IN THE LOOKING GLASS
It seems to be a human impossibility for us to see ourselves as others see us. We never know exactly how we appear to our neighbors. Men are like moving pictures—it requires some distance from the picture to see the moving figures to the best advantage. We know that our nearest neighbor knows less of our true character than the people living at a distance. When Henry D. Thoreau built a little log cabin, with his own hands, on the banks of Walden Pond, Massachusetts, his neighbors saw the man at close range, and failed to notice the strength of mind and character. It was the people at a long distance who saw the real Thoreau at fitful glances, and anxiously magnified the man until he became a thing unnatural—a genius.
The too-appreciative public called Thoreau a genius—a man to whom thought came without an effort. He himself didn’t think so. He lamented his own weakness and ignorance of things. It required so much time to learn a simple truth: to cull out the true from the false. Half the thinkers of the world are thinking out a plan to live without menial labor. They are thinking out a plan to fool and deceive the unthinking into buying knowledge and secret keys to science. And the deceived people look at them from a distance and put a false estimate on their ability, and pay them well to be fooled and humbugged.
I have seen sick people ignore their home physician and go a hundred miles to consult a quack; and for a long time imagine that his knowledge of the healing art was almost divine. The quack’s nearest neighbors looked on in disgust, and repeated the immortal words of Shakespeare, “What fools these mortals be!”
But even Shakespeare is seen at a distance in greater lustre than around his own home. There is an old saying that “the king is never great to his own valet.” But often this is because of the mental gulf between the two men. The valet often judges only the physical man, or the moods of the mental man. Men are great only when they go into the silence and apply their entire force of mind to solving the problems of life. The great speech you heard your favorite orator deliver was not gathered spontaneously while standing before you. The speech was but the fruit of many, many hours of struggle and study and worry and of painful effort. Did you but know the late hour when he blew out the lamp and lay his aching, throbbing head on his pillow, and only slept to dream over again his struggles, you would not call him a genius, but a plodding student.
The man who stands looking into the mirror and beholds his own face, without finding weak spots and flaws and lack of character, is too vain to be judge of himself. The serious, sincere man is always finding flaws in himself, and seeking to find a remedy to cure them. The man or woman who “gets stuck” on the face they see in the glass are mental quacks—they are humbugging themselves. They see a genius in the reflection of an asinine mug. They go away from the glass, and a moment later cannot describe the manner of face they carry on their shoulders. If they were ever so good an artist and painter, they could not paint a picture of themselves from memory.
And if we cannot judge ourselves correctly, how can we expect our own neighbors to judge us even charitably. And our mental face flits before us and out of reach of our grasp as rapidly as the reflection of our physical countenance. We seem to sit in the midst of moving pictures, our mind the curtain on which the pictures are flashed. If we stop the machine and retain the same picture for any great length of time on our mental curtain, we become insane. The machine must be kept in motion, one scene following after the other all day long. True, we can repeat the passing scenes daily, but they must be in motion, passing swiftly on.
When we apply ourselves to any particular study we learn to ignore all the other passing scenes and fasten our mental eye on the screen at a point where our favorite figures appear as they flash by, but our subconscious mental eye realizes all the time that the entire picture show is in progress. The truth is, dear reader, we haven’t time to see our neighbor as he really is, nor even see ourself in all our many phases. Our face is passing through the mirror too rapidly for us to estimate the strength or force of character. In the great economy of nature we are only shadows cast upon the curtain of eternity and passing rapidly away. Our short life makes a film of limited length, the different scenes passing before us so rapidly that even in our sensitive memory only one per cent of all that transpires leaves a trace that can be recalled in after years.
What need we care what people think of us, when we cannot judge or estimate ourselves. If we can practice charity toward each other and forget our neighbor’s faults, as we forget our own face, we do well. The moving pictures of life will not stop long enough for us to “get stuck on ourself.” If we do so, we are left behind. The rushing crowd cannot see us as we see ourselves in the glass.