In the beginning I spoke1 about my “philosophy of life” when I was a student in college twenty years ago. I didn’t tell you what it was because I don’t think I really had one then. I’m not sure I have one now. But I think it is interesting and important that I should have thought I had one at the age of seventeen, and that people still talk about “a philosophy of life” as though it were a concrete object that you could pick up and handle and take the weight and dimensions of. Just recently I was asked to contribute to a book called Modern–Day Philosophies. I tried to write something for it but gave it up, because I was unwilling2 and unready to say that I had a “modern-day philosophy”. And the reason that I was unwilling and unready was not that I felt confusion and doubt about what I think and now believe, but that I felt confusion and doubt about saying it in formalistic and final terms.
That was what was wrong with most of us at Pine Rock College twenty years ago. We had a “concept” about Truth and Beauty and Love and Reality — and that hardened our ideas about what all these words stood for. After that, we had no doubt about them — or, at any rate, could not admit that we did. This was wrong, because the essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man–Alive, and his “philosophy” must grow, must flow, with him. When it does not, we have — do we not? — the Unfixed Man, the Eternal Trifler, the Ape of Fashion — the man too fixed3 today, unfixed tomorrow — and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.
I cannot attempt, therefore, to define for you your own “philosophy”— for to define so is to delimit the “closed” and academic man, and you, thank God, are not of that ilk. And to define so would be to call upon me once again your own and curious scorn, your sudden half-amused contemptuousness. For how could anyone pin down neatly4 the essence of your New Englandness — so sensitively proud, so shy, so shrinking and alone, but at bottom, as I think, so unafraid?
I shall not define you, then, dear Fox. But I may state, may I not? I may say how “it seems to me”? — how Fox appears? — and what I think of it?
Well, first of all, Fox seems to me to be Ecclesiasticus. I think that this is fair, and, insofar as definition goes, I think you will agree. Do you know of any definition that could possibly go further? I do not. In thirty-seven years of thinking, feeling, dreaming, working, striving, voyaging, and devouring5, I have come across no other that could fit you half so well. Perhaps something has been written, painted, sung, or spoken in the world that would define you better: if it has, I have not seen it; and if I did see it, then I should feel like one who came upon a Sistine Chapel6 greater than the first, which no man living yet has heard about.
So far as I can see from nine years of observing you, yours is the way of life, the way of thought, of feeling, and of acting7, of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. I know of no better way. For of all that I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth — and also earth’s highest flower of poetry, eloquence8, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments9 in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could only say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting10 and profound.
And I should say that it expresses your own position as perfectly11 as anything could. I have read it over many times each year, and I do not know of a single word or stanza12 in it with which you would not instantly agree.
You would agree — to quote just a few precepts13 which come to mind from that noble book — that a good name is better than precious ointment14; and I think you would also agree that the day of death is better than the day of one’s birth. You would agree with the great Preacher that all things are full of labour; that man cannot utter it; that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. I know you would agree also that the thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and that that which is done, is that which shall be done: and that there is no new thing under the sun. You would agree that it is vexation of spirit to give one’s heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly15. I know you would agree — for you have so admonished16 me many times — that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity.” You would agree with him in that; but you would also agree with him that the fool foldeth his hands together and eateth his own flesh. You would agree with all your being that “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”
Is this abridgement and this definition just, dear Fox? Yes, for I have seen every syllable17 of it in you a thousand times. I have learned every accent of it from yourself. You said one time, when I had spoken of you in the dedication18 of a book, that what I had written would be your epitaph. You were mistaken. Your epitaph was written many centuries ago: Ecclesiastes is your epitaph. Your portrait had been drawn19 already in the portrait the great Preacher had given of himself. You are he, his words are yours so perfectly that if he had never lived or uttered them, all of him, all of his great and noble Sermon, could have been derived20 afresh from you.
If I could, therefore, define your own philosophy — and his — I think I should define it as the philosophy of a hopeful fatalism. Both of you are in the essence pessimists21, but both of you are also pessimists with hope. From both of you I learned much, many true and hopeful things. I learned, first of all, that one must work, that one must do what work he can, as well and ably as he can, and that it is only the fool who repines and longs for what is vanished, for what might have been but is not. I learned from both of you the stein lesson of acceptance: to acknowledge the tragic22 underweft of life into which man is born, through which he must live, out of which he must die. I learned from both of you to accept that essential fact without complaint, but, having accepted it, to try to do what was before me, what I could do, with all my might.
And, curiously23 — for here comes in the strange, hard paradox24 of our twin polarity — it was just here, I think, where I was so much and so essentially25 in confirmation26 with you, that I began to disagree. I think almost that I could say to you: “I believe in everything you say, but I do not agree with you”— and so state the root of our whole trouble, the mystery of our eventual27 cleavage and our final severance28. The little tongues will wag — have wagged, I understand, already — will propose a thousand quick and ready explanations (as they have)— but really, Fox, the root of the whole thing is here.
In one of the few letters that you ever wrote to me — a wonderful and moving one just recently — you said:
“I know that you are going now. I always knew that it would happen. I will not try to stop you, for it had to be. And yet, the strange thing is, the hard thing is, I have never known another man with whom I was so profoundly in agreement on all essential things.”
And that is the strange, hard thing, and wonderful and mysterious; for, in a way the little clacking tongues can never know about, it is completely true. Still, there is our strange paradox: it seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South — so much in balance, in agreement — and yet, dear Fox, the whole world lies between.
’Tis true, our view of life was very much the same. When we looked out together, we saw man burned with the same sun, frozen by the same cold, beat upon by the hardships of the same impervious29 weathers, duped by the same gullibility30, self-betrayed by the same folly, misled and baffled by the same stupidity. Each on the opposing hemisphere of his own pole looked out across the spinning orbit of this vexed31, tormented32 world, and at the other, and what each saw, the picture that each got, was very much the same. We not only saw the stupidity and the folly and the gullibility and the self-deception of man, but we saw his nobility, courage, and aspiration33, too. We saw the wolves that preyed34 upon him and laid him waste — the wild scavangers of greed, of fear, of privilege, of power, of tyranny, of oppression, of poverty and disease, of injustice35, cruelty, and wrong — Land in what we saw of this as well, dear Fox, we were agreed.
Why, then, the disagreement? Why, then, the struggle that ensued, the severance that has now occurred? We saw the same things, and we called them by the same names. We abhorred36 them with the same indignation and disgust — and yet, we disagreed, and I am making my farewell to you. Dear friend, the parent and the guardian37 of my spirit in its youth, the thing has happened and we know it. Why?
I know the answer, and the thing I have to tell you now is this:
Beyond the limits of my own mortality, the stern acknowledgment that man was born to live, to suffer, and to die — your own and the great Preacher’s creed38 — I am not, cannot be, confirmed to more fatality39. Briefly40, you thought the ills which so beset41 mankind were irremediable: that just as man was born to live, to suffer, and to die, so was he born to be eternally beset and preyed upon by all the monsters of his own creation — by fear and cruelty, by tyranny and power, by poverty and wealth. You felt, with the stern fatality of resignation which is the granite42 essence of your nature, that these things were doomed43 to be, and be for ever, because they had always been, and were inherent in the tainted44 and tormented soul of man.
Dear Fox, dear friend, I heard you and I understood you — but could not agree. You felt — I heard you and I understood — that if old monsters were destroyed, new ones would be created in their place. You felt that if old tyrannies were overthrown45, new ones, as sinister46 and evil, would reign47 after them. You felt that all the glaring evils in the woad around us — the monstrous48 and perverse49 unbalance between power and servitude, between want and plenty, between privilege and burdensome discrimination — were inevitable50 because they had always been the curse of man and were the prime conditions of his being. The gap between us widened. You stated and affirmed — I heard you, but could not agree.
To state your rule and conduct plainly, I think I never knew a kinder or a gentler man, but I also never knew a man more fatally resigned. In practice — in life and conduct — I have seen the Sermon of the Preacher work out in you like a miracle. I have seen you grow haggard and grey because you saw a talent wasted, a life misused51, work undone52 that should be done. I have seen you move mountains to save something which, you felt, was worth the effort and could be saved. I have seen you perform prodigies53 of labour and patience to pull a drowning man of talent out of the swamp of failure into which his life was sinking; and at each successive slipping back, so far from acknowledging defeat with resignation and regret, you made your eyes flash fire and you will toughen to the hardness of forged steel as I saw you strike your hand upon the table and heard you whisper, with an almost savage54 intensity55 of passion: “He must not go. He is not lost. I will not, and he must not, let it happen!”
To give this noble virtue56 of your life the etching of magnificence it deserves, it is your due to have it stated here. For, without it, there can be no proper understanding of your worth, your true dimension. To describe the acquiescence57 of your stern fatality without first describing the inspired tenacity58 of your effort would be to give a false and insufficient59 picture of the strangest and the most familiar, the most devious60 and the most direct, the simplest and the most complex figure that this nation and this generation have produced.
To say that you looked on at all the suffering and injustice of this vexed, tormented world with the toleration of resigned fatality without telling also of your own devoted61 and miraculous62 effort to save what could be saved, would not do justice to you. No man ever better fulfilled the injunction of the Preacher to lay about him and to do the work at hand with all his might. No man ever gave himself more wholly, not only to the fulfilment of that injunction for himself, but to the task of saving others who had failed to do it, and who might be saved. But no man ever accepted the irremediable with more quiet unconcern. I think you would risk your life to save that of a friend who put himself uselessly and wantonly in peril63, but I know, too, that you would accept the fact of unavoidable death without regret. I have seen you grow grey-faced and hollow-eyed with worry over the condition of a beloved child who was suffering from a nervous shock or ailment64 that the doctors could not diagnose. You found the cause eventually and checked it; but I know that if the cause had been fatal and incurable65, you would have accepted that fact with a resignation as composed as your own effort was inspired.
All of this makes the paradox of our great difference as bard66 and strange as the paradox of our polarity. And in this lies the root of trouble and the seed of severance. Your own philosophy has led you to accept the order of things as they are because you have no hope of changing them; and if you could change them, you feel that any other order would be just as bad. In everlasting67 terms — those of eternity68 — you and the Preacher may be right: for there is no greater wisdom than the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, no acceptance finally so true as the stern fatalism of the rock. Man was born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must, dear Fox, deny it all along the way.
Mankind was fashioned for eternity, but Man–Alive was fashioned for a day. New evils will come after him, but it is with the present evils that he is now concerned. And the essence of all faith, it seems to me, for such a man as I, the essence of religion for people of my belief, is that man’s life can be, and will be, better; that man’s greatest enemies, in the forms in which they now exist — the forms we see on every hand of fear, hatred69, slavery, cruelty, poverty, and need — can be conquered and destroyed. But to conquer and destroy them will mean nothing less than the complete revision of the structure of society as we know it. They cannot be conquered by the sorrowful acquiescence of resigned fatality. They cannot be destroyed by the philosophy of acceptance — by the tragic hypothesis that things as they are, evil as they are, are as good and as bad as, under any form-they will ever be. The evils that we hate, you no less than I, cannot be overthrown with shrugs70 and sighs and shakings of the head how, ever wise. It seems to me that they but mock at us and only become more bold when we retreat before them and take refuge in the affirmation of man’s tragic average. To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora’s box of human frailty71, once opened, will never show a diminution72 of its ugly swarm73, is to help, by just that much, to make it so for ever.
You and the Preacher may be right for all eternity, but we Men–Alive, dear Fox, are right for Now. And it is for Now, and for us the living, that we must speak, and speak the truth, as much of it as we can see and know. With the courage of the truth within us, we shall meet the enemy as they come to us, and they shall be ours. And if, once having conquered them, new enemies approach, we shall meet them from that point, from there proceed. In the affirmation of that fact, the continuance of that unceasing war, is man’s religion and his living faith.
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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neatly
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| adv.整洁地，干净地，灵巧地，熟练地 | |
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devouring
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| 吞没( devour的现在分词 )； 耗尽； 津津有味地看； 狼吞虎咽地吃光 | |
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chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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judgments
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| 判断( judgment的名词复数 )； 鉴定； 评价； 审判 | |
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lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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stanza
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| n.（诗）节，段 | |
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precepts
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| n.规诫，戒律，箴言( precept的名词复数 ) | |
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ointment
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| n.药膏，油膏，软膏 | |
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folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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admonished
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| v.劝告( admonish的过去式和过去分词 )；训诫；（温和地）责备；轻责 | |
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syllable
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| n.音节；vt.分音节 | |
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dedication
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| n.奉献，献身，致力，题献，献辞 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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pessimists
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| n.悲观主义者( pessimist的名词复数 ) | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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paradox
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| n.似乎矛盾却正确的说法；自相矛盾的人(物) | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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confirmation
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| n.证实，确认，批准 | |
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eventual
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| adj.最后的，结局的，最终的 | |
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severance
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| n.离职金；切断 | |
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impervious
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| adj.不能渗透的，不能穿过的，不易伤害的 | |
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gullibility
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| n.易受骗，易上当，轻信 | |
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vexed
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| adj.争论不休的；（指问题等）棘手的；争论不休的问题；烦恼的v.使烦恼( vex的过去式和过去分词 )；使苦恼；使生气；详细讨论 | |
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tormented
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| 饱受折磨的 | |
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aspiration
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| n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出 | |
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preyed
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| v.掠食( prey的过去式和过去分词 )；掠食；折磨；（人）靠欺诈为生 | |
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injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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abhorred
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| v.憎恶( abhor的过去式和过去分词 )；（厌恶地）回避；拒绝；淘汰 | |
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guardian
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| n.监护人；守卫者，保护者 | |
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creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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fatality
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| n.不幸，灾祸，天命 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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beset
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| v.镶嵌；困扰，包围 | |
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granite
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| adj.花岗岩，花岗石 | |
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doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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tainted
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| adj.腐坏的；污染的；沾污的；感染的v.使变质( taint的过去式和过去分词 )；使污染；败坏；被污染，腐坏，败坏 | |
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overthrown
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| adj. 打翻的，推倒的，倾覆的 动词overthrow的过去分词 | |
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sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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perverse
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| adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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51
misused
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| v.使用…不当( misuse的过去式和过去分词 )；把…派作不正当的用途；虐待；滥用 | |
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undone
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| a.未做完的，未完成的 | |
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prodigies
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| n.奇才，天才（尤指神童）( prodigy的名词复数 ) | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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acquiescence
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| n.默许；顺从 | |
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tenacity
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| n.坚韧 | |
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insufficient
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| adj.(for，of)不足的，不够的 | |
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devious
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| adj.不坦率的，狡猾的；迂回的，曲折的 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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miraculous
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| adj.像奇迹一样的，不可思议的 | |
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peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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ailment
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| n.疾病，小病 | |
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incurable
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| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
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bard
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| n.吟游诗人 | |
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67
everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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68
eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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69
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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70
shrugs
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| n.耸肩（以表示冷淡，怀疑等）( shrug的名词复数 ) | |
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71
frailty
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| n.脆弱；意志薄弱 | |
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72
diminution
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| n.减少；变小 | |
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swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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