The essay meditates on what it means to be human, arguing that sincere writing should read like companionship rather than material for dissection, and that books meant to be read enlarge imagination, sympathy, and the sense of life. It laments the decline of youthful receptivity that once made literature richly present and contrasts humane, genial style with cold technicality. It diagnoses modern urban complexity, specialization, and haste as forces that narrow experience and threaten the broad traits that sustain human life, and it urges deliberate effort to preserve leisure, reflection, and a more rounded human sympathies.