FOREFINGERS
This left forefinger of mine is certainly a curiosity. It looks like
a miniature totem-pole, and I wish I had before me its life history.
I'd like to know just how all these seventeen scars were acquired.
It seems to have come in contact with about all sorts and sizes of
cutlery. If only teachers or parents had been wise enough to make a
record of all my bloodletting mishaps, with occasions, causes, and
effects, that record would afford a fruitful study for students of
education. The pity of it is that we take no account of such matters
as phases or factors of education. We keep saying that experience is
the best teacher, and then ignore this eloquent forefinger. I call
that criminal neglect arising from crass ignorance. Why, these scars
that adorn many parts of my body are the foot-prints of evolution,
if, indeed, evolution makes tracks. The scars on the faces of those
students at Heidelberg are accounted badges of honor, but they cannot
compare with the big scar on my left knee that came to me as the free
gift of a corn-knife. Those students wanted their scars to take home
to show their mothers. I didn't want mine, and made every effort to
conceal it, as well as the hole in my trousers. I got my scar as a
warning. I profited by it, too, for never were there two cuts in
exactly the same place. In fact, they were widely, if not wisely,
distributed. They are the indices of the soaring sense of my
youthful audacity. And yet neither parents nor teachers ever graded
my scars.
I recall quite distinctly that, at one time, I proclaimed boldly over
one entire page of a copy-book, that knowledge is power, and became
so enthusiastic in these numerous proclamations that I wrote on the
bias, and zigzagged over the page with fine abandon. But no teacher
ever even hinted to me that the knowledge I acquired from my contest
with a nest of belligerent bumblebees had the slightest connection
with power. When I groped my way home with both eyes swollen shut I
was never lionized. Indeed, no! Anything but that! I couldn't milk
the cows that evening, and couldn't study my lesson, and therefore,
my newly acquired knowledge was called weakness instead of power.
They did not seem to realize that my swollen face was prominent in
the scheme of education, nor that bumblebees and yellow-jackets may
be a means of grace. They wanted me to be solving problems in common
(sometimes called vulgar) fractions. I don't fight bumblebees any
more, which proves that my knowledge generated power. The emotions
of my boyhood presented a scene of grand disorder, and those
bumblebees helped to organize them, and to clarify and define my
sense of values. I can philosophize about a bumblebee far more
judicially now than I could when my eyes were swollen shut.
I went to the town to attend a circus one day, and concluded I'd
celebrate the day with eclat by getting my hair cut. At the
conclusion of this ceremony the tonsorial Beau Brummel, in the most
seductive tones, suggested a shampoo. I just couldn't resist his
blandishments, and so consented. Then he suggested tonic, and grew
quite eloquent in recounting the benefits to the scalp, and I took
tonic. I felt quite a fellow, till I came to pay the bill, and then
discovered that I had but fifteen cents left from all my wealth.
That, of course, was not sufficient for a ticket to the circus, so I
bought a bag of peanuts and walked home, five miles, meditating, the
while, upon the problem of life. My scalp was all right, but just
under that scalp was a seething, soundless hubbub. I learned things
that day that are not set down in the books, even if I did get myself
laughed at. When I get to giving school credits for home work I
shall certainly excuse the boy who has had such an experience as that
from solving at least four problems in vulgar fractions, and I shall
include that experience in my definition of education, too.
I have tried to back-track Paul Laurence Dunbar, now and then, and
have found it good fun. Once I started with his expression, "the
whole sky overhead and the whole earth underneath," and tried to get
back to where that started. He must have been lying on his back on
some grass-plot, right in the centre of everything, with that whole
half-sphere of sky luring his spirit out toward the infinite, with a
pillow that was eight thousand miles thick. If I had been his
teacher I might have called him lazy and shiftless as he lay there,
because he was not finding how to place a decimal point, I'm glad, on
the whole, that I was not his teacher, for I'd have twinges of
conscience every time I read one of his big thoughts. I'd feel that,
while he was lying there growing big, I was doing my best to make him
little. When I was lying on my back there in the Pantheon in Rome,
looking up through that wide opening, and watching a moving-picture
show that has no rival, the fleecy clouds in their ever-changing
forms against that blue background of matchless Italian sky, those
gendarmes debated the question of arresting me for disorderly
conduct. My conduct was disorderly because they couldn't understand
it. But, if Raphael could have risen from his tomb only a few yards
away, he would have told those fellows not to disturb me while I was
being so liberally educated. Then, that other time, when my friend
Reuben and I stood on the very prow of the ship when the sea was
rolling high, swinging us up into the heights, and then down into the
depths, with the roar drowning out all possibility of talk--well,
somehow, I thought of that copy-book back yonder with its message
that "Knowledge is power." And I never think of power without
recalling that experience as I watched that battle royal between the
power of the sea and the power of the ship that could withstand the
angry buffeting of the waves, and laugh in glee as it rode them down.
I know that six times nine are fifty-four, but I confess that I
forgot this fact out there on the prow of that ship. Some folks
might say that Reuben and I were wasting our time, but I can't think
so. I like, even now, to stand out in the clear during a
thunder-storm. I want the head uncovered, too, that the wind may
toss my hair about while I look the lightning-flashes straight in the
eye and stand erect and unafraid as the thunder crashes and rolls and
reverberates about me. I like to watch the trees swaying to and fro,
keeping time to the majestic rhythm of the elements. To me such an
experience is what my neighbor John calls "growing weather," and at
such a time the bigness of the affair causes me to forget for the
time that there are such things as double datives.
One time I spent the greater part of a forenoon watching logs go over
a dam. It seems a simple thing to tell, and hardly worth the
telling, but it was a great morning in actual experience. In time
those huge logs became things of life, and when they arose from their
mighty plunge into the watery deeps they seemed to shake themselves
free and laugh in their freedom. And there were battles, too. They
struggled and fought and rode over one another, and their mighty
collisions produced a very thunder of sound. I tried to read the
book which I had with me, but could not. In the presence of such a
scene one cannot read a book unless it is one of Victor Hugo's. That
copy-book looms up again as I think of those logs, and I wonder
whether knowledge is power, and whether experience is the best
teacher. But, dear me! Here I've been frittering away all this good
time, and these papers not graded yet!