in which I had been brought up,--a purely intellectual revulsion, I
believe, because my mind was occupied for a long time afterwards with
theological questions, and the only feeling that entered into it was a
sort of disgust at the arrogance of damning so great a proportion of
the human race. I read T. W. Higginson’s “The Sympathy of Religions”
with the greatest satisfaction, and attended the Unitarian church
whenever I could slip away. This faith, while it still appeals to me,
seems at times a little too static and refined to satisfy me with
completeness. For some time there was a considerable bitterness in my
heart at the narrowness of the people who could still find comfort in
the old faith. Reading Buckle and Oliver Wendell Holmes gave me a new
contempt for “conventionality,” and my social philosophy still further
tortured me by throwing the burden for the misery of the world on these
same good neighbors. And all this, although I think I did not make a
nuisance of myself, made me feel a spiritual and intellectual isolation
in addition to my more or less effective physical isolation.
Happily these days are over. The world has righted itself, and I have
been able to appreciate and realize how people count in a social and
group capacity as well as in an individual and personal one, and to
separate the two in my thinking. Really to believe in human nature
while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal
development,--to call for and expect much from men and women, and not
to be disappointed and embittered if they fall short,--to try to do
good with people rather than to them,--this is my religion on its human
side. And if God exists, I think that He must be in the warm sun, in
the kindly actions of the people we know and read of, in the beautiful
things of art and nature, and in the closeness of friendships. He may
also be in heaven, in life, in suffering, but it is only in these
simple moments of happiness that I feel Him and know that He is there.
Death I do not understand at all. I have seen it in its crudest, most
irrational forms, where there has seemed no excuse, no palliation. I
have only known that if we were more careful, and more relentless in
fighting evil, if we knew more of medical science, such things would
not be. I know that a sound body, intelligent care and training,
prolong life, and that the death of a very old person is neither sad
nor shocking, but sweet and fitting. I see in death a perpetual warning
of how much there is to be known and done in the way of human progress
and betterment. And equally, it seems to me, is this true of disease.
So all the crises and deeper implications of life seem inevitably to
lead back to that question of social improvement, and militant learning
and doing.
This, then, is the goal of my religion,--the bringing of fuller, richer
life to more people on this earth. All institutions and all works that
do not have this for their object are useless and pernicious. And
this is not to be a mere philosophic precept which may well be buried
under a host of more immediate matter, but a living faith, to permeate
one’s thought, and transfuse one’s life. Prevention must be the method
against evil. To remove temptation from men, and to apply the stimulus
which shall call forth their highest endeavors,--these seem to me the
only right principles of ethical endeavor. Not to keep waging the
age-long battle with sin and poverty, but to make the air around men
so pure that foul lungs cannot breathe it,--this should be our noblest
religious aim.
Education, knowledge and training,--I have felt so keenly my lack
of these things that I count them as the greatest of means toward
making life noble and happy. The lack of stimulus has tended with me
to dissipate the power which might otherwise have been concentrated
in some one productive direction. Or perhaps it was the many weak
stimuli that constantly incited me and thus kept me from following one
particular bent. I look back on what seems a long waste of intellectual
power, time frittered away in groping and moping, which might easily
have been spent constructively. A defect in one of the physical senses
often means a keener sensitiveness in the others, but it seems that
unless the sphere of action that the handicapped man has is very much
narrowed, his intellectual ability will not grow in compensation for
his physical defects. He will always feel that, had he been strong or
even successful, he would have been further advanced intellectually,
and would have attained greater command over his powers. For his mind
tends to be cultivated extensively, rather than intensively. He has so
many problems to meet, so many things to explain to himself, that he
acquires a wide rather than a profound knowledge. Perhaps eventually,
by eliminating most of these interests as practicable fields, he may
tie himself down to one line of work; but at first he is pretty apt
to find his mind rebellious. If he is eager and active, he will get
a smattering of too many things, and his imperfect, badly trained
organism will make intense application very difficult.
Now that I have talked a little of my philosophy of life, particularly
about what I want to put into it, there is something to be said also
of its enjoyment, and what I may hope to get out of it. I have said
that my ideal of character was militant rather than long-suffering.
It is true that my world has been one of failure and deficit,--I have
accomplished practically nothing alone, and until my college life freed
me could count only two or three instances where I had received kindly
counsel and suggestion; moreover it still seems a miracle to me that
money can be spent for anything beyond the necessities without being
first carefully weighed and pondered over,--but it has not been a
world of suffering and sacrifice, my health has been almost criminally
perfect in the light of my actual achievement, and life has appeared
to me, at least since my more pressing responsibilities were removed,
as a challenge and an arena, rather than a vale of tears. I do not
like the idea of helplessly suffering one’s misfortunes, of passively
bearing one’s lot. The Stoics depress me. I do not want to look on my
life as an eternal making the best of a bad bargain. Granting all the
circumstances, admitting all my disabilities, I want too to “warm both
hands before the fire of life.” What satisfactions I have, and they are
many and precious, I do not want to look on as compensations, but as
positive goods.
The difference between what the strongest of the strong and the most
winning of the attractive can get out of life, and what I can, is after
all so slight. Our experiences and enjoyments, both his and mine, are
so infinitesimal compared with the great mass of possibilities; and
there must be a division of labor. If he takes the world of physical
satisfactions and of material success, I at least can occupy the far
richer kingdom of mental effort and artistic appreciation. And on the
side of what we are to put into life, although I admit that achievement
on my part will be harder relatively to encompass than on his, at least
I may have the field of artistic creation and intellectual achievement
for my own. Indeed, as one gets older, the fact of one’s disabilities
fades dimmer and dimmer away from consciousness. One’s enemy is now
one’s own weak will, and the struggle is to attain the artistic ideal
one has set.
But one must have grown up, to get this attitude. And that is the best
thing the handicapped man can do. Growing up will have given him one of
the greatest satisfactions of his life, and certainly the most durable
one. It will mean at least that he is out of the woods. Childhood has
nothing to offer him; youth little more. They are things to be gotten
through with as soon as possible. For he will not understand, and he
will not be understood. He finds himself simply a bundle of chaotic
impulses and emotions and ambitions, very few of which, from the nature
of the case, can possibly be realized or satisfied. He is bound to be
at cross-grains with the world, and he has to look sharp that he does
not grow up with a bad temper and a hateful disposition, and become
cynical and bitter against those who turn him away. But grown up, his
horizon will broaden; he will get a better perspective, and will not
take the world so seriously as he used to, nor will failure frighten
him so much. He can look back and see how inevitable it all was, and
understand how precarious and problematic even the best regulated of
human affairs may be. And if he feels that there were times when he
should have been able to count upon the help and kindly counsel of
relatives and acquaintances who remained dumb and uninterested, he will
not put their behavior down as proof of the depravity of human nature,
but as due to an unfortunate blindness which it will be his work to
avoid in himself by looking out for others when he has the power.
When he has grown up, he will find that people of his own age and
experience are willing to make those large allowances for what is out
of the ordinary, which were impossible to his younger friends, and
that grown-up people touch each other on planes other than the purely
superficial. With a broadening of his own interests, he will find
himself overlapping other people’s personalities at new points, and
will discover with rare delight that he is beginning to be understood
and appreciated,--at least to a greater degree than when he had to
keep his real interests hid as something unusual. For he will begin to
see in his friends, his music and books, and his interest in people
and social betterment, his true life; many of his restless ambitions
will fade gradually away, and he will come to recognize all the more
clearly some true ambition of his life that is within the range of
his capabilities. He will have built up his world, and have sifted
out the things that are not going to concern him, and participation
in which will only serve to vex and harass him. He may well come to
count his disabilities even as a blessing, for it has made impossible
to him at last many things in the pursuit of which he would only
fritter away his time and dissipate his interest. He must not think
of “resigning himself to his fate”; above all, he must insist on his
own personality. For once really grown up, he will find that he has
acquired self-respect and personality. Grown-upness, I think, is not a
mere question of age, but of being able to look back and understand and
find satisfaction in one’s experience, no matter how bitter it may have
been.
So to all the handicapped and the unappreciated, I would say,--Grow up
as fast as you can. Cultivate the widest interests you can, and cherish
all your friends. Cultivate some artistic talent, for you will find
it the most durable of satisfactions, and perhaps one of the surest
means of livelihood as well. Achievement is, of course, on the knees of
the gods; but you will at least have the thrill of trial, and, after
all, not to try is to fail. Taking your disabilities for granted, and
assuming constantly that they are being taken for granted, make your
social intercourse as broad and as constant as possible. Do not take
the world too seriously, nor let too many social conventions oppress
you. Keep sweet your sense of humor, and above all do not let any
morbid feelings of inferiority creep into your soul. You will find
yourself sensitive enough to the sympathy of others, and if you do not
find people who like you and are willing to meet you more than halfway,
it will be because you have let your disability narrow your vision and
shrink up your soul. It will be really your own fault, and not that of
your circumstances. In a word, keep looking outward; look out eagerly
for those things that interest you, for people who will interest you
and be friends with you, for new interests and for opportunities to
express yourself. You will find that your disability will come to have
little meaning for you, that it will begin to fade quite completely out
of your sight; you will wake up some fine morning and find yourself,
after all the struggles that seemed so bitter to you, really and truly
adjusted to the world.
I am perhaps not yet sufficiently out of the wilderness to utter all
these brave words. For, I must confess, I find myself hopelessly
dependent on my friends and my environment. My friends have come to
mean more to me than almost anything else in the world. If it is far
harder work to make friendships quickly, at least friendships once
made have a depth and intimacy quite beyond ordinary attachments. For
a man such as I am has little prestige; people do not feel the need of
impressing him. They are genuine and sincere, talk to him freely about
themselves, and are generally far less reticent about revealing their
real personality and history and aspirations. And particularly is this
so in friendships with young women. I have found their friendships the
most delightful and satisfying of all. For all that social convention
that insists that every friendship between a young man and woman must
be on a romantic basis is necessarily absent in our case. There is
no fringe around us to make our acquaintance anything but a charming
companionship. With all my friends, the same thing is true. The first
barrier of strangeness broken down, our interest is really in each
other, and not in what each is going to think of the other, how he is
to be impressed, or whether we are going to fall in love with each
other. When one of my friends moves away, I feel as if a great hole
had been left in my life. There is a whole side of my personality that
I cannot express without him. I shudder to think of any change that
will deprive me of their constant companionship. Without friends I
feel as if even my music and books and interests would turn stale on
my hands. I confess that I am not grown up enough to get along without
them.
But if I am not yet out of the wilderness, at least I think I see the
way to happiness. With health and a modicum of achievement, I shall
not see my lot as unenviable. And if misfortune comes, it will only
be something flowing from the common lot of men, not from my own
particular disability. Most of the difficulties that flow from that
I flatter myself I have met by this time of my twenty-fifth year,
have looked full in the face, have grappled with, and find in no wise
so formidable as the world usually deems them,--no bar to my real
ambitions and ideals.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
Transcriber’s Notes
Page 112: “kind of spiritual parasites” changed to “kind of spiritual
parasite”
Page 264: “form sone of the darker” changed to “form some of the darker”