BEFORE starting on our new notebook we have been looking over the old one. We are painfully astonished to see so many interesting ideas that we never turned to account.
We see no reason for being ashamed of using a memorandum book to jot down casual excitements in the mind. If you are really interested in what goes on inside your head, that is the only possible way to keep track of those flittermice of thought. Astronomers spend much time examining the Great Nebula in Orion, and other pinches of star dust that circumspangle the universe. It is equally important to scrutinize those dim patches of mental shining where, once in a while, one suspects the phosphorescent emergence of Truth. Unhappily, most of the ideas jotted down for sonnets and meditations never get anything done to them. They lie there unexercised, and once a year or so, when we run through the pile of old notebooks just to cheer ourself up, we are newly gratified to see how many occasions for thought the world suggests. Often, however, we aren’t quite certain just what we meant. For instance, scattered through our now discarded memoranda we find the following cryptic entries:
The army of unalterable bunk.
Prayers for newspaper men.
Nesting season for mares.
Who wrote the line “A rose-red city half as old as time”?
The current fetiches, taboos, and hokums are as hard to expel from the mind as the deboshed melody of some vulgar popular song.
As a child, the phrase “civil engineer” puzzled me—the civility or civics of engineering I could not comprehend.
It’s a mistake to conclude that the result of an action was necessarily included in the purpose: i. e. Effects overlap Causes, e. g. The Tariff.
If every day we are surrounded by astonishment and unexpected adventures in the actual realm, why may it not also be true in the spiritual?
Kipling is the kind of man who, after half a dozen visits to the dentist, would have been able to write a story filled with accurate technical details of dental science.
SIGN ON ITALIAN RESTAURANT ON PARK PLACE: IF YOUR WIFE CAN’T COOK DON’T DIVORCE HER—KEEP HER AS A PET, AND EAT HERE.
SIGN ON A MANICURE PARLOUR: SPECIAL ATTENTION PAID TO OTHER GIRLS’ FELLOWS.
Potboiling—the crackling of a crown of thorns under a pot.
Biography is impossible. There’s no such thing.
Well, the preceding items, lifted more or less at random from one of these notebooks, are sufficient to explain the sense of mystification with which one examines old memoranda. And yet one always hopes that he may chance upon some germ of thought which is worth the fun of expanding it. It reminds us rather of the Janitor Emeritus of the Post, an elderly and pensive darkness, who has a fixed idea that some day he is going to find something precious in the various rubbish of the office, and is to be seen gravely poking into baskets and canisters of jetsam in the hope of motion picture magazines, tobacco, and detective stories.
But among these fugitive and sudden scribbles we did find one notation that brings back to us more or less clearly what we had in mind. It was written thus: People in N. Y. no rooted sense of place.
We had been thinking of the curious life of those who dwell in city apartments. We are a great lover of apartments every now and then, for a briefly adventurous term; and certainly every one who has read Simeon Strunsky’s admirable book Bellshazzar Court will have realized how fecund with human episode these great, dense barracks are. But there can be no good life for very long unless one has an opportunity to plant feet on actual soil; to be close witness of earth’s colours and seasons; to be able (sovereign pleasure of all) to go out at night and make the circuit of one’s terrain and recognize a few stars. There are three stars, for instance, that we see (at certain seasons) from the back stoop when we visit the icebox towards midnight. We suspect them of being the trio known as Orion’s Belt. Anyhow, part of our pleasure in life is to notice them occasionally and know that they are still there, or were still there when those agile beams left them to vibrate across all the light-years between us.
Orion’s Belt, by the way, seems to be a Sam Browne, for it is tilted up diagonally. We will show you exactly what his starry girth looks like, so you can recognize it:—
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The simple and sensuous pleasures of place are not so easy to enjoy in the city. There is a feeling of unreality, of human and mechanical interposition, when you are snugly nested in a niche of a stone cliff fifteen stories high. Something stands between you and the realization of earth. That something may be fine, comfortable, reassuring, it may be highly stimulant for the mind; but there is also a loss to the spirit. It is a loss not to be able to see exactly how Nature tints her tapestry curtain of gold and bronze, behind which she quietly shifts the scenes for the next act; and then suddenly the curtain is shredded away; the landscape widens and is transvisible to the eye; going out on the porch at night you find the trees full not of leaves but stars.
This is a large topic: we can only hint at it. Science, criticism, ethics, these are urbane. Poetry and religion are rustic. Poetry particularly—whether the writing or the reading of it—thrives best where there is silence and the foundation on earth. The solid satisfaction of visiting one’s own cellar and the brightness of one’s own furnace grate, actually set down inside the shell of earth’s crust; of knowing one’s own chimney shaft open topward to the sky; the fall of autumn acorns rattling on the roof—are sentiments felt rather than understood. But from that quiet fertility of feeling understanding grows gradually. You must be quiet with things before you can love them; and you must love them before you can write about them.
But very likely these fragmentary ideas are true only for those who believe them. It is a way ideas have.
