3CONQUEST OF FEARS
CONQUEST OF FEARS
An interesting boy of ten and I have been much together in the open weather. We have learned many things, but nothing more important than what a sham Fear is. I do not mean that we take chances or that it is wise to risk life or limb. Fine discrimination is back of all training in the arts of life; still we certainly have found that Fear is a waster and diminisher of beauty and power—and that it can be mastered.
About the most fascinating thing that life has shown me is the way in which fine examples of the younger generation learn the deeper matters of life—matters of self-mastery which make the very presence of a lad significant to a stranger, and which formerly were supposed to be secrets for the sons of kings alone.
"Do you fear anything?" I ask. "Look deep. Listen deep—do you fear anything?... It's like the pain that tells you of a weakness ordisease. Fear is an unerring reminder of a task of conquest ahead for you. That which you fear most is the thing to conquer first."
There had been much of this talk of Fear before a laughable personal experience showed me how much I asked.
I crossed a mesa and came to an abrupt drop-off—two hundred feet sheer. It astonished me. I hadn't experienced anything like this quiver of horror for years. All members and muscles bolted at the thought of advancing closer to the edge. I sat down to think it out. It never had occurred before that Iwasn'tmy nervous system, and must not let it get me down.
The more I thought, the more I perceived that I must do the thing I dreaded so. In fact, I had told trusting young people that they were not their bodies, not their emotions, not even their minds—that these must be made to obey. Here I had a chance to prove if I were less in action than talk. I forced my fluttering young self to the edge.... Dizziness—wobbly limbs, fancied shoves from behind, the call of the huge shadowed space below, a queer sense of parting in mid-air, the body thumping down, another and liberated self gladly spurning the ground—all these symptoms of panic followed swiftly.
I held until calm came, and I then could study this little coil of forgotten fears—a civilised mess.... The weakness was absurdly easy toovercome after the will was once aroused. There's no end or limitation to will force when awakened. The greater the man, the more awe he has for this subject. There's a glow that follows conquest of any kind; the mere call of the will to action brings a sense of power in the heart. There is no way more speedily to dispel pain, anger, passion, fear, or any of these tentacles of personality—than to summon the power of will to instant action. The particular matter of this precipice showed me a trick about calling up the force—priceless to me afterward in bigger tests, and for opening the way of self-conquest to boys.
One must decide what one wants to do—then carry it out to the death. Discrimination, art, all culture and knowledge may be brought to bear in making the decision—but after that, it must be carried out—just that.
Fears belong to the abdomen. You can feel them there. They are quicker than thought. Perhaps you had a twinge of nerves over some sight or sound or odour, before your mind could tell you what you were afraid of.... I have often told the young ones here—listening a bit to my own voice—that there isn't anything living or dead, phantom, shell, or living soul, that has got the authority to make the spirit of man quail.
Courage is spirit.
Most people don't care to try to deal with it; they let it have its way.... Do you recall the fears of the dark room as a child—fear always stealing behind—upstairs alone, the rush to the light, almost screaming tension?... I heard a patter of steps the other evening and knew the whole story—a boy of seven. He had been sent upstairs without a light. I sent him back, told him to stay there until he got himself in hand—to stay in the dark and think the bogie down. He was well afterward.
I have known some under-fire work. A man soon gets himself in hand to look straight at a white-fringed trench. Fear of sharks furnished another test. From a child the deep-sea devourers had an exquisite fascination for me—to be cut in two under brine, white belly, backward mouth, black-rimmed, hairy pig eyes, the double-rows of teeth.... Pacific Islanders swim in the same harbour with fourteen-foot scavengers, careless of whole schools of monsters, yet scurry to their boats at the sight of one solitary,differentfin. I had seen the so-called, man-eating brutes, "grey nurses," dim grey horrors with dull black spots. A well-fed imagination also came into play.
I went swimming in the surf with a splendid Australian chap—a doctor home from the trenches.... He left me back in the surf lines and started out to sea. I finished my swim decently in toward North America, and lay on the strand. From time to time off in the sunset I saw my friend's head.... I was glad to grab the beach-comber when he came in.
"It's all perfectly sane and splendid," I said, "and I'm glad to have you back for supper with us, and the billows out yonder are doubtless all that you say, for an afternoon's lie-up, only I venture to ask—what if a grey nurse should happen in from the lower islands?"
"You don't think about them," he said.
That's about all there is to the fear subject. You don't let it get you. There is nothing worth fearing in or above or under the plane of manifestation.... So I tried that out in deep water. The old horrors succumbed like the fear of the precipice, but not so readily, quite. One can imagine keenly in the dim deep; the touch of sea-weed quickens all the monsters of the mind....
There's nothing fit to be afraid of, unless it is theself. When we get the ape and the tiger, the peacock and the porpoise, the lizard and the shark and the carcajou of our own natures mastered, there isn't anything left to do but to tally them off outside, a friendly finish with them all. No menagerie is complete as man's, and each of us favours some species from time to time.
I have thought much about fear. In another place I told how we have overcome inertia; howwe developed senses through the hard administry of fear and hunger, anger and the rest. Now, however, these must be overcome.... One of the last physical fears to let go in my case is that for the hangman's rope. I think Roger Casement really wanted the axe in preference to the hemp. Steadily facing a repulsion, it surely vanishes.
The point of it all is that you can teach self-command to the children.... I took a girl of fourteen to my precipice—left her there standing on the very edge. After a few minutes I called. Her face was calm as if she had gazed from a porch....
"Did you feel any fear?" I asked.
"Only yours for me," she answered.
It was very true. I had the thing whipped for myself, but it had been hard to leave her there.
Finally I took the smaller boys out for a test. They didn't know I was testing them. Children haven't the fear of height such as we put on. I recalled a score of episodes of my own boy-days, in which I startled the elders by Sam Patch imitations. Also I have put the young ones through some deep water affairs....
You may not be able to get it quite—but all fear is illusion. Every inner beast mastered makes us stronger. These animals within are our cosmos to rule. We do not know how beautiful they are until we lose our fear for them. Boys and girlshere are learning these things and putting them in action.
The kingdom of heaven is also within. Fear, passion, anger, poverty, and the like—all represent areas of our own kingdom not yet brought under perfect cultivation.... After the emotional and physical conquests come the psychic ones—hard matters of mastery pertaining to the heart and mind—to know, to do, to dare, to keep silent—then the finding of the hidden treasures of the subconscious, mystic fleets that sail those dim seas, as yet uncharted for most of us.... After that, the Soul. At last we must be potent enough to stand eye to eye in the presence of the King Himself.
From looking steadily over an escarpment of two or three hundred feet drop, to gazing at the world from the forward cockpit of an airplane at two or three thousand feet, isn't such a long step as you would imagine. The fact is, I was in no way terrified in my first flight, and fear certainly crawled me full length as I stood that time at the edge of the mesa. Our young people have the call to test the new dimension of wings. This zeal corresponds in a unique way with the new education. Intellect stays upon the ground. Intuition is the lifting of the wings of the mind.
I had already begun to make friendly visits to an aerodrome at the edge of the Pacific when thefollowing letter came from the Abbot,[2]who is now seventeen and in New York:
... Perhaps Steve told you that I had a ride in an airplane about three weeks ago. Man! 'Tis the place for me! Next summer, soon as school dissipates, I attach my name to the Royal Flying Corps. The psychic effect of a flight is wonderful—like travelling over a very tall bridge. The Atlantic coast for many miles lay in profile as a map, the roads stretched as thin mathematical lines; forests as darker shadows of the earth; New York as a blotch of smoke and curious patchwork. For twenty minutes we sailed around and around, just as you've seen a gull pinion, then we came to earth; waited until it got dark, then up again.... Lights of the aerodrome lay like jewels upon the earth, but up, up we went, faster and higher, the roar of the propeller providing a steady nervous outlet. I could shout my lungs out—I had to relieve myself of the excess thrill.
Then what should happen? Red, a tiny rim, like the disc of a golden dollar, the sun began to lift up from the horizon again. The higher we went, the higher it lifted, until there it hung, as a golden bulb, a swollen orange off in the mighty stretches,—pure, golden,—while below twinkled the town's lights. 'Twas the fullest, richest, most brimming moment I've ever had. The awe of the cosmos overtakes the heart and lays down its stupendous laws. The distance between sun and 'plane seemed a golden pathway that ever couldabsorb your flight. I was aware only of worshipping God, and that roar of the machine made one think of the roar of the planets, comets, meteors, all the suns, roa-oa-ring. What a romance! Finding the sun!
... No discussion of the fear element whatsoever in the letter....
The old thrills won't do for the new race. I took a pair of screen-trained young ones to a circus recently and became absorbed at their mild boredom. Alcohol is too slow and coarse for the wastrel tendencies of the modern hour. The sad ones of the new generation use high potency drugs to forget the drag of time and space. A new dimension is required in all things. The young men of the new race make light of our old dreads and are learning winged ways to heaven and to hell.
4THE STUFF OF COMRADES
THE STUFF OF COMRADES
I wonder if I can make clearer, by turning a few different facets in this chapter, what we mean by friends, comrades, the spirit of things, and love not as an emotion but as a cosmic force. Many days I have faced a Chapel, as I face this day's work, longing to bring in closer the dream of the new social order, yet dismayed by the limitations of words and my own mind, trained so long in the life of the old.... I would begin to talk, drawing the young minds to mine through an intimate revelation of the heart, then presently lose the sense of effort, even the sense of thought—and an hour would pass in the joy of communal blessedness, because we were one.
Man is not getting larger, though he is continually holding more. The human brain, after it reaches a certain age and size, may gain thereafter a conception of the universe without altering the size of the hat-band. There is a continualcondensation at work within us mentally and physically. We take the cream of the thing, and throw the rest away. The wiser and the more inclusive we become, the more we take just the spirit of a thing, and leave the bulk and weight behind.
This is true in our every refinement, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read and the friends we gather together. We become harder and harder to suit, because bulk and weight are common, but the spiritual extract of anything is slow to appear for us. The wiser the man, the more fastidious he is, and this does not mean that he is a crank. The excellence of fastidiousness is not in eccentricity but in inclusiveness. In the spirit of the thing, he sees all. From the spirit of the thing, he expresses in his own way any part. He can array whole hierarchies of facts from the spirit of the whole, but mainly he leaves the facts in reference-libraries, where they belong and are quickly available, and stores away in his working faculties just a drop of theoilof a subject or a breath from its essence.
There are those who believe that the soul of man is made up of essences of experiences of thousands of lives—yet the refinement of the soul is so spiritualised that the best surgeon cannot find the little organ. He knows the brain, which is made up of the stored experiences of but onelife, but because the soul is so small or so diffused, the surgeon is very apt to say that there is no such organ. And yet, we all know there is knowledge and power behind us, which drives us, in our greater moments, to utterances and action entirely without the scope of the brain. We may call this the soul, or the nth power, or the fourth dimension—the name doesn't matter.... Listen, if I write well to-day—I mean well for me—if I rise to the opportunity at all, it will be because I am writing things which my brain doesn't know.
I yearn to make this still clearer.... The rose, which is the highest evolved of flowers, includes all the evolution of plant-life of its line beneath; the same with gold among the minerals. The fact that each is the highest necessitates that. In the same way, man includes Nature and the lower creatures, in that he is the highest. This is easily proven to you when you recall that a child in the womb passes through all states of creature evolution. That period is, in a wonderful way, a review of the evolution of the world.
The mere fact that the higher one climbs, the farther one can see, proves it again. This is a law. The scent of a rose is the sublimate of all plant odours; and the spirit of man is the refinement of all knowledge and experience beneath.
The higher man ascends, the more inclusive.To heal another, the physician must be able to include the other. Evolution is continual refinement—the drawing unto ourselves of the spirit of bulks of matter. I stood upon a bluff overlooking the ocean recently, and a breath of the south wind awakened in my mind the story of one whole summer; others have listened to forest trees or the humming roar of a distant city, or the rush of a great river, and found in them the aggregate of all Nature's sounds in one tone. This is the magic of the spirit of things.
In all philosophy, there is no difference of opinion as to one fact, that man is unfolding a microcosm within himself, including in his consciousness more and more the Idea of the Universe. The cosmic consciousness, which a few have attained, is the actual perception of the externals of the Plan.
The cream of anything includes all the parts. The cosmic mind must include the essence of all arts and experiences and facts. Just as the rose and the man and the grain of dust are potential with all beneath, the highest man, the cosmic intelligence, is potentially the cosmos in containing the Idea of it.
This idea may be contained in and expressed outwardly by some great single, all-including, all-mastering emotion—such as love. And now we are in a region where there can be no differenceof opinion; at least I have never heard disputed what is the greatest thing in the world.
There are all kinds of love. The simple man loves simply—himself, his woman, his children and his animals. The love of the cosmic consciousness breaks forth in a deluge upon the race, because it comprehends and includes all beneath. This great outpouring is formed of earth, air, water, fire, sunlight and all winds, all facts, all experiences, all arts, light of the moon and stars and all glowing things under the sun, all sounds and scents and pictures, all ardours, and sympathies and tolerances. Its outpouring is action, and is of itself creative. This is theOM. Such a love leavens and impregnates all things, because it understands and includes all things. It unifies all separateness; it enfolds all intelligence with intuition; it unites all parts.
This brings us to that ancient and unassailable premise of all religions—that God includes every part of the universe in being the spirit of it; that His idea of creativeness is expressed in one great single, all-mastering and including emotion,—which is love. We hear the little children saying it, "God is love."
... We awaken the Ideal in ourselves first by imitating the virtues of others. In the earlier days when to me courage meant physical action, men passed in different fields, leaving an imperishable remembrance. I have often seen the expressions of those I loved and idealised as a boy, live again in the faces of my own children. John T. McCutcheon in Luzon, filling a reel of films, under a volley of fire at Binan, on his knees, working the camera with a whole brigade sprawled behind—gave me one of the finest early building blocks for the courage among men. He also gave me an ideal of cleanliness: One evening, after a vicious day's march, and we were all ravenous, John T. left camp to find a river. There he bathed with government bouquet,—made himself right with himself, even to shaving, before meat and drink. His constraint looked like mastery to me then. Grant Wallace was a big star of that service—ideal in performance of friendship.... Young men at hand now are different. Not one of them lack in grip and grit. They reveal the new thing in courage, the courage that begins where the courage of the soldier ends. These have gone far into the mystery of their own kingdoms—rapidly becoming kings of themselves.
The world doesn't understand them. The Abbot[3] is a sensation in literary matters at Columbia, but unplaced. The Dakotan[3]was said to be unfit for a soldier because he was twenty pounds under weight for his height. He can leap fivefeet six, run or hike indefinitely, exhaust a cement-mixer, say "stick" in all tongues and "quit" in none. He has the will and wisdom to make himself a new man over night—and yet his Government wants him served up just so, in pounds. There isn't any one loves America more than the Dakotan, whom we now call Steve. Even the young military surgeons will know before long that endurance is a matter of spiritual culture, that courage is spirit—that a man is well because of cleanliness of body and thought and organised will; that he doesn't fail in a pinch because he is evolved; that all the higher forms of life call for speed rather than strength, the levitating force of spirit rather than the gravitating force of flesh, for brain rather than brute.... Comrade stuff is the stuff of souls.... I've studied them long and devotedly. I build my days upon the things these boys show me. Less and less are we different from those who call to our hearts.
These young men do not think themselves out; they are not troubled by misses or personal discrepancies. They simply are themselves. I have perceived that men of dreams and genius and action are in the larger sense free from themselves. The main part of their day's performance is a lifting out of the tangle of emotion and desire, into a large, unrestricted area full of calm daylight, where events and movements are seen in their relation to one another, not in separateness and one at a time, an area also where inspiration is momentarily expected to strike. They do not analyse themselves. They do not hear their own voices. They are not dismayed if they falter or drop from the key. The things that most men do with care, and that occupy so much of the days these young men perform automatically.
My own path was upward through an intense self-consciousness—the American, not the oriental way. I lived with myself all the route. I observed outward conditions and events, domestic, civic and cosmic; but at the same time observed their effects upon myself. I did not know until I was adult that there is a big receptivity of consciousness above this—where intuitions play and weave causes and effects together—where the mind is more like a child's than a man's, or more like a giant's, perhaps—where the big faith comes, and the warm laugh comes, and man surpasses himself, but does not know until afterward, if at all.
Warmth flooded into me as I touched this larger consciousness. It became clear as daylight—that a man is at his best only when out of himself. I saw much of my misery and depression was the result of self-analysis. I was a better man when I let myself go utterly. And this was exactly the thing that happened in moments of danger, moments of romance and friendship, moments of the self hurling itself outward. Capacity for these moments makes the Comrade, and indicates that love which is not a sentiment, but a cosmic force.
Again, you cannot describe a spiritual thing with these little tools and materials in black and white—just intimations.... If we are sweet enough inside, something of the song will come to us.... Two words suggest it best. The first isComrade, which has become a silliness in a military sense, yet has a high and holy meaning to all reconstructionists.... I remember when the word first came to me with a thrill, as a young lad going off to Cuban wars. It was burned out of me a few days afterward in a Sibley tent full of regular army soldiers.... I remember the scorn with which I used the word all the years—or avoided using it—until slowly, smilingly, its new dimension opened, hard as a diamond, and as clear—its meaning in work and world and women, its new meaning to Russia and India and China and America.
It seems to sayEquality. It's a kind of deep drink of spirit together, a word spoken at the last moment between men—an inner-shrine word, spoken with a smile, and a glimpse into the eternal indestructibility of the human heart. It expresses the love of the world, not as it is felt inthe brain, but in the breast of the soul. The New Race has already washed it clean. It goes with a Cause fit to die for. It belongs to men and women who can look at each other with a kind of prayer in their eyes and face death alone and laugh at it.
There's a fury, too, in the word—fury against the world, against things as they are. It stands against the world-darkness now, and for the day that is to be. It means love for the poor, a love for the peasants, a passion to serve and be tender to them, not to drive them into the pits of death—a readiness to die for them withoutcant, a readiness also to dare to live for them.
Comrade—there's vision in it to strip off the masks of decadent nations, to open wide the sepulchres where the priests are still plotting to crucify the King; its strong magic will uncover the monotonous crimes of commerce.... It signifies the spirit of the young men and women who have already begun with gladness and fire to clear the débris for the building of the New Age.
They will begin with the soil; they will know and love their own hard part. They will begin with the grass, with the rice, with the millet and the wheat, the clean things, the simple and holy things that the peasants love, with the songs that the peasants sing, the songs of the soil and the rivers and snows—to build upon them the newheaven and the new earth.... Above all, there's a laugh in the word—the laugh of youth and power.
The other word isDemocracy.
5JOHN'S THINGS
JOHN'S THINGS
Here are some of John's things, mainly letters to the Old Man. California called hard for the recent winter, and I went out a few weeks ahead of the Stonestudy outfit. John intended to follow within three weeks, but overturned a kettle of boiling water in his lap, and was unable to leave his quarters for three times that period. We all learned better the hard lesson—to wait. The quoted word "Play" in his first letter refers to a little slip of paper which I had pasted upon my typewriter. There has been a big tendency in recent months, in my case, to let down all tension in relation to literary production—the idea being that when one has learned all the laws he is capable of, the time is at hand when it is well to forget them. I have written several times throughout this book of an ideal emergence of Workman into Player. We learn many laws, to learn at last that there are none. We come up through manyslaveries to freedom.... I have not corrected all the spelling in John's documents. The point most interesting is how the real voice breaks through the mind of a child of nine from time to time.
Dear Younervers[4]Pal:We got your letter but it was not like you for it was not type-written. Your old machine here is going grand. I am using it now. It seems that I am with you all the time.Comradhas meant a lot the last four days to me. Comrad is everything in the New Race. Masters will be comrads with every one.That "Play" has it all, on your machine. "Play" is in all somewhere. It is all like a big page and everything is woven on it. There is a time when Comrads hafto go apart for a little while, but not long. Their thoughts never go apart. They are always pulling together, always weaving in thoughts and things that are the same. It is wounderful—a parting. No sadness over it. It is the best that could come, or it would not. We are held together. The pull of the world is nothing to us.It is hard to keep high, but we will. Fred[5]and I take a swim every day. I go a hundredand fifty feet. Then we come up and rub each other.True Comrads have it all. Love from Comrad to Comrad.
Dear Younervers[4]Pal:
We got your letter but it was not like you for it was not type-written. Your old machine here is going grand. I am using it now. It seems that I am with you all the time.Comradhas meant a lot the last four days to me. Comrad is everything in the New Race. Masters will be comrads with every one.
That "Play" has it all, on your machine. "Play" is in all somewhere. It is all like a big page and everything is woven on it. There is a time when Comrads hafto go apart for a little while, but not long. Their thoughts never go apart. They are always pulling together, always weaving in thoughts and things that are the same. It is wounderful—a parting. No sadness over it. It is the best that could come, or it would not. We are held together. The pull of the world is nothing to us.
It is hard to keep high, but we will. Fred[5]and I take a swim every day. I go a hundredand fifty feet. Then we come up and rub each other.
True Comrads have it all. Love from Comrad to Comrad.
Pal:I woke up this morning kind of blurred, and got Irving and Steve to come out and clean up the barn. They came and we worked there all morning, and then went in for a swim. It was wounderful, the feel I had when I got some clean clothes on and had the old dog[6]feeling good. He is meditating over what a wounderful world it is now. The stall smells sweet as a hay-stack.Fred just got here and is working at your desk.How was your morning? I never had a better one, and its the weary old Sabbath, too.Send for me soon now. It seems that it was a year since we have been together. We can not do without each other. Send for meSoon. I hold my hand high to you.
Pal:
I woke up this morning kind of blurred, and got Irving and Steve to come out and clean up the barn. They came and we worked there all morning, and then went in for a swim. It was wounderful, the feel I had when I got some clean clothes on and had the old dog[6]feeling good. He is meditating over what a wounderful world it is now. The stall smells sweet as a hay-stack.
Fred just got here and is working at your desk.
How was your morning? I never had a better one, and its the weary old Sabbath, too.
Send for me soon now. It seems that it was a year since we have been together. We can not do without each other. Send for meSoon. I hold my hand high to you.
Dear Old Magic Fath:I am at Steve's desk in the guest room. It is the first time that I have touched the keys of a type writer since the night I was berned. It sure does feel good.It has been much more wonderful to hafto have Patience for the Meeting. It will be twice asgreat for both. I have needed you so since I have been in bed. In pane and sicknes there is nothing that you need so much as your Comrad.I felt palms up to everything. It is all good. We love it all. It all was something for us to get. It puts us higher after something comes to us like that.I have all the pores poring out love to you. We are always together.Your Side Kiker.
Dear Old Magic Fath:
I am at Steve's desk in the guest room. It is the first time that I have touched the keys of a type writer since the night I was berned. It sure does feel good.
It has been much more wonderful to hafto have Patience for the Meeting. It will be twice asgreat for both. I have needed you so since I have been in bed. In pane and sicknes there is nothing that you need so much as your Comrad.
I felt palms up to everything. It is all good. We love it all. It all was something for us to get. It puts us higher after something comes to us like that.
I have all the pores poring out love to you. We are always together.
Your Side Kiker.
Dear Old Pal:Fred and I slept again in the Study. It looked like a storm last night, but it did not come. Fred is a real Comrad. I got to his heart last night. I do not know how. The roses have been wounderful the last few days.How is wounderful Mary? We are all sending Thoughts to you. We have had wounderful full days lately, all heat. The town is howling for rain now; they are never satisfied. We are always ready for anything. It is the best. Our wounderful old mailtrain just crossed the magic lane. I love trains more and more. They have a pull to my heart. We love everything.I do not feel on erth. I feel in space. Out of the draw of the erth—Free.Love always in my heart for you. I hold hard for the time that Comrads pull together again forthe road, us two. Jane is at my hump all the time—so I will quit.
Dear Old Pal:
Fred and I slept again in the Study. It looked like a storm last night, but it did not come. Fred is a real Comrad. I got to his heart last night. I do not know how. The roses have been wounderful the last few days.
How is wounderful Mary? We are all sending Thoughts to you. We have had wounderful full days lately, all heat. The town is howling for rain now; they are never satisfied. We are always ready for anything. It is the best. Our wounderful old mailtrain just crossed the magic lane. I love trains more and more. They have a pull to my heart. We love everything.
I do not feel on erth. I feel in space. Out of the draw of the erth—Free.
Love always in my heart for you. I hold hard for the time that Comrads pull together again forthe road, us two. Jane is at my hump all the time—so I will quit.
Dear Old Comrad:We are close this morning. I can feel your warm wounderful hand in mine this morning. We are one. There is the holy breath—such a great pull of thoughts and work to California. It seems as if all the Comrads were calling me there. Then I hafto think of the one thing—Patience. When you have mastered Patience, you are free. All well here. My sores are getting better fast. I have wanted to work lots lately, since I was in bed, but I could not. I lost so many ideas in bed. Beds are a curse. I love you, Comrad. We need to be together.Your old Pal.
Dear Old Comrad:
We are close this morning. I can feel your warm wounderful hand in mine this morning. We are one. There is the holy breath—such a great pull of thoughts and work to California. It seems as if all the Comrads were calling me there. Then I hafto think of the one thing—Patience. When you have mastered Patience, you are free. All well here. My sores are getting better fast. I have wanted to work lots lately, since I was in bed, but I could not. I lost so many ideas in bed. Beds are a curse. I love you, Comrad. We need to be together.
Your old Pal.
Sunlight Pal:A wounderful sun. A little late in getting up. The sun was out full—a wounderful breakfast and a wounderful bowl of roses.Every morning gets greater. The coming together again gets closer. Separation is a great thing! You find that when it comes. It will be so big and wounderful to come together on the shores of the sea. The trains on the Pere Marquette line have a draw to my heart; the whistle is so wounderful.... To have a bath in the salt water and not in old Lake Erie.... It wasanother wounderful night with Fred. He has done so much for me this time that we have been away from each other.He is so wounderful if you can get to him. I think I have got right to him to the heart. I am awful lonesome for you and the sea.I walked to the train track with Fred this morning. It was like the day you were going away. I felt it was nearing the last walk up the old Lane. Fred has the same feel. It swept over us—a free feel; it was almost too much.How is your Sisity-list coming? Mine is great. It is hard to get along without you here. Old Abe was drafted, and we don't know when we will see him. The sea and sunlight sweeping in the open door of your work room! We will sure have some grand times. We will get horses and have some more of them Moonlight rides. It will be great to hit the oldTie pathItself—with the[7]Welcome Mulligan and the[8]Onerbel Chas. Lipton under our arms. The smell of the burning bark and a caben in the Rockies! Oh, the open road. Life is Life on the old Road.That canyon must be a wounder, and the sea and the misty mountains and the brown hills. You have it all. Oh man, that is the country for everything.I keep high for our meeting, Comrad of the Road.
Sunlight Pal:
A wounderful sun. A little late in getting up. The sun was out full—a wounderful breakfast and a wounderful bowl of roses.
Every morning gets greater. The coming together again gets closer. Separation is a great thing! You find that when it comes. It will be so big and wounderful to come together on the shores of the sea. The trains on the Pere Marquette line have a draw to my heart; the whistle is so wounderful.... To have a bath in the salt water and not in old Lake Erie.... It wasanother wounderful night with Fred. He has done so much for me this time that we have been away from each other.
He is so wounderful if you can get to him. I think I have got right to him to the heart. I am awful lonesome for you and the sea.
I walked to the train track with Fred this morning. It was like the day you were going away. I felt it was nearing the last walk up the old Lane. Fred has the same feel. It swept over us—a free feel; it was almost too much.
How is your Sisity-list coming? Mine is great. It is hard to get along without you here. Old Abe was drafted, and we don't know when we will see him. The sea and sunlight sweeping in the open door of your work room! We will sure have some grand times. We will get horses and have some more of them Moonlight rides. It will be great to hit the oldTie pathItself—with the[7]Welcome Mulligan and the[8]Onerbel Chas. Lipton under our arms. The smell of the burning bark and a caben in the Rockies! Oh, the open road. Life is Life on the old Road.
That canyon must be a wounder, and the sea and the misty mountains and the brown hills. You have it all. Oh man, that is the country for everything.
I keep high for our meeting, Comrad of the Road.
Prose Settings
I
THE RED SUNSET.
The red sunset Died away like the close of a forest fire.
The Dusk ran through the mountains like a scarf of blue.
The Moon and old Jupiter took the Open Road together.
The others came out of the everlasting Blue Deeps.
II
THE DESERT NIGHT.
The man at the camel corral was fixing the camels for the desert. Other men were waiting at the front of the Temple. Another came forward with four camels, a pack-beast and two riders. Then all were off over the Sun Betin Sand.
Nothing but Sand and Harizen. Only the Arab who was ahead on the Old Camel knew the way.
They went on and on over the Everlasting Sand, the Sun Betin Sand.
III
PINES.
The great wood is the Pines. The very whiff of them gives you the breath of Nature, the greatMother of the planet, the mother of Love. Her breath is the breath of life and love, and the Mouziek of the world.
Treas(California)
Treas are grate. They are so wild and wounderful. There is so many kinds here. The trea I love best of them all, is the U.K. Liptes. It is fragran; it has the sun and the erth all flowers and the swaying beauty of its great youth. I loved it from the first. It is beauty that stays.
I went up to a grove the other day and along a little lone path—the mist and odor of them lingering in deep shadows. My feet broke the deep silences and a Voice came and spoke soft to me: "If you listen long enough you can hear——" I think it was my Master speaking, for a glow came around me, after He had spoke.
The Song of the Sperit
Life is not any good until you forget your boddy; then you get all the power of living, but you can't do anything that you feel like doing.
Lether:
All lether has a mystery in it. It is the animal's mystery. The misteks of the other world know it, and try to tell us. I have been told butmy mind has not received it. I will hafto wait until it does. I think I will know it all in a fue years. I will tell the rest of the world, if I hear it first. I would like to be the first to hear it.
Stones:
The whole erth was of stone.
God thought that he would make it something good. He sent the Old Mother Nature down and she spent years and years, but she did not know what to put on it. She went up to God and He took her to a room, and showed her the things that He had to put on the Erth.
They were sperits, so she got them one at a time and brought them down.
In the mean time she was making other things. They were seeds and she planted these and they came up. It was wheat and barley and other things like that. The sperits became people and took them for food, and the old Mother is still putting things and bringing her sperits on the Erth. This world is just about filled.
The Sperit
At night the Sperit goes to see God. It gets fresh to make the boddy fresh every morning. This is what keeps you clean. If you were all clean, you would not die. You go thru a hardlife and what is not clean is burned off, and then you are pure to go to heaven. You rest then until you are ready to come and be a saint.
Alone
The sun beat hard upon the rocks.
I was alone in the Power of the rocks. Nothing was moving.
I was Alone. My Sperit was alone.
It was the loneliest place in the world.
No animal of any kind, not a bird or a snake—alone.
Nature did not even have cells of thought.
The power of the rocks was holden me there.
A thought came over me that I had never known Home.
All of a sudden Nature spoke, and I was free from everything.
I came back to the Father.
Equals
There is a greatness in a man that treats his horse like his brother. A man is a beast when he beats his horse. He is of a lower Brivahen[9]than the horse. The man who says to his horse that he is his equal, is a great man, a master of animals.
Beauty
When the New Race comes, there will be beauty—real beauty. Down thru the ages people have talked of beauty, but they have not seen it really, yet. It will come with the New Race—beauty in everything—in the body, in writing, in talk, in love. Not love one, but all. The younerverse Lovers will not only love each other, but they will love all. This war is the great clean up of the world. After it is all over, and the troops come all home together, there will be the great New Race waiting for them with open arms—then all will be real beauty.
The Hold Up and the Get Away
... It was the first time Denver Bill had come in without a cigarette in his mouth. They wanted to know why he wasn't smoking, but they didn't ask.
He ordered the same drink and took it fast.... He chucked the chair over, grabbed the tellfon off the table and gave "Hlo."
He said, "Horse up here in five minutes."
It was there.
He was out of town in a minute more.
Denver Bill stopped at a cabin where he had made ponmets[10]to rob a train at 7:45, and itwas now 6:10. His friend was there. They jumped on their horses and rode a quarter of a mile. The train whistled around the curve.
There was a shout. Denver called: "Stop that engine!"
It stopped slow.... Bill murdered the engineer, and then flew thru the train of cars. He grabbed the fifty pound gold box and jumped thru the window. A shot rang out.
Bill was pincked.
The man that he had come with played dirt on him because he went off with the gold. Bill crawled across the field and laid in the hay stack.
He rolled the first cigarette of the day.
Letter to the Abbot(from California)
Dear Old Wife:How are you coming? I was just up over the hill behind us, getting two wounderful qwortz of golden honey. How is your type mill pumping these days? I got a new story in my bean:—Have an old fisherman that takes those forks and goes after crabs—have him find a pot of pearls instead of crabs.—Think if it is done right it would make a wounder.When will you be out here? We will lead a pack trane over the mountains! Oh, that is theold open road! Pack mules, they mean it to me—a line of mules in the mountains and a couple of saddel horses! That's the life.I hope you have changed your mind about them airaplanes. I do not like the Idea. But, old man, it is for the best, and nothing is a mistake. Take it as it comes. Write soon, and make the pages fly like dust to me. I need all that I can get.Last night was our first bit of rain. Slept in an open window where my face was sprayed all night with the wounderful cold drops of spring. When I got up, I was feeling better than I ever did before. I was all relaxed. I lay a long time just in the wounder of the wounderful free air and rain. I got up and went down and washed in more of the soft rain, and ate and went outside to come down to my work shop. I stood in the wind. Everything around me was so wounderful. All the trees and flowers were brighter. The hills were a little damp. The birds were playing and drinking in the rain. The ray of sun was just coming over the hill. I could almost hear the breathing of the grass and erth. It was like a song, the great song of spring and breathing of the world.That is the way that the new generation will come in after the world is washed and all countries areone. A Boy, young and clean, will comein, whistling and breathing a Song of the New Race.Your Comrad.
Dear Old Wife:
How are you coming? I was just up over the hill behind us, getting two wounderful qwortz of golden honey. How is your type mill pumping these days? I got a new story in my bean:—Have an old fisherman that takes those forks and goes after crabs—have him find a pot of pearls instead of crabs.—Think if it is done right it would make a wounder.
When will you be out here? We will lead a pack trane over the mountains! Oh, that is theold open road! Pack mules, they mean it to me—a line of mules in the mountains and a couple of saddel horses! That's the life.
I hope you have changed your mind about them airaplanes. I do not like the Idea. But, old man, it is for the best, and nothing is a mistake. Take it as it comes. Write soon, and make the pages fly like dust to me. I need all that I can get.
Last night was our first bit of rain. Slept in an open window where my face was sprayed all night with the wounderful cold drops of spring. When I got up, I was feeling better than I ever did before. I was all relaxed. I lay a long time just in the wounder of the wounderful free air and rain. I got up and went down and washed in more of the soft rain, and ate and went outside to come down to my work shop. I stood in the wind. Everything around me was so wounderful. All the trees and flowers were brighter. The hills were a little damp. The birds were playing and drinking in the rain. The ray of sun was just coming over the hill. I could almost hear the breathing of the grass and erth. It was like a song, the great song of spring and breathing of the world.
That is the way that the new generation will come in after the world is washed and all countries areone. A Boy, young and clean, will comein, whistling and breathing a Song of the New Race.
Your Comrad.
Another
Well, Wife:Here I am pumping a little more of my vocabulary at you. I think that I will go into the ocean and have a swim. It's dulce on my wounds. What I want to tell you is about an old sea loafer here—a big, black dog. He isn't any kind of a dog—nothing but a world-man-dog, he is. He is a lover of the sea and sand. He goes down with us every day. He is a pal for the road. He can't follow the saddel like Jack, but he can shore be a frend. I have lerned him and he has lerned me. We stick close.Well, pal of the sea and saddel, I am getting awful lonesome, but I am with you all the time. I need your old paw. I shore keep high for the Spring Coming. We will have a shack back in the hills all alone, and drink tea and talk. Don't it sound good? I won't forget it either, not until we have it. We have planned it for many ages, and we will hafto have it—old pal of the moonlight rides.I am close and always your Comrad.
Well, Wife:
Here I am pumping a little more of my vocabulary at you. I think that I will go into the ocean and have a swim. It's dulce on my wounds. What I want to tell you is about an old sea loafer here—a big, black dog. He isn't any kind of a dog—nothing but a world-man-dog, he is. He is a lover of the sea and sand. He goes down with us every day. He is a pal for the road. He can't follow the saddel like Jack, but he can shore be a frend. I have lerned him and he has lerned me. We stick close.
Well, pal of the sea and saddel, I am getting awful lonesome, but I am with you all the time. I need your old paw. I shore keep high for the Spring Coming. We will have a shack back in the hills all alone, and drink tea and talk. Don't it sound good? I won't forget it either, not until we have it. We have planned it for many ages, and we will hafto have it—old pal of the moonlight rides.
I am close and always your Comrad.