over their faces jumped out and smashed the window of the shop with iron bars. While this was going on, Mr Taylor was upstairs. He and his staff began throwing furniture out of the window. Chairs and tables went flying into the arcade. One of the thieves was struck by a heavy statue, but he was too busy helping himself to diamonds to notice any pain. The raid was all over in three minutes, for the men scrambled back into the car and it moved off at a fantastic speed. Just as it was leaving, Mr Taylor rushed out and ran after it throwing ashtrays and vases, but it was impossible to stop the thieves. They had got away with thousands of pounds worth of diamonds.
Yesterday afternoon Frank Hawkins was telling me about his experiences as a young man. Before he retired, Frank was the head of a very large business company, but as a boy he used to work in a small shop. It was his job to repair bicycles and at that time he used to work fourteen hours a day. He saved money for years and in 1958 he bought a small workshop of his own. In his twenties Frank used to make spare parts for aeroplanes. At that time he had two helpers. In a few years the small workshop had become a large factory which employed seven hundred and twenty-eight people. Frank smiled when he remembered his hard early years and the long road to success. He was still smiling when the door opened and his wife came in. She wanted him to repair their grandson's bicycle!
Nearly a week passed before the girl was able to explain what had happened to her. One afternoon she set out from the coast in a small boat and was caught in a storm. Towards evening, the boat struck a rock and the girl jumped into the sea. Then she swam to the shore after spending the whole night in the water. During that time she covered a distance of eight miles. Early next morning, she saw a light ahead. She knew she was near the shore because the light was high up on the cliffs. On arriving at the shore, the girl struggled up the cliff towards the light she had seen. That was all she remembered. When she woke up a day later, she found herself in hospital.