Читать книгу The Letters of William James, Vol. 2 - William James - Страница 8

Glenwood Springs,

Colorado, Aug. 13, 1895.

My dear Flournoy,—Ever since last January an envelope addressed to you has been lying before my eyes on my library table. I mention this to assure you that you have not been absent from my thoughts; but I will waste no time or paper in making excuses. As the sage Emerson says, when you visit a man do not degrade the occasion with apologies for not having visited him before. Visit him now! Make him feel that the highest truth has come to see him in you its lowliest organ. I don't know about the highest truth transpiring through this letter, but I feel as if there were plenty of affection and personal gossip to express themselves. To begin with, your photograph and Mrs. Flournoy's were splendid. What we need now is the photographs of those fair demoiselles! I may say that one reason of my long silence has been the hope that when I wrote I should have my wife's photograph to send you. But alas! it has not been taken yet. She is well, very well, and is now in our little New Hampshire country-place with the children, living very quietly and happily. We have had a rather large train de maison hitherto, and this summer we are shrunken to our bare essentials—a very pleasant change.

I, you see, am farther away from home than I have ever been before on this side of the Atlantic, namely, in the state of Colorado, and just now in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. I have been giving a course of six lectures on psychology "for teachers" at a so-called "summer-school" in Colorado Springs. I had to remain for three nights and three days in the train to get there, and it has made me understand the vastness of my dear native land better than I ever did before.... The trouble with all this new civilization is that it is based, not on saving, but on borrowing; and when hard times come, as they did come three years ago, everyone goes bankrupt. But the vision of the future, the dreams of the possible, keep everyone enthusiastic, and so the work goes on. Such conditions have never existed before on so enormous a scale. But I must not write you a treatise on national economy!—I got through the year very well in regard to health, and gave in the course of it, what I had never done before, a number of lectures to teachers in Boston and New York. I also repeated my course in Cosmology in the new woman's College which has lately been established in connection with our University. The consequence is that I laid by more than a thousand dollars, an absolutely new and proportionately pleasant experience for me. To make up for it, I haven't had an idea or written anything to speak of except the "presidential address" which I sent you, and which really contained nothing new....

And now is not that enough gossip about ourselves? I wish I could, by telephone, at this moment, hear just where and how you all are, and what you are all doing. In the mountains somewhere, of course, and I trust all well; but it is perhaps fifteen or twenty years too soon for transatlantic telephone. My surroundings here, so much like those of Switzerland, bring you before me in a lively manner. I enclose a picture of one of the streets at Colorado Springs for Madame Flournoy, and another one of a "cowboy" for that one of the demoiselles who is most romanesque. Alice, Blanche—but I have actually gone and been and forgotten the name of the magnificent third one, whose resplendent face I so well remember notwithstanding. Dulcissima mundi nomina, all of them; and I do hope that they are being educated in a thoroughly emancipated way, just like true American girls, with no laws except those imposed by their own sense of fitness. I am sure it produces the best results! How did the teaching go last year? I mean your own teaching. Have you started any new lines? And how is Chantre? and how Ritter? And how Monsieur Gowd? Please give my best regards to all round, especially to Ritter. Have you a copy left of your "Métaphysique et Psychologie"? In some inscrutable way my copy has disappeared, and the book is reported épuisé.

With warmest possible regards to both of you, and to all five of the descendants, believe me ever faithfully yours,

W. James.