The most selfish man in the world is the one who is most
unselfish,—with his sorrows. He does not leave a single misery of his
untold to you, or unsuffered by you,—he gives you all of them. The
world becomes to him a syndicate formed to take stock in his private
cares, worries and trials. His mistake is in forming a syndicate; he
should organize a trust and control it all himself, then he could keep
everyone from getting any of his misery.
Life is a great, serious problem for the individual. All our greatest
joys and our deepest sorrows come to us,—alone. We must go into our
Gethsemane,—alone. We must battle against the mighty weakness within
us,—alone. We must live our own life,—alone. We must die,—alone. We
must accept the full responsibility of our life,—alone. If each one of
us has this mighty problem of life to solve for himself, if each of us
has his own cares, responsibilities, failures, doubts, fears,
bereavements, we surely are playing a coward’s part when we syndicate
our sorrows to others.
We should seek to make life brighter for others; we should seek to
hearten them in their trials by the example of our courage in bearing
our sorrows. We should seek to forget our failures, and remember only
the new wisdom they gave us; we should live down our griefs by counting
the joys and privileges still left to us; put behind us our worries and
regrets, and face each new day of life as bravely as we can. But we have
no right to retail our sorrow and unhappiness through the community.
Autobiography constitutes a large part of the conversation of some
people. It is not really conversation,—it is an uninterrupted
monologue. These people study their individual lives with a microscope,
and then they throw an enlarged view of their miseries on a screen and
lecture on them, as a stereopticon man discourses on the microbes in a
drop of water. They tell you that “they did not sleep a wink all night;
they heard the clock strike every quarter of an hour.” Now, there is no
real cause for thus boasting of insomnia. It requires no peculiar
talent,—even though it does come only to wide-awake people.
If you ask such a man how he is feeling, he will trace the whole
genealogy of his present condition down from the time he had the grippe
four years ago. You hoped for a word; he gives you a treatise. You asked
for a sentence; he delivers an encyclopedia. His motto is: “Every man
his own Boswell.” He is syndicating his sorrows.
The woman who makes her trials with her children, her troubles with her
servants, her difficulties with her family, the subjects of conversation
with her callers is syndicating her sorrows. If she has a dear little
innocent child who recites “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night,” is it not
wiser for the mother to bear it calmly and discreetly and in silence,
than to syndicate this sorrow?
The business man who lets his dyspepsia get into his disposition, and
who makes everyone around him suffer because he himself is ill, is
syndicating ill-health. We have no right to make others the victims of
our moods. If illness makes us cross and irritable, makes us unjust to
faithful workers who cannot protest, let us quarantine ourselves so that
we do not spread the contagion. Let us force ourselves to speak slowly,
to keep anger away from the eyes, to prevent temper showing in the
voice. If we feel that we _must_ have dyspepsia, let us keep it out of
our head, let us keep it from getting north of the neck.
Most people sympathize too much with themselves. They take themselves as
a single sentence isolated from the great text of life. They study
themselves too much as separated from the rest of humanity, instead of
being vitally connected with their fellow-men. There are some people who
surrender to sorrow as others give way to dissipation. There is a vain
pride of sorrow as well as of beauty. Most individuals have a strange
glow of vanity in looking back upon their past and feeling that few
others in life have suffered such trials, hardships and disappointments
as have come to them.
When Death comes into the little circle of loved ones who make up our
world, all life becomes dark to us. We seem to have no reason for
existing, no object, no incentive, no hope. The love that made struggle
and effort bearable for us,—is gone. We stare, dry-eyed, into the
future, and see no future; we want none. Life has become to us a
past,—with no future. It is but a memory, without a hope.
Then in the divine mystery of Nature’s processes, under the tender,
soothing touch of Time, as days melt into weeks, we begin to open our
eyes gently to the world around us, and the noise and tumult of life
jars less and less upon us. We have become emotionally convalescent. As
the days go on, in our deep love, in the fullness of our loyalty, we
protest often, with tears in our eyes, against our gradual return to the
spirit and atmosphere of the days of the past. We feel in a subtle way a
new pain, as if we were disloyal to the dear one, as if we were
faithless to our love. Nature sweetly turns aside our protesting hands,
and says to us, “There is no disloyalty in permitting the wounds to
lessen their pain, to heal gradually, if Time foreordain that they can
heal.” There are some natures, all-absorbed in a mighty love, wherein no
healing is possible,—but these are rare souls in life.
Bitter though our anguish be, we have no right to syndicate our sorrow.
We have no right to cast a gloom over happy natures by our heavy weight
of crape, by serving the term prescribed by Society for wearing the
livery of mourning,—as if real grief thought of a uniform. We have no
right to syndicate our grief by using notepaper with a heavy black
border as wide as a hatband, thus parading our personal sorrow to others
in their happiest moments.
If life has not gone well with us, if fortune has left us disconsolate,
if love has grown cold, and we sit alone by the embers; if life has
become to us a valley of desolation, through which weary limbs must drag
an unwilling body till the end shall come,—let us not radiate such an
atmosphere to those round us; let us not take strangers through the
catacombs of our life, and show the bones of our dead past; let us not
pass our cup of sorrow to others, but, if we must drink it, let us take
it as Socrates did his poison hemlock,—grandly, heroically and
uncomplainingly.
If your life has led you to doubt the existence of honor in man and
virtue in woman; if you feel that religion is a pretense, that
spirituality is a sham, that life is a failure, and death the entrance
to nothingness; if you have absorbed all the poison philosophy of the
world’s pessimists, and committed the folly of believing it,—don’t
syndicate it.
If your fellow-man be clinging to one frail spar, the last remnant of a
noble, shipwrecked faith in God and humanity, let him keep it. Do not
loosen his fingers from his hope, and tell him it is a delusion. How do
you know? Who told you it was so?
If these high-tide moments of life sweep your faith in Omnipotence into
nothingness, if the friend in whom you have put all faith in humanity
and humanity’s God betray you, do not eagerly accept the teachings of
those modern freethinkers who syndicate their infidelity at so much per
reserved seat. Seek to recover your lost faith by listening to the
million voices that speak of infinite wisdom, infinite love, that
manifest themselves in nature and humanity, and then build up as rapidly
as you can a new faith, a faith in something higher, better and truer
than you have known before.
You may have _one_ in the world to whom you may dare show with the
fullness of absolute confidence and perfect faith any thought, any hope,
any sorrow,—but you dare not trust them to the world. Do not show the
world through your Bluebeard chamber; keep your trials and sorrows as
close to you as you can till you have mastered them. Don’t weaken others
by thus—syndicating your miseries.