After the books comes the demand that what has been understood become form in a man, or else remain decoration. Reading can orient. It cannot substitute for the type. A young man can pass through hundreds of pages and remain unchanged in appetite, speech, and bearing. The pages have then become another stimulus in a horizontal life.
Young men often confuse accumulation with ascent. They treat the next book as the next height. Height is a change of being. After a certain point further reading without application is evasion. The texts have already given the measure. What remains is whether the reader will obey it in the concrete relations of his day.
This passage from knowledge to form is the residual form of the older traditional knowledge of realization. Realization once had a path, a master, and a rite. It now has the narrow field of one life and the criterion already received. The man who leaves the page and holds the measure in his conduct already performs the residual act.
Leave the books behind as a crutch. Keep them as orientation and refuse to hide in them. The residual act is to make the doctrine true in the body and in the day. After the books, only that making counts.