Читать книгу The Hive - Will Levington Comfort - Страница 7

Table of Contents

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 or disease. 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 I wasn't my 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 to overcome 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, different fin. 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 the self. 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; how we 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 girls here 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 the following 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 could absorb 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.