EXCEPTION
A bicycle, the other day, a little outside Paris as it was running along
quietly, lifted itself off the ground suddenly, and flew three yards and
seven inches.
There are nine million seven hundred and eighty nine thousand nine
hundred and seventy-nine bicycles that have not flown three yards and
seven inches.
But what of it? Why count them up? Why bother about them? The important,
conclusive, massive, irresistible, crushing, material fact is that one
bicycle has flown three yards seven inches.
The nine million seven hundred and eighty-nine thousand nine hundred and
seventy-nine bicycles that can not fly yet are negligible. So are nine
out of ten business firms.
If there is one exceptional man in modern industry who is running his
business in the right way and who has made a success of it and has
proved it--he may look visionary to class-socialists and to other people
who decide by measuring off masses of fact, and counting up rows of
people and who see what anybody can see, but he is after all in
arranging our social programme the only man of any material importance
for us to consider. It would be visionary to take the past, dump it
around in front of one, and try to make a future out of it. I do not
deny what people tell me about millionaires and about factory slaves. I
have not mooned or lied or turned away my face. I stand by time one
live, right, implacable, irrevocable, prolific exception. I stand by the
one bicycle out of them all that has flown three yards and seven inches.
I lay out my program, conceive my world on that. Piles of facts
arranged in dead layers high against heaven, rows of figures, miles of
factory slaves, acres of cemeteries of dead millionaires, going-by
streetfuls of going-by people, shall not cow me.
My heart has been broken long enough by counting truths on my fingers,
by numbering grains of sand, men, and mountains, bombs, acorns and
marbles alike.
Which truth matters?
Which man is right?
Where is Nazareth?
* * * * *
Nazareth is our only really important town now. I will see what is going
on in Nazareth. On every subject that comes up, in every line of
thought, I will go to the city of implacable exceptions. All the
inventors flock there--the man with the one bicycle which flies, the one
great industrial organizer, the man with the man-machine, and the
man--the great boy who carries new great beautiful cities in his pocket
like strings and nails and knives, they are all there.
Nazareth is the city, the one mighty little city of the spirit where all
the really worth-while men wherever they may seem to be, all day, all
night, do their living.
Other cities may make things, in Nazareth they make worlds. One can see
a new one almost any day in Nazareth. Men go up and down the streets
there with their new worlds in their eyes.
Some of them have them almost in their hands or are looking down and
working on them.
It does not seem to me that any of us can make ourselves strong and fit
to lay out a sound program or vision for a world, who do not watch with
critical expectation and with fierce joy these men of Nazareth, who do
not take at least a little time off every day, in spirit, in Nazareth,
and spend it in watching bicycles fly three feet and seven inches. To
watch these men, it seems to me, is our one natural, economical way to
get at essential facts, at the set-one-side truths, at the exceptions
that worlds and all-around programs for worlds are made out of. To watch
these men is the one way I know not to be lost in great museums and
storehouses of facts that do not matter, in the streetfuls and
skyscraperfuls of men that go by.
I regret to record that professors of political economy, social
philosophers, industrial big-wigs, presidents of boards of trade have
not been often met with on the streets of this silent, crowded, mighty,
invisible little town that rules the destinies of men.
Not during the last twenty years, but one is meeting them there to-day.
All these things that people are saying to me are mere history. I have
seen the one live exception. One telephone was enough. And one Galileo
was enough, with his little planet turning round and round, with all of
us on it who were obliged to agree with him about it. It kept turning
round and round with us until we did.