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Page 34
Is there any reason for this inordinate ambition to "get on"? Louis
Stevenson was happier, as a small boy with a bull's-eye lantern at his
belt, than any king upon his throne. The secret of enjoyment is to learn
to look about us, to value what our destiny has given us, to transform it
into magic by some contributory gift of poetry or humor, to consider with
contentment the lilies of the field. The zest of life is in the living of
it; and "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
How often, in the roaring and tumultuary tide of life, we meet a man who
sighs, "If only I could have a single day in which there was nothing that
I had to do, nothing even that I had to think of, how happy I should be!"
and yet this self-same man, if set down at a railway junction, will at
once bestir himself to seek something to think of, something to do, and
will spurn the gift of leisure. The incessant hurry of our current life
has tragically lured us to forget the art of loitering. We are no longer
able--like Wordsworth, on his "old gray stone"--to sit upon a trunk at
some railway junction of our lives and listen reverently to the "mighty
sum of things forever speaking."
One of the loveliest women I have ever known--the late Alison
Cunningham--told me a little anecdote of the author of _The
Lantern-Bearers_ which, so far as I know, has never yet been published.
When little Louis was about five years old, he did something naughty, and
Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him he would have to stay there
for ten minutes. Then she left the room. At the end of the allotted
period, she returned and said, "Time's up, Master Lou: you may come out
now." But the little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner.
"That's enough: time's up," repeated Cummy. And then the child mystically
raised his hand, and with a strange light in his eyes, "Hush...," he said,
"I'm telling myself a story...."
And, in the _Christian Morals_ of Sir Thomas Browne, we may read the
following passage:--"He who must needs have company, must needs have
sometimes bad company. Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of
solitude, and the society of thyself; nor be only content, but delight to
be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is
not uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not
his imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all
quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole
world in the hermitage of himself."
Wordsworth sitting quiescent and receptive in a lakeside landscape, little
Louis standing in a corner, Sir Thomas Browne enjoying the whole world in
the hermitage of himself:--what a rebuke is offered by these images to
those who fret and fume away the leisure that is granted them at all the
waiting places of their lives!... These disgruntled travelers _nel mezzo
del cammin di nostra vita_ miss their privilege and duty of enjoying life
merely because they miss the point that life is, in itself, enjoyable.
They are so busy reading guide-books to the vague beyond that they shut
their minds to all that may be going on about them, or within them, at
way-stations. They close their eyes and ears to the immediate. They veto
all perception of the here and now. But life itself is always here and
now; and, truly to enjoy it, we must learn to look forever with
unfaltering eyes into the bright face of immediacy.
* * * * *
And there is another point about railway junctions that reveals an
important application to the larger journey of our life. A friend of mine,
who is a great lover of painting, had occasion once (and only once) to
change trains at Basle, in the course of a journey from Lucerne to
Heidelberg. He had to wait two hours at this railway junction; and this
time he pleasantly expended in eating many dishes at a restaurant, and
amusing the lax porters by teaching them a method of economizing energy in
shifting trunks. It should be noted that this friend of mine was not
trying to "kill time;" for, like all genuine humanitarians, he of course
regards that tragic process as the least excusable of murders. He was
entirely happy for two hours in that railway station. But--having packed
his guide-book in a trunk--it was not until he reached Darmstadt, some
days later, that he discovered that several of the very greatest works of
Holbein are now resident in Basle. The two hours that he had spent playing
and eating might have been devoted to an examination of many masterpieces
of that art which, more than any other, he had crossed the seas to seek.
He has never yet been able to return to Basle; but for a sight of those
lost portraits of the most honest and straightforward of all German
painters, he would gladly sell his memories of both Lucerne and
Heidelberg.
Here we have a record of a great disappointment that was occasioned merely
by the common habit of despising railway junctions, and presuming them to
be inevitably dull. But this same unfortunate presumption, applied to life
at large, leads many people to overlook the nearness of some great
adventure. Interrogate a thousand men, and you will find that none of them
has first set eyes upon his greatest friend in the Mosque of Cordoba or in
Trafalgar Square. Every adventure of lasting consequence has confronted
all of them, without exception, in some hidden nook or cranny of the
world,--some place unknown to fame. Anybody is as likely to meet the woman
who is destined to become his wife, at Essex Junction on a wintry night,
as in the Parthenon by moonlight in the month of May. The most romantic
places in the world are often those that promised, in advance, to be the
least romantic.
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