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Page 60
[M] La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on
the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents
absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in
snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.
But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got
far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare,
the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed
with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities;
and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy
connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow
stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods
and joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and
primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the
army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated
pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided
beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the
over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good
of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of
seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's
body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we
deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often
dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they
would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and
on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my
brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the
happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to
sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our
birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have
finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the
day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their
life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are,
they lose it all! But we live in the present."[N]
[N] Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii.
p. 240.
The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the
non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been
beautifully described by a man who _can_ write,--Mr. W.H. Hudson, in his
volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."
"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author,
"at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea."
... "It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun,
and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner
would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket,
than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead
of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and
solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into
infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so
few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of
thorns.... Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned
to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival,
and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun
compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,--no motive which could
be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
shoot,--the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... Sometimes I
would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more
than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless,
generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak
wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow
pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I
would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill,
I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the
prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and
irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured
by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless
wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same
landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would
dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One
day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or
thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently
been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was
on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and,
after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place
every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one
spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting
down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each
time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of
that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of
sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal
like, to repose at that same spot."
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