Читать книгу Singing in the Rain - Anne Shannon Monroe - Страница 8

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In the heart of Crater Lake National Forest in the wilds of the Cascade Mountains, where snow lies man-deep most of the year, I came upon a beautiful life-size figure of a woman chiselled from a granite boulder. Mammoth encircling trees, centuries old, bent their boughs to it as a protectorate; far above, a patch of blue sky; leading to it, no path; on it, no name. But the squirrels had accepted it and were busy storing their winter nuts about its base. The forest had accepted it, closed it in, one with its eternal beauty and silence.

I moved softly away as having inadvertently set foot in some holy spot, but I could not get it out of my mind, and I could not let it alone. I must know the statue’s history. How came it there? Who did it? And why in the lost depths of the great mountains? Who had chosen so to bury his work? Out in the world I made a stir about it, and at last I found the sculptor and learned the truth. It was his offering to the forest, to its silence and repose, its beauty and fascination, but especially to the mystery of its unseen life. And at the same time it was an offering to the mystery of the unseen life in each mortal, that unseen self often kept under cover to the very end by the repressions and inhibitions of man.

Ever since hearing this explanation from the sculptor—who was something altogether different out in the world, a sculptor only in the virgin wilderness where his soul bounded free of the overlay and his latent abilities flamed into power—I think, when I look at drab people going drearily about: What monument of beauty have you reared in your own secret fastness to the thrilling thing God meant you to be? What lies hidden beneath that dun-coloured disguise? What repressed talents? What undeveloped gifts? What seed that might have flowered into its own peculiar beauty? For just as surely as God set going a machine in the Universe to create granite atom by atom, he set going a machine in each human being to create certain ends in the world, and failure to create these ends will leave him forlorn and bereft. No one was ever started on the short earthly way so poor that he was not provided with a special gift, an emphasized ability, and the impulse eternally to seek its use.

Our own, ever our own, that is the human craving. Our own, though not so good, is better for us than any other, though that other is of the highest rank. We cannot take our cue from another; we must take it from our own selves. We mistakenly carry our aspirations to recognized writers and painters and architects, and we ask, “Can I write or paint or build?”—when all the time no one so well as ourselves knows whether we can write or paint or build. No one in all the world, though his gifts lift him to the skies, can tell another what he can do, what potentialities are there, what seed lies deep buried.

We are each like a bowl of water in which a lump of alum has been dissolved: the crystals float about unseen until a string is let down into them, when all the little particles begin to form around it, visualizing a thing of ordered beauty. So do our lives become when a string is let down into them about which our unseen gifts may form and cluster.

Youth gets this keenly; it is so much nearer the Source. Alone the boy dreams his dream, and he sees his life coursing through it. It all seems so very simple, so feasible, so joyous. Then he appears among his elders, and they have another plan, the outcome of their dreaming. They confuse and bewilder him: his dreams get mixed with theirs; his vision clouds; he begins to yield, to conform, to compromise. Veil upon veil falls over his eyes—he loses his vision. Oh, a bitter residue remains with which the world often has to reckon in far later years.

The old idea of “making” a certain thing out of a child is based wholly on the material conception of his being just so much stuff, like a piece of silk, out of which one might make a dress, an umbrella, underwear, or window hangings. It takes into account no spiritual heritage, no divine right. The father wanted to be a lawyer, was disappointed, so makes a lawyer of his son and makes him miserable for life. The mother wanted to be a musician, was disappointed, so makes a musician of her daughter. This can never be done successfully. The water goes over the wheel but once, and when it’s gone, it’s gone for ever. You had your opportunity—or maybe you didn’t—well, it’s all one now. Let it go, or catch up with it yourself, as best you can; but this new little life, this fresh little handful straight from God with His message imbedded in its soul—be careful how you confuse that message, how you stamp it out and plant one of your own.... It’s a pretty big responsibility and it’s an awkward thing to have a marred life on your hands.

A caller said to a little boy whose delight it was to play physician, “Will you be a doctor when you grow up, Billy?” And Billy with heavy reproof answered, “I am a doctor.”

Well, Billy was right. The child is the thing the man becomes, if the man becomes the thing he truly is. There is no way suddenly to become via the sheepskin route a physician, lawyer, or teacher: the spirit inside is physician, lawyer, teacher from the moment the little life emerges from its cocoon. The very most the college can do, when it does its utmost best, is to develop what is already there, placed there by the authority of One higher than any president of any faculty on earth. The worst sin to its name is the attempt to graft something on that doesn’t belong.

A lubberly Dutch boy had long hoed my garden: a stoop-shouldered boy, and as I supposed dull drudgery and clumsy futility all the way through. But he stopped to bid me good-bye the other night, and his back was straight, his head up, and his eyes shining as with supernal glory. I shall never forget the shining of his eyes; it was as a window opened on a naked soul. It had all been arranged, it seemed—he was to go away to school!

A stodgy-minded person said to a young art student who had been bubbling over with enthusiastic prophecies as to what she would do some day, “I can’t see any such gift in you.” Back flashed the youthful retort, “It isn’t important that you should—only that I do.” And she was just about right, even if a bit impertinent.

I always laugh when I think of Agnes, the child of long lines of professorial people, early slated for more of the same thing. But Agnes hated Greek, loathed Latin, and as for higher mathematics, she simply wasn’t there at all. She failed in school after school, was humiliated, depressed, unhappy, until some brilliant genius in the family asked, “Well, Agnes, what do you want to do?” Quoth Agnes, “I want to cook.” Poor child, no one ever had cooked in her family, and she may have suffered. Anyway, Agnes wanted to cook, and when her stunned parents came to, and discovered that she could learn it in school, from books, and get a diploma for doing so, their respect developed sufficient vitality to permit their entering her on a course in Household Arts. And if you want to see Agnes to-day, you’ll have to call at one of the foremost tea-rooms of the country, where she is responsible for the sane and wholesome feeding of hundreds daily and is about the sanest, most wholesome person you’ll meet in a long march.

A driving type of mother told me that she had decided to make a stenographer of her daughter, as she could be prepared quickly and stenographers were always in demand. I turned to the girl, tender, sensitive, already drooping under the mother’s dominance like a young plant under too much sun, and I asked, “Do you want to be a stenographer?” “Oh, if I could choose,” she said, brightening, “I’d be a kindergartner, or just anything that had to do with kiddies.” Well, I wish you could see the lovely nursery she conducts for boarding babies, with kiddy coops all over the great old lawn, and cunning little tots toddling here and there in the safety of the soft turf. It’s been a wonderful success: only, one of the dearest of the babies had lost its mother, and the helpless young father can’t see any way at all but that the little “nursery maid” shall permanently undertake its care and incidentally his own.

Another girl, all sociability and human friendliness, loving to help other people with little problems, was being railroaded into school teaching because the pay was sure and the hours short, leaving plenty of time for outside pleasures—as if any amount of sure pay could purchase any pleasure comparable to the satisfaction of being congenially employed. Well, she saw her mistake in time and opened, instead, a tiny shop in her neighbourhood for notions and embroidery, added house aprons and baby clothes, kept on adding as demand suggested, until she had a thriving shopping and advisory centre to which her whole end of town flocked.

We cannot afford to divide ourselves into two compartments, one for work and one for pleasure. Our work must be our pleasure. The quality we put into our work is too sensitively affected by our attitude toward it, and the reaction on ourselves is too intense for such a division to be other than highly injurious to both. We must do the work that is a pleasure to do, the work that though it wear us to the bone, provides a joyous wearing.

And no matter how dimly marked our gift, or how humble its first employment, if we work from it as a starting point, we will soon have enough development to give us song. For when we traffic in the stream of our own potentialities, every move of our lives sends power to that traffic. A true dealer in scrap iron who walks abroad over the country will see a rusty old wheel in the field, an abandoned rake in a meadow; a true dealer in music will catch the liquid notes of a lark, the soft swishing of water against a river bank; a true dealer in art will revel in the shades of grasses, the deep purples of massed tree trunks. When we traffic in our own we steadily receive contributions of more of the same thing from our common day, from every move of our common lives. All nature conspires to enrich us. But when we traffic in another’s stream, what contribution does the common day make? Bored to death, you are dealing in scrap iron because junk men have become millionaires, but will you become a millionaire? Not you! Freed from the shop, do you see scrap iron everywhere? Indeed no, you’ve a soul above scrap iron, you fervently breathe, and you’re off after butterflies. You’ve taken up music because the family urged it, but off in the country do you revel in a lark’s notes? Not a bit of it! You’re engrossed in a new barn and wondering about the rounding roof. You’ve cold-bloodedly decided to become an artist, as artists run in your blood and it’s expected, but freed from the studio, do you see colour everywhere? You do not! You see, instead, what fine truck gardening opportunities are in that mucky bottom land, if only the family wouldn’t have a fit over a truck gardener in its midst.

Nature marks us clearly for our ends. The bee sips the honey from the flower cup; there’s beauty in the cup, pollen, fragrance—but the bee is after the honey. You bend over the cup for its fragrance, another for its beauty, another finds healing in it. Each finds his own, and makes his contribution to life in proportion as he sticks to his own.

One of the biggest misconceptions in our rather uncivilized world is that any one order of work is more to be respected than another, as an engine’s “whistle” might look with condescension on the rivets that hold its mechanism together. We especially respect what we call brain work, but all work is brain work whichever servants of the brain execute it—hands or feet or voice or eyes or ears. The only work which is not brain work is that slip-shod product of kitchen or desk executed when the brain is not on the job, and this is the only work on earth which cannot be respected. Elevation—what we call success—never comes spontaneously; it is the result of quality put into work all down the line, quality put into a work one loves. Most notable editors were printers’ devils and loved the smell of printers’ ink. Most notable mothers worshipped their dollies, as little girls, and had infinite patience in dressing and undressing them, putting them to sleep, and taking them for an airing. That railway president you hold as a model before your little son was an oiler only yesterday, and as good an oiler as he is a president. That head of a great school you so admire first taught in remote country districts. Never forget that this is America, and America ever rewards the true children of her democracy who step out fearlessly in the direction they would go.

If, then, you love dietetics, start—if necessary—in your own kitchen; if a classroom, start in the most available school; if babies, promote a nursery; if languages, begin in night classes—and learn from foreigners in your vicinity while you learn from books. If you are one of the fortunate who are not financially handicapped, take your gift and go with it to the best centre for its development: key your life to it. The least—the very least—start in your own direction is a thousand times more hopeful for your future development and happiness than the biggest sort of start in another. There is always a way to connect your tastes and aspirations with the needs of the world if you are brave enough to accept the way when you find it. Men would not have been given a craving to find the poles had there been no poles. Long ago we laughed at Darius Green and his flying machine, but Darius was not so green as we. God makes no mistakes. Every gift placed in a mortal has its niche for expression in the world, just as in the children’s cut-up games there is a place for the tiniest piece. A willingness to do the unusual may sometimes be required—something out of the family line—but are we Hindus, to lose caste by reason of our calling?

And neither should a life work be conceived only in terms of a specific money-making vocation. Money-making is not the need of all, but a life work is. We must each have a life work that will round into expression our own special gift, that will help us most steadily to become what is in us to be, that will move us ahead most steadily into our own proper future. And it matters not a picayune whether this future is that of an artist, a domestic-natured home-maker a cook, or a college president. All that matters is that it is our future, and not the future of someone else, not the future another thought proper for us. Women have all too often been pushed by convention and circumstance into wifehood and motherhood when their very souls yearned for other callings. Whenever you hear a descanting mother go on at length about the sacrifices she has made for her children, she is very likely one of these unfortunates who has been pushed into another’s future. The truth probably is that she never met her children’s happiness-needs wisely in her whole domestic experience; that she has steadily gone against her own grain in being domestic at all, to say nothing of the grain of her family. This word “sacrifice” is the greatest telltale we have regarding misplaced lives. For it can be no sacrifice to give yourself for the thing that is your true work, be it child or picture or poem.

What do you want to do with yourself, anyway, you who talk of sacrifice? Preserve yourself? Mummify yourself? Embalm yourself? That is not living. Living is spending. Living is giving. Living is projecting yourself into your work, into the thing that is yours to do. When you spend yourself on your natural work—in the home or in the larger world—that is you extended, that is you going right on into expression, into future. That is not being sacrificed; that is being resurrected. The only real “sacrifice” is the sacrifice of a gift, through failure to know yourself and act on the knowledge. In which case there are two sacrifices—the gift and the work actually in your hands, the work usurped. Children pay sometimes huge penalties for a mother in the wrong calling, and business pays huge penalties for employing potential mothers to tend its files. Each in his own proper sphere, and we have no penalty, no “sacrifice.”

I have never believed Christ felt himself sacrificed in his death. He was spent for the thing he stood for, and if He felt that his death on the cross would establish the truth He came to bring, then it was no sacrifice to Him. Think how Christ’s life was so merged into His work that we know almost nothing of Him outside it. Think how Shakespeare was so lost in his plays that we scarcely know a Shakespeare outside them. This is the ideal. This is the way to look upon a life work, be it the raising of children, the making of money, or the furthering of any of life’s worthy ends. Find your own true work, and you will find your heart’s own. Lose yourself in it, and you will never think of sacrifices in its connection.

We each have our special devotions in every direction. Note how one will all but smother in the shut-inness of mountains, while another will bloom like a rose. There are those who cannot endure the vast unbrokenness of the desert, while to others, how it calls for ever! Some love a dog, some a cat: some men, among stock breeders, are for Holsteins, others for Ayrshires, for no particular reason. And when it comes to our human relationships, how rich is our day when we meet one who is by nature akin! How kindling the contact! How we are aroused, stimulated, when we find our own, scattered like gold in ore, everywhere through life. Do not for a moment put all these predilections of ours down to mere whim. They are all for purpose. Through them old Dame Nature gets her earth explored and inhabited to the uttermost ends, gets all her numerous family looked after, gets all our abilities fertilized. When we reach a point where we see purpose in everything and begin to work in harmony with that purpose—not against it—we shall begin to achieve the proper fulfilment of our lives.

If, then, we are to give back to the world the full fruitage of our natures, we must enrich every avenue of our lives, steadily, with more of its own kind. We must call our own to us, for it is the law. Call our own loudly, as our children. Call our work, our play, our friends, our environment. And when we do this, when we at last begin to enter upon our own true heritage—how all the devotees of our calling through all time hold out their hands to us! How all the aids rush to us! How all the forces in the Universe are with us! We become as a runner who has entered upon a path that leads on to the full sun of his desires. We become as a straw in a stream caught up by all the other straws going that way, by the force of the full current going that way, by the winds that blow that way. What an entering upon a timeless life it is! What a following on after a beautiful weaving from a loom that winds on into eternity! Can we afford to let others miss it, those young runners just starting? Can we afford to leave the statue buried in the stone?