Life Triumphing Over Learning

Rockwell Kent

Mr. Kent has, in this admirable book-plate, sought not to praise books and the reading of books, but to show them as subtle poisons, invading the mind and depriving it of the power to deal freely and eagerly with reality. Life, fierce with youth, fiery and serene, rides by on a charger, while the student, bending over the crook of his own elbow, is dulled to everything but the book under his eyes. It is much the same thought which Anatole France has put in one of his essays: "You see in books things which you cannot see in reality, either because they are too far away, or because they are past. But all that you see in books, you see wrongly, and sadly. We have an hour to live, why should we burden it with so much knowledge? Why should we learn so much when we know that we shall never know anything? We live altogether too much in books and not enough in life".