believing in eternity? There was a glamour and a glitter about that past
playground of religion which makes our present creed of science barren
and chilly. If to-day we write the word Eternity in white chalk on a
blackboard, and gazing at it try to recall what it used to signify, we
shall find this exercise of the spirit most joyous. The word reminds us
how we used to slip away from hurry to bathe in a sea of timelessness,
refreshing to every taut nerve. How we exulted and expanded in the
belief that eternity would give us all that we could not get in the
present, for that was what eternity was for! We should never again be
sick or sad or bad. In eternity we should be no longer the puny spawn
of monkeys, but beings good and great and glorious as angels. Eternity
was full of shining light and serried ranks of singing hosts. Majestic
figures from the past walked its wondrous streets and we ourselves
walked with them. There was the gleaming of a golden and immortal city,
our home at last. There was even in our vision of eternity the presence
of God.
Such was the fairyland of faith where once we walked confidently. It is
banned now even from our fancy as irrevocably as the elf-kingdom of the
nursery. No one now believes we live after we die; it is even deemed
reprehensible to want to. Yet for those of us who formerly possessed
eternity it is hard all at once to get used to doing without it. We
agree with science that eternity should be abolished in the interests
of an efficient spiritual life, and yet, without eternity, we sometimes
ache with our abrupt adjustment to being merely mortal. Creeds and other
comforts have a way of slipping away from us without our seeing. Time
and again we can be found blindly struggling to adapt ourselves to some
deficiency in our supply of beliefs without any clear conception of the
nature of the hole or of our resources for either filling it or enduring
it. The present age suffers all the awkwardness of being transitional.
In a few decades babies will be born immune to any faith or fear in
regard to the future, but meanwhile it is well to examine closely our
present difficulties in passing from immortality to annihilation, and
perhaps to discover a little help for hobbledehoys. A transitional
period should be a little patient with itself, for it suffers both
the growing-pains of stretching to the demands of the future and the
rheumatic twinges of belonging to a decaying past.
The first difficulty of our adjustment has the nature of a growing-pain,
being due to our still imperfect response to the commands of science,
which bewilder our dullness by apparent contradiction. When science is
all the time bidding us to batter down doors, it is confusing to the
mind to have science herself declare that death is the only door that
opens nowhere. In every other department of research we are encouraged
to the wildest flights of imagination and hypothesis. It is, therefore,
increasingly difficult, as we become increasingly inured to scientific
adventure, to stop short before the most provocative of all phenomena,
the human spirit in its eventful cycle. Eternity seems the only
thoroughly scientific explanation of soul. At a mere superficial reading
each human life appears like a chapter from a serial rather than a
complete volume or a fugitive page tossed on the wind. The chance-blown
paragraphs reveal so much that suggests a vigorously conceived plot,
powerful characterization, dramatic incident, intense emotion, rich
background, that it is almost impossible not to formulate a synopsis
of preceding chapters, and to conjecture the dénouement following the
catastrophe of death.
It is even at times hard to withstand the conviction that there must
be an author. One could almost suspect him of breaking off at a crisis
on purpose to make us eager for the next installment. The figure of
speech may perhaps make clear to us the primary trouble of our being
transitional, namely, the difficulty of being both scientific and
unscientific at the same time, for our instinct to understand and
explain tends to destroy our pleasure even in the torn chapter we
hold in hand; it is hard to work up a proper reading enthusiasm in
the face of the positive assertion by science that there will be no
“continued-in-our-next.”
The most cursory study of our bygone belief reveals at once other
troubles for the present generation in trying too suddenly to get along
without a future. We suffer from the working within us of old instincts
and superstitions not to be violently uprooted--rheumatic heritage of
souls in process of transformation. While our reason admits that there
is no valid excuse for being immortal and that our perverse hankering
after such a condition argues us self-centered and self-important, all
the same there is peril in too abruptly removing the props to personal
prestige promised by the mythical joys of our lost fairyland. Our
anticipated survival gave us a sense of superiority to the insects,
prevented our being sensitive to the silent scoffings of the roadside
stones that so long outlast us. Evanescence tends also to undermine
our personal affections. It hardly seems worth while to be overfond of
relative or friend whom a breath of wind may snuff out like a flame.
Why should beings more brittle than beetles go about loving each other
as if they were gods? Morally, human frailty was often subconsciously
controlled by keeping ourselves fit for the society we expected
ultimately to enter, that of saints and sages and perhaps of God Himself.
The first effect of destroying all these expectations is disastrous
for people who were far more dependent on them than they dreamed, for,
to tell the truth, eternity in the old days had so little apparent
relation to our daily conduct that the complete rejection of the
concept is like that of some bodily organ whose functioning is deemed
negligible until it ceases. Our suffering is no less keen because we
recognize it as purely evolutional and temporary. In a few generations
people will find as much inspiration in being finite as we used to
find in being infinite. Meanwhile, for us who have the luck to be
transitional there is perhaps a compromise.
Apart from our personal pangs, the loss of eternity has had effects,
social and political, that intensify our private discomfort. Perhaps if
our difficulties are clarified we may recognize how burdened we actually
are, and be more willing to allow ourselves a makeshift leniency. Chief
among the public phenomena directly traceable to the absence of eternity
is the war. On a basis of strict mortality, war for aggrandizement
becomes the only legitimate activity for person or nation. Reason shows
that, since death ends all, material things are the only things worth
getting, and even more clearly shows that, since human beings are as
finite as mosquitoes, they are no more worthy of preservation. Germany
is the most laudably logical nation in the world, but her logic has
been a little uncomfortable for the nations who are more sluggish
in evolution, and who still cling to their retrogressive respect for
spiritual valuations and to their obsolete reverence for the human soul.
Of course, if Germany had not purified herself of all taint of faith in
eternity, she might conceivably have waited for permeation in peace,
instead of being in such a devil of a hurry to chop a way through for
her culture. Doubtless, in the course of time other nations will attain
Germany’s serene heights of pure reason, but at present it is necessary
frankly to admit that aggression, while our brains pronounce it a most
rational pastime, is still for our imaginations and sympathies one of
the chief temporary discomforts of doing without eternity.
Next to the war in importance of effect stands the high cost of living.
Of course we all know that there is enough food for everybody to eat and
enough money to pay for it, provided that nobody wants more food than he
ought to eat, nor more money than he ought to spend. However, now that
we know with absolute certainty that we die when we die, any man would
be a fool if he did not try to eat as much and to spend as much as he
possibly could. Food and money are the only fun the finite can have,
and naturally the effort to get as much as possible of both sends prices
soaring. Without penetrating too far into economic intricacies, one can
connect the decline in value of the Apocalypse with the advance in value
of eggs. The high cost of living is directly due to the high cost of
dying; when dying costs annihilation, people have to work pretty hard to
get a life’s worth out of seventy years.
Of causes of distress taken in order of popular complaint, next to war
and the high cost of living stands the new poetry. The relation between
imagism and immortality is so obvious as to be invisible. Granted that
the aim of literature is to mirror life, the imagist insistence on
aspect _versus_ interpretation is inevitable, for plainly literature
should not deal with meanings when life, being mortal, cannot have a
meaning. Sensation alone is sufficiently ephemeral to be true to life,
whereas a poem that attempts to express some significance beneath
phenomena has a tendency to outlast its generation, and runs the risk of
endurance, and of becoming, in some notable instances, even immortal,
whereas such a reversion toward stability either in a poem or in a
person shows each alike false to our faith in flux.
Those of us, however, who cannot all at once throw off the thrall of
the poor old poets of our infancy must be content to go a bit slowly,
trusting that our descendants will attain complete responsiveness to
the poetry of the evanescent. We perceive humbly enough how reactionary
we are, but our obstreperous instinct for explanation corrupts even
our literary tenets so that with senile obstinacy we sometimes wonder
whether, even from its own purely æsthetic point of view, the new
poetry does not miss something the older poetry possessed. Meaning,
adroitly introduced into a poem, sometimes produced a pretty little
art of its own, a blending of outer and inner attributes that had in
itself a kind of grace. It is even more heterodox to question, in
looking back, whether a poet’s effort to explain was not stimulating to
his imagination, making him actually see things more vividly in their
external aspects by his very concentration on their inner qualities.
Certainly no imagist poet, for all his preoccupation with picture, has
ever produced as vivid descriptions as did Browning, a poet above all
others avid for meanings.
We of to-day may as well acknowledge first as last that our feet, set in
infancy to the pace of eternity, will never step lively enough for the
present age. While deprecating the breathlessness of keeping up with the
contemporary, the most old-fashioned of us must admire its valiancy. We
are not nearly so lazy as when we used to leave some of our development
to be accomplished after the temporary set-back of death. Our own
muscles are a bit stiff, however, and as we conscientiously whip them to
the requirements of high-speed pressure, we must comfort ourselves with
the thought that our posterity will be able to fly without experiencing
any of our awkwardness.
The spiritual leisure and lethargy resulting from a reliance on eternity
to finish up what we could not get done on earth, obviously clogged the
wheels of progress, which now can be everywhere seen whizzing along
without any brakes. We open the advertising pages of any periodical, to
find that speed is the dominant advantage offered with every commodity.
Get-healthy-quick, get-learned-quick, get-rich-quick, are the headings
under which most of our advertisements might be grouped. We are all
familiar with the photographed faces of the people who will show us how
to reach a maximum of attainment in a minimum of time. The gentleman
with the arresting index finger leaps out at our laziness to teach us
how to be successful in ten lessons. Success is a word that could not
even be defined before the abolishment of eternity, with the resultant
denial of all criteria but the immediate.
While haste is necessarily painful for our still imperfectly adjusted
mentality in every department of life, we must allow for our being
peculiarly sensitive to the changes it necessitates in the training of
youth. In the old days when death graduated us into eternity, we had
much more time to devote to education. There was in our early years
an agreeable luxury in the pursuit of learning. We did not have to
practice the rigid economy of the correspondence school or of languages
by phonograph. As we look back, it seems as if minds were richer when
they did not have to be so niggardly in the luggage they took for their
journey. This is but the sentimental vaporing of the senile, for in our
sane moments we perceive as clearly as does the most modern pedagogue
that Greek and Latin are impedimenta to retard the boy of to-day in
the race set before him, and we agree with the publisher-purveyors to
youth that the compendia of useful knowledge furnished by them offer the
handiest possible canned nutriment for a period that has time only for
acquisition, not for digestion.
As regards the study of the classics, we did not at first perceive that
to annul the future involved annulling the past, and yet, practically,
giving up eternity has undermined our interest in history. Conviction
of mortality enjoins the conscience to concentrate on the contemporary
so intensely that past events become obscure. Unless we have eternity
before us we really have no time to look behind. Yet some of us have a
yearning for history that used to find satisfaction in fancying that our
little age fitted into a sequence of ages. It contributed to a false but
agreeable complacency to gaze back into an endless past as it did to
gaze forward into an endless future. Of course, abolishing eternity does
not necessarily obliterate the past or explicitly forbid our going back
there to visit; it merely makes to-day so important that we have no time
whatever for yesterday.
In this matter of educational adjustment, as in others, a transitional
period suffers enough to permit itself a little humoring of its
prejudices; we should not attach too much guilt to a surreptitious
enjoyment of the ancients so long as we do not corrupt the youth of our
acquaintance by teaching them any of our respect for antique art. So
long as we are doing our conscientious best to free our boys and girls
from the cumbersomeness of a classic education, we may feel that we have
done our duty, and may indulge a secret delight in the dusty shelves
that reveal to us the grace that was Greece and the glory that was Rome.
It is all right so long as we don’t let the children know, for that
bygone beauty is strangely seductive and glamorous, and contact with
it might sap their energy in pursuing fortune and fame and food, which
should be the sole preoccupation of people appointed to die.
Indisputably speed must be the desideratum of all activity, educational
or other. Now the chief distress we older ones experience from speed
is not that it leads to success, but that so often it leads nowhere.
The old-fashioned custom of having a purpose in a pursuit makes it
difficult for us to enjoy pure giddiness as heartily as do our younger
contemporaries. Haste, first introduced as a method of extracting
from the temporary what eternity used to supply, has become an end in
itself, so that a great many people ask nothing else of life but to feel
themselves whizzing. Since nothing is permanent except impermanence,
the one thing to do is to go spinning along, cautious only to avoid
bumping into a destination. As a consequence of trying to catch up in
one lifetime with all the activity of eternity, we have acquired such
exhilaration, such momentum of energy, that there is nothing we are so
afraid of as the impact of arriving somewhere. The profession of flux as
a creed necessitates the practice of flying as a habit. Yet with this
very profession of faith I find I have arrived at a heresy.
Now this heresy consists of the argument plainly approved by pure logic
that if the purpose of speed is to get the most out of this life because
there is no other, then no movement at all is exactly as rational as
too much, and we have a perfect right to select any spot of our mental
landscape that suits us and sit down on it, convinced that it is just
as sensible to get our money’s worth out of life’s little day by being
stationary as by being giddy. On the principle that ephemeral beings
have a right to any fun they can find is founded the advice to our age
toward which this entire discussion has been directed. Baldly stated,
the proposal is this: the best way of doing without eternity is to
pretend we don’t have to! The suggestion is frankly so absurd that
any reader is permitted to smile at it as freely as does the writer.
We have lost eternity and we can’t bring it back by pretending it is
still there. The point is that we don’t want to bring it back, but we
do want to discover some way of being comfortable without it. Believing
that there is no eternity, but living as if there were, is not a
process possible to all persons, and is therefore urged only upon those
capable of so separating their reason and their imagination that the
two can function independently of each other. Many people are happily
thus constituted, and still more can become so if they try. There is,
moreover, no real sin in the course, because we are rather true to our
imaginations than false to our convictions, and, besides, we do no
proselyting; we merely allow our own fancy the refreshment of revisiting
our lost fairyland.
The chief obstacle to the compromise is that its absurdity is exactly
balanced by its efficacy; in other words, you can’t tell how good
it will feel until you try it, and if you are an over-rational and
over-conscientious person you will think it beneath your dignity to
try it. Yet actually there is nothing that contributes so much toward
a sense of well-being as pretending, for a few minutes every day,--say
just before getting up in the morning and just before going to sleep at
night,--that you are going to live after you die.
After a few weeks of this exercise, that embarrassment we experience
in the presence of nature becomes less painful, whereas, when we are
too acutely conscious of mortality, we are shamed by an insensate
oak, by a rock we could pound to powder for its silent sneer at our
evanescence. If we make believe we are as good as they are, we can hold
up our heads to the sky and the stars, and even venture to penetrate the
social exclusiveness of the sky and the mountains. A man who pretends
he is immortal is not so deafened by the cannon of the contemporary
that he cannot hear the still, sweet voices of the little flowers. An
association with the ancient aristocracy of sea and forest is good for
a person, but it is almost impossible to feel at ease in this society
unless we temporarily assume an equality with it in permanence.
This secret leniency toward our abandoned faith tends to enhance our
joy in human comradeship as well as in that of nature. In actuality
human affection is so menaced by fate as to resemble the surreptitious
whispering in the schoolroom while the teacher’s back is turned. When
the loftiest spiritual converse may at any time be broken off by the
malevolence of a molecule called a germ, some of us would rather never
love anybody as the only means of getting even with being ephemeral. On
the other hand, if we can manage to simulate a sense of survival, and
can picture death as a mere voyage, we can enjoy comradeship up to the
very last minute, and shout confident au revoirs even while the boat is
pulling out to sea.
A faith in a future secretly indulged is stimulating to mentality. If we
assume for a few minutes even in jest that perhaps our life’s chapter
has a meaning, instantly our ingenuity is off to invent other chapters
past and future. Before we know it our minds are glowing as we discover
some passage of grand and sustained style, or are tingling with the
glorious guesswork of an entire synopsis. If we are gifted with any
dramatic instinct, we are as likely as not, while we turn the pages,
to find ourselves appropriating the hero’s part, and bearing ourselves
a bit more nobly, with a dim notion of being destined to still greater
actions in the next installment. Pretending that perhaps after all our
life has a meaning makes us acquit ourselves rather better than we
otherwise should in the tragic episodes, and makes us enjoy the comic
scenes with a twinkle kindled at imperishable fires. Even hazarded
surmises about the creatorship of our life’s romance sometimes give a
sense of rest and relief not as yet afforded by the prevalent doctrine
of pure flux.
A little self-indulgence in eternity will not only enfranchise our
conversation with our contemporaries and quicken our brains to decipher
the book of humanity, but will tend to keep our minds, manners, and
morals in trim for association with the great and good of all ages. We
used to believe the halls of the dead were thronged with noble spirits
toward whose wisdom and beauty our pilgrim feet would surely sometime
find the way. This hope helped us to keep ourselves in order, much as
the exiled Englishman restrains himself from slumping by donning his
dress-suit in the jungle solitude. Of course, when evolution from the
eternal to the ephemeral is fully accomplished, nobody will need any
fillip to personal prestige, but for us poor intermediates, painfully
hobbledehoy, it is a secret education in noble manners to pretend to
ourselves that some day we shall be called upon to meet Socrates or
Buddha or Christ.
Why not have a little patience with ourselves, we poor devils who have
to bear all the brunt of the transition from eternity to evanescence?
If we promise not to corrupt advancing youth, if we promise not even to
corrupt our own reason by any genuine faith, can’t we safely play that
our life’s chapter is going to be continued?
For, after all, what if there should be an Author?
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
freqnently=> frequently {pg 51}
the world “inn”=> the world “inn” {pg 56}
idiosyncracies=> idiosyncrasies {pg 220}
End of Project Gutenberg's The Joys of Being a Woman, by Winifred Kirkland