Tilling the soil, if the man who tills be working alone, tends to reflection,—provided that man possesseth wherewith to reflect,—and it promotes straight and simple thinking, thoughts which may be straight and true or they may not; but the thoughts of the tiller of the soil are more likely to be straight and true than the thoughts of the same man riding in a motor-car or working on the twenty-fifth floor of an office building. If such a man be the president of the company it is one thing; he may be puffed¹ up with the pride of a little brief authority or he may be the simple, true man that Old Goodwin is. His sense of the values[Pg 128] of things must be warped² and distorted unless he tills the soil at times or does something that is equivalent, like sailing the deep blue oceans, where there is so very little between him and the workings of nature; and I do not mean sailing as a passenger in an ocean steamer or a yacht, in which he will have as little to do with the workings of nature as he would in a great hotel.

 

In such a man the sense of values must be distorted nearly as much, though in a different way, as that of a man who sits at one of an interminable row of desks, on another floor of the same office building, from eight-thirty in the morning until five in the afternoon, with an hour for luncheon³; and knows himself to be but a cog in a huge machine, a cog which can and[Pg 129] will be replaced as soon as it gives a sign of running unsmoothly. What a dreadful thought that you are but a cog in a machine! How very dreadful it must be to realize that you are growing old and are still nothing but a cog! How pregnant of rebellions, little futile⁴ rebellions! And how it must tear the very soul of that man to know beforehand that his rebellions must be little and futile! I can understand that a man in that state would welcome death; that he would be stood up against a wall and shot rather than go back to that desk of the interminable row—number thirteen, it might be. But there is nobody to stand him up against a wall. They will have none of him. He is too old. Too old to be shot, although he may have fighting instincts stirring fiercely within[Pg 130] him. So they take his son, it may be, and he goes back to his desk. There is no escape for him. They will not even let him die as a man should in these times. Life is a series of disappointments, and the last is the most bitter. Hope takes herself away until he can hardly see her through the fog.

分享到：