Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-04-16

Undermining sentences In books Is g
good habit
Mostly they will be sentences a reader
likes, but occasionally they may mark
disagreements.
In either event the habit will do q
great deal 10 help the reader make the
book his own.
How many Of us read blindly. with
out knowing much more when we end
q book than when We began iti
This state Of affairs may be all right
with a work Of fiction, when the nara
tive flow Is what we are after, In the
main.
With more serious works, however
one flnds felicitous sentences, prize
thoughts, which he would not willingly
let die.
And yet these very purple spots, II
unmarked, will pass from mind quickly
perhaps never to be found again. unless
the reader takes the pains to underline
them as he goes along.
Undermining is peculiarly valuable &c
the writer and TO the speaker No mat
ter how vivid a thought may be. and
how well the reader promises himself
TO remember 1t, In most cases its power
will fade away, and he will find him
self forgetting It,
Now where is that sentence?" he
will ask himself, turning over few
pages. It know right where 1t is
But he doesn't know where 1t Is. He
thinks 1t is at the bottom of a right
hand page, or at the top of left-hand
page, but before long he finds that he
Is not sure where 1t Is.
He may even go to the trouble Of re-
reading the entire work, only to have
the elusive phrase, or word, or SEN
tence, or paragraph, escape him en-
tirely, as If it had never been, as II he
had never read It.
We know a man in this town who dis
covered a most apt sentence, one pc
lem, in one Of the volumes of Alexandra
Dumas 'D'Artagnan" series. Not hav-
ing pencil and paper handy, he decided
TO forego his customary habit OF
undermining what struck him as good
Surely he could not forget that prize
sentence, he told himself. He would
be able to turn to 1t at will. But he
got interested in the ensuing adven-
lures, went through the following ad-
ventures, and by the time he thought
of his sentence again it was gone.
Then began the search for 1t. It has
now been three years since he at
tempted to retrace his mental steps in
that great maze and TO rediscover-
for he had found 1t once-the sentence
which so tickled his fancy. He has
even gone to the extent of rereadine
all the volumes Of the series, but the
elusive sentence still evades him. He has
attempted to tell the gist of it to
friends, and to set them to tracking
it down, but they have had no better
success than he.
At times he has even doubted that he
ever found such a sentence, such g
thought, but then he knows better, he
can swear he read 1t, he almost knows
where It Is. He believes that it is in
THE Three Musketeers," but for the
life of him he has never been able tc
find 1t since. He has gone through that
book with flne-tooth comb, as it were
still he finds it not.
And all this labor, this searching
would have been obviated If he had
simply underlined the sentence with q
pencil. Then 1t would have been his
forever.
One of the greatest things the habit
of undermining does for a reader is that
1t records his moods of the moment
When he goes through his book again
perhaps years later, he finds there a
mental photograph of himself, in the
sentences which impressed him as good
why did underline that?" he will
find himself asking as he rereads
what he knows once struck him as
worthy. Now he sees nothing in It
What has happened? The chances are
that he has grown mentally, and that