reading X resources from Tkinter

[Guy Middleton]

I just got my copy of Grayson's "Python and Tkinter Programming" (very
nice book, by the way).

He says that one can set entries in the "Tk option database" with
Tk().option_readfile(), and that the syntax of the file read is the same
as the .Xdefaults or .Xresources file.

It's not clear to me (maybe I am not reading carefully enough) if one can
query the X resources directly, or if you can copy X resources into the
option database.  Is this possible?  If it is, how?