From Ger­ald Stan­ley Lee’s Crowds, 1913. Read it aloud, as with all of Lee, every damned word of it, aloud, until you get it right, until it’s in your blood and bones and mind and you can see the world he saw back then, right now:

There is a boy at this very moment with strings and mar­bles and a nation in his pocket, a sys­tem of railroads—a boy with a national cure for tuber­cu­lo­sis, with sun-​​engines for everybody—there is a boy with cathe­drals in him too, no doubt or some boy like young Pin­chot, with moun­tains­ful of forests in his heart.

This is what Mr. Carnegie him­self would like to do, but with his big, stiff, clumsy libraries trail­ing their huge, sense­less brick-​​and-​​mortar bod­ies, their white pil­lars and things, about the coun­try, unmanned, inert, eye­less, all those great gates and forts of knowl­edge, Col­i­se­ums of paper, and with the mechan­i­cal peo­ple behind the coun­ters, the police­men of the books, all stand­ing about pro­tect­ing them—with all this for­mi­da­ble array, how can such a boy be hunted out or drawn in, or how would he dare go tramp­ing in through the great gates and hunt­ing about for him­self? He could only be hunted out by peo­ple all wrought through with human expe­ri­ence, men and women who would give the world to find him, who are on the daily look­out for such a boy—by some spe­cial kind of eager librar­ian, or by dis­guised teach­ers, anony­mous poets, or by divin­ers, by expert geniuses in boys. If Mr. Carnegie could go about and look up and buy up wher­ever he went these men who have this boy-​​genius in them, deliver them from empty, help­less, mere getting-​​a-​​living lives; and if he could set these men, and set them about thickly, among the books in his libraries—those huge anatomies and bones of knowl­edge he has estab­lished every­where, all his great lit­er­ary steel-works—men would soon begin to be dis­cov­ered, to be cre­ated, to be built in libraries … but as it is now.…

Gen­tle Reader, have you ever stood in front of one of them, looked up at the win­dows, thought of all those great tiers, those moulds and blocks of learn­ing on the shelves; and have you never watched the weary peo­ple that drib­ble in from the streets and wan­der coldly about, or sit down list­less in them—in those mighty, silent empires of the past? have you never thought that some­where all about them, some­where in this same library, there must be some white, silent, sunny coun­try of the future, full of chil­dren and of singing, full of some­thing very dif­fer­ent from these iron walls of wis­dom? And have you never thought what it would mean if Mr. Carnegie would spend his money on search par­ties for peo­ple among the books, or what it would mean if the entire library, if all the books in it, became, as it were, wired through­out with live, splen­did, delighted men and women, to make con­nec­tions, to estab­lish the cur­rent between the peo­ple and the books, to dis­cover the peo­ple one by one and fol­low them to their homes, and fol­low them in their lives, and take out the latent geniuses, and the list­less engi­neers and poets, and the Kos­suths, Cæsars, the Flo­rence Nightingales…?

I have.

And thank you, Bar­bara, for find­ing this for me tonight.