Perhaps it is because the inanimate sweep of the water, its hugeness and silence, make one forget the petty things and the greedy trifles which form the routine of one's day. And when one forgets these things one remembers, alas, something they pleasantly obscured by their presence. A dream, perhaps, buried long ago. A hope, an emotion successfully interred under the amiable rubbish the days have piled up.
Then, too, there is the question, "Where you going?" And an answer to it that seems to come out of the long reaches of water—"Come with me—somewhere—nowhere."
These thoughts play in people's minds without words. They are almost more a part of the lake than of their thinking, as if they were, in fact, lake thoughts.
Another reason why people grow sad when they look at the water of the lake is perhaps that the lake offers them an escape from the tawdry, nagging little responsibilities of the day that go with being a citizen and a breadwinner. Not that it invites to suicide. Quite the reverse; it invites to living. To doing something that has a sweep to it; that has a swagger to it. To setting sail for strange ports where strange adventures wait.
So, as the I. C. trains rush their thousands to work and home again the citizens and breadwinners let their imaginations gallop toward a faraway horizon. And these imaginations came galloping back again and the breadwinners are saddened—by a memory. Yes, they were for a moment rovers, egad! swashbucklers, gentlemen and ladies of fortune free of the rigamarole burdens that keep them on the I. C. treadmill. And now they are again passengers. Going to work. Going home to go to work again tomorrow.
It is easy to think that this is the secret of the sad little grimace the lake brings to the eyes of the train riders.
* * * * *
This discourse is becoming a bit dolorous. But the subject rather requires an andante treatment. The city's press agents will tell you quite another story about the lake—about the "city's playground" and how conducive it is to healthful sport and joyous recreation. But, on the other hand, there is this other side, so to speak, of the lake. For the lake belongs to those familiar things that surprise people into uncomfortable silences.
One could as easily write about the sky in this vein, since the lake, like the sky, challenges the monotony of people's lives with another monotony—the monotony of nature that seems to engulf, obliterate, reduce to puny proportions the routine by which people live and which, fortunately, they delude themselves into admiring.
There is also the question of beauty. This is a delicate issue to introduce into one's daily reading and the reader's pardon is solicited with proper humiliation. And yet, there is a question of beauty, of soul states and aesthetic nuances involved in the consideration of the lake.